Learning Foreign Languages

I wrote a post some time ago about how much I like to learn languages, while never expecting to master any of them - how, in fact, that is part of the pleasure. Like learning a craft, when you try to learn another language, you are embarking on a task - or taking up a hobby - in which your skill cannot ever be entirely perfected. Even in one’s native language, there are unexplored areas, and this is doubly so with a language you set out to learn after acquiring your own. You therefore have a rich source of mental activity ahead of you for as long as you live.

Another pleasurable aspect of language learning, particularly in a time of uncertainty and relativism, is the immutability of much of the material you study. You meet a word you have never seen before and you search a dictionary for its meaning. You find it, and that’s it. You don’t have to argue about whether the word might actually mean something quite different, whether the source of your information is a fake news outlet (although I do admit there is a whole other post to be written about politics and dictionaries - we have a whole shelf of Croatian-English dictionaries, given to us as presents by Croatian diplomats since the break up of Yugoslavia; each volume is  rich with newly discovered vocabulary that differentiates the Croatian language definitively from the Serbian one) or feel any doubts at all about the information before you. This word in this language conveys what you mean in your language when you use that word. Learn this word and you can express that concept, no ifs or ands or buts.

But what I like better than all this about language learning is finding out about tiny, puzzling variations in perspective that are embedded in each nation’s language. Thus, for example, while we English speakers (apart from some Scots), think, when telling the time, about the past - referring back to the hour that has just been when we say “ten past one” or “five thirty”, those who speak Hungarian tell the time with their eyes firmly on the future. Their one fifteen is actually a quarter of the way to two o’clock; their half past five, becomes half the way to six.

Of course, having said I like the fixed certainties involved in  learning another language, I’m now contradicting myself, since what I love about this aspect of the activity is its mysterious quality. How are one’s attitudes affected by such tiny variations in the way we think about time and other elements of existence? Are we all seeing the same world, regardless of the language that we speak?