I recently read this moving article about the author Yiyun Li’s latest work. This is not an author whose work I have read in the past, but it is one whose work I will be beginning to read shortly. I found the following excerpt from the article (used under fair use) quite captivating:
“She and her husband speak to one another in Mandarin Chinese, but she now thinks and dreams in English and says she retains the advantage of not writing in her mother tongue. “I’m very careful with my words. Every time I put down a word, I think through it and make sure it’s the right word. But when you’re a native speaker you sometimes just use it automatically, right?” She says she has “a more precise personality” in English.”
This article got me thinking about my own life as a lover of both ambitous artistic projects and language learning; I’ve organized my thoughts into the writing that follows.
It could be said that the difference in speaking one’s native language and a second language is that amount of effort and attention that must be given to precision. As native speakers of a language we do not tend to give much thought, at least in common, colloquial conversation, to the choices that we are making when choosing what words to use. In contrast, one of the blaring signs of being a non-native speaker in any language is stumbling and taking an exceedingly long time to consider what the correct word to use is – this usually comes in the form of lengthy, unnatural pauses that disrupt the flow of the conversation that is occurring. I for one fall susceptible to this when I am trying to learn a new language – I can remember being very excited that I was successfully to order a coffee fully in Danish for the first time early in my semester abroad, only to stumble for what felt like an eternity when the barista then asked me for my name – I only figured out what she was saying through context!
When a high level is attained in a second language, the effort exerted to maintain an acceptable level of precision is far less than the effort in the example above. In many ways, this is the result of one’s intuition for the language being developed and trained. A simple definition of fluency might be when the level of exertion required for broad conversational precision (ie not just conversations pertaining to whatever vocab you added to your Anki deck) is low enough that the added latency of being a non-native speaker is not blaringly noticeable. Of course, this definition of fluency only accounts for speaking, which is far from the only skill involved in learning a new language – but for me on a personal level, speaking is the most difficult skill and requires the most effort, so I have focused my definition on it.
I ask that the reader forgive my usage of mathematics terms here, but they allow for my argument to be developed with accurate analogies. The next question is of what this “precision” really means. An interesting way to look at this is to translate. It is often said that translation is more of an art-form than a homomorphism. This is to say that no translation can be entirely precise, and different approaches are available to translation. One might attempt to convey the emotions and tone of the text to be translated as potently as possible, without regard for what we might call the euclidean distance (ie the difference between the literal meanings of the words used) created; another approach might be to keep the literal meanings as close as possible, even if some of the tone and feel of the work are lost. While counterintuitive at first glance, it seems to me (as nothing more than a hobbyist translator, doing it for fun and on occasion to translate content for the Spanish language version of Wikipedia) that the techniques used to maintain the tone and sentiment of a text are the ones which incur a greater distance from the original text, or, to put it another way, the ones which allow for, if not necessiate, more freedom and personal expression on the part of the translator.
This observation seems to strongly suggest to me that language and communication are not entirely precise even when between native speakers. And, in some ways, we have just used three paragraphs to create an argument for a result that was already obvious! Even for those who speak a language as a second language, but especially for native speakers, certain words will have vivid connotations and memories associated with them. We can’t always know what associations someone who we are speaking to might have with a certain choice of word. These discrepancies in communication are part of the beauty of language – they are what makes speaking a language a highly personal act to the speaker – and they ensure that even when two speakers have a sophisticated understanding of a language, their own internal parsing and processing of communication in said language will inevitably differ. This is part of the reason why academic papers often feel very dry and monotonous to read (at least to those uninterested in the results) – the language is manipulated to try to avoid these consequences to the extent reasonably possible.
Imprecision is perhaps what makes creativity flourish. It is the fact that artistic works are open to different interpretations and that those who interact with artwork are permitted to take from it what they need that makes art touch us all in a universal way. An intriguing example of different interpretations of artwork is the Sixth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams, a piece that I greatly admire and one that was an enormous influence on my own Fourth Symphony. The piece was written from 1944-1947, yielding the obvious interpretation from many that it was a response to the gruesome events of war. This did seem to be further implicated by the fact that the first chord of the symphony was constructed in one of the most dissonant ways possible – a simultaneous exploration of ideas in F minor and E minor – and there are other moments of the symphony where the obvious interpretation is one of shocking violence. Yet Vaughan Williams himself infamously stated “It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music,” and pointed to Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the exclusive extramusical (or programmatic) influence.
In the same way that the condition of imprecision allows for language to be highly personable, and perhaps for it to be an utter expression of personality, the condition of imprecision is what allows for art to be nearly universal in its ability to affect in so many distinct ways. It would be much less interesting to look at some piece of artwork, whether a painting, a musical composition, a poem or novel, or anything else, and have no say in what your own interpretation of the work was. This is perhaps why support for the arts is wavering – as a consequence of a faulty education system that does just this, placing constraints on what views students are permitted to have on artwork, or even worse, dismissing the possibility of this interaction altogether! This takes the magic and the life out of artwork and results in a world where students grow into adults who dread sitting down and reading, dread a trip to the new installations at the local museum, dread any type of music that requires even an ounce of effort to understand…
This yields an interesting strategy for learners of a foreign language. The question is not “can the language be incorporated into creative projects?,” but “at what point can the language be incorporated into such a project?” This is not a trivial question to answer. Many learners, myself included, take the research of Stephen Krashen to heart in the acquisition process. Can we construct an analogue to comprehensible input – a notion of comprehensible output?
As it turns out, this is already done in language classes. I had frequent writing assignments both when I took Spanish in high school (which was not how I learned Spanish) and during my year of Mandarin at Brown. During my second semester of Chinese, in lieu of a written final exam, the “final” portion of the grade was an oral presentation with slides in Chinese, followed by a question-and-answer. In other words, it was comprehensible output, not input.
Next, we investigate whether at what point comprehensible output can be turned creative. A beginner in the language who is focused on brute memorization of the essentials will not be able to produce some creative output. But what about someone with a advanced-beginner or lower-intermediate level, like myself at the end of my second semester of Mandarin? At that point, some amount of creativity can be introduced – but the constraints are extreme.
I believe it is at the point where the fundamentals are internalized and an intuition has begun to be developed that creativity can truly blossom. This is typically the intermediate level, certainly beyond my level of Chinese – the Bs of the CEFR. Furthermore, this stage of language learning can yield some truly wonderful and magical outputs due to the shared notion of constraint. Constraint will be necessary to keep the project in scope in terms of its interaction with the language – one could not expect a B1 learner to write a dissertation in their target language – but the extent of the constraint is minimal and largely relates to the scope of the project rather than the contents of the project. As it turns out, constraint is essential to any creative project. The best results come from self-imposed constraints. Aiming for perfection in a creative project from the start without any constraint is precisely the cookbook recipe for writer’s block (or more broadly, let’s call it “artist’s block”). Thus there is a natural prerequisite in a meritable creative project for constraint which can be effortlessly fulfilled by introduction of one’s target language(s) into the project. In my own life this interactoin of imprecisions has brought interesting projects yielding great enjoyment.
I now finish this by returning to the quote mentioned in the introduction. How do we ever, as language learners, get to a level in the target language where not only have we developed enough intuition to avoid imprecision, but in fact we have reached a level where our ability in the language is equivalent to our native tongue or perhaps even surpasses it for some purposes? Li’s brilliantly defiant stance is an embodiment of one of my principles – turning weaknesses into strengths. The fact that some pinch of imprecision and doubt will always remain in a second language is an inevitable one. This is why we use the term “second language” to refer to all languages other than one’s native language. Li takes this inevitable fact and reconciles it by developing a practice that yields poignant creative results in a meticulous manner that would simply not be possible in her native tongue. To me, this is a great inspiration both creatively and in the realm of language learning, and I’m looking forward to reading her work soon!