What a Piece of Work is Man

It's probably good for the ego to feel like a complete idiot for at least a few hours every week. Not that I was lacking in time spent feeling like an idiot, but my Spanish class will give me even more. Learning languages is hard!

I pretty much take for granted my ability to communicate (I think we all do), but it's really a phenomenal skill that we humans possess. We're pretty fucking smart. With words we can express such abstract and complicated ideas and emotions, and we do it all the time without even thinking about it. With the languages in which we're fluent, that is. When you're trying to communicate in a language you don't actually speak, it's not just that it doesn't really work. You lose so much of your personality that the usual defenses (humor, humility) are harder to come by. And there's a huge, inescapable power differential when you don't speak the right language. Suddenly the cashier at the grocery store becomes a little intimidating. You can't take in everything that goes on around you because you don't understand it all. You don't overhear conversations, or read headlines as you walk past a newsstand. If I pay close attention I can understand some conversations, and I understand a lot of what's in the Spanish newspapers if I sit down and read them. What I'm missing are the things that, in English, I would pick up without trying or even noticing. I can communicate on a very basic level; the problem is that the rest of the world doesn't operate on that level.

It's definitely not all bad. The learning part of learning a new language can be exhilirating--I still get all excited about understanding even basic things or conjugating a verb correctly without thinking about it. I go back and forth between being amazed by the human mind's capacity for language and humbled by my own overwhelming inadequacies with same.... Good for the ego.

...After writing the above, I found the following quote in "The Conquest of Happiness" by Bertrand Russell (who, by the way, was incredibly sexist. Maybe not by the standards of his time, but certainly by those of ours.):

"It is in the moments when the mind is most active and the fewest things are forgotten that the most intense joys are experienced."

I like to think I have greater joys than those that come from speaking or understanding Spanish; still, the idea is interestingly relevant.