Punished by Translation
Taleb argues that needing to communicate gives language practice an urgency that textbooks alone may lack. His travel anecdotes show how a translator can remove opportunities to try, make mistakes, and learn new words.
THE IDEA
Punished by Translation
Another forgotten property of stressors is in language acquisition—I don’t know anyone who ever learned to speak his mother tongue in a textbook, starting with grammar and, checked by biquarterly exams, systematically fitting words to the acquired rules. You pick up a language best thanks to situational difficulty, from error to error, when you need to communicate under more or less straining circumstances, particularly to express urgent needs (say, physical ones, such those arising in the aftermath of dinner in a tropical location).
One learns new words without making a nerd-effort, but rather another type of effort: to communicate, mostly by being forced to read the mind of the other person—suspending one’s fear of making mistakes. Success, wealth, and technology, alas, make this mode of acquisition much more difficult. A few years ago, when I was of no interest to anyone, foreign conference organizers did not assign to me the fawning “travel assistant” fluent in Facebook English, so I used to be forced to fend for myself, hence picking up vocabulary by finger pointing and trial and error (just as children do)—no handheld devices, no dictionary, nothing. Now I am punished by privilege and comfort—and I can’t resist comfort. The punishment is in the form of a person, fluent in English, greeting me by displaying my misspelled name at the airport, no stress, no ambiguity, and no exposure to Russian, Turkish, Croatian, or Polish outside of ugly (and organized) textbooks. What is worse, the person is unctuous; obsequious verbosity is something rather painful under the condition of jet lag.
Yet the best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country. My friend Chad Garcia improved his Russian thanks to an involuntary stay in the quarantine section of a hospital in Moscow for an imagined disease. It was a cunning brand of medical kidnapping, as during the mess after the end of the Soviet rule, hospitals were able to extort travelers with forced hospital stays unless they paid large sums of money to have their papers cleared. Chad, then barely fluent in the language, was forced to read Tolstoy in the original, and picked up quite a bit of vocabulary.
When to use it
While traveling or living abroad, take opportunities to conduct everyday conversations in the language you are learning.
In a new role, practice unfamiliar tasks and use feedback to identify what you still need to learn.
Choose a manageable real-world language task, such as asking for directions or ordering a meal, and review unfamiliar words afterward.
Give children opportunities to learn through play, attempts, and feedback alongside instruction.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Author's experience with travel assistants
When the author was unknown, conference organizers did not provide a fluent travel assistant, forcing him to learn languages through finger pointing and trial and error. Now, with privilege and a fluent assistant, he is 'punished' by comfort and misses out on organic learning opportunities.
Chad Garcia's involuntary hospital stay
Chad Garcia improved his Russian by being forced to stay in a Moscow hospital quarantine, where he read Tolstoy in the original to pass the time and learned vocabulary under stress.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
How does comfort and privilege affect your ability to learn new skills, especially languages?
Can you recall a time when a stressful or difficult situation forced you to learn something quickly and effectively?
How could structured study and real conversations complement each other in your language learning?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)