Recently I was reevaluating how I learn languages.
Most enthusiasts take a textual approach, and it’s not like this is entirely wrong. Having a new script to ground you and leave a door open to reading however incidentally – of course you’d learn the script then. Arguably it serves as the framework driver for your progress.
But when I reflect upon what I love about the English language – really any language, though of course one’s mother tongue shall always take priority – so the love isn’t in transcription. One may certainly admire all the fonts and typographic strides to where sans serif dominates the web, whether out of practicality or an ode to simplicity. How grapheme clusters mimic in visual when read or flow into another, despite representing entirely different phonemes. Maybe we could all band together and instate mandatory cursive once more.
But it isn’t transcription. The student so enamored may find a critical mistake: all scripts are guidelines. Not guardrails. When you realize that every spoken word stands on its own, however rhymed or transcribed, only then do you begin to saunter into something more. Subtleties, and a people’s song spanning centuries.
If you’d had the pleasure of studying tonal languages, you may wonder why you signed up for so much suffering. But the point here is that every language is a tonal language. We’re all slaves to prosody – melody and pacing, and stressing pitch. No matter how much you memorize, you’d only know pockets of the U.S. pronounce “potato” as “pataydah” if you heard it.
You can love transcription, but under the veil it may be about the hidden music. The music, and maybe you wouldn’t care, but there’s a voice to revive in any corpus and that’s what I look for. Because it’s the voice that drives each point home, each novel to ending.
We can broaden the transcript to be about placement and point ordering, Chekhov’s gun to clarity. But that’s still a part of threading the voice together, maybe. And it’s that voice which determines mostly everything; all grammar yields to how it sounds. How do you know it’s right? Natives say so. And you can feel the crescendo – or if you lean into unconscious cruise control it builds a reasonable enough structure regardless.
And in the same vein, after memorizing many characters and pronunciations across languages, I realize the most enjoyable part is joining the pit orchestra. You can almost see the text-stitched ghost hand reaching out, and you fill in the rest with your own chords.
So I changed my flashcards to only have audio on the front. Because I realized how critical the voice is – and the only way to pick it up is to listen a lot more than you’d ever think.