Second Language, The First

I was reminded yesterday of something I debated with a group of "philosophers" some years ago. It was on learning a second language.

The main topic came when a person said that "You can never truly learn a second language."

It's probably the topic of a lot of philosophy courses and talks.

His idea was "When we are growing up, we learn how to label things with language. When we see a ball or a nipple or our mother at first, we just see it, but later we learn through our parents and society that that ball or nipple or mother is called "ball" and "nipple" and "mama." So, we have objects and feelings and all sorts of things that exist in the world, and then we have labels attached to those."

The idea is something like this rough illustration:

__We see a round object__ ============= ball.

But when we learn a foreign language, the second language only refers to the first language. For instance, in Japanese, ball is "tama." So learning a second language is like this rough illustration:

__We see a round object__ ============= ball. ----------------- tama.

It is abstracted from our original perception of the object itself, filtered through our "first language." We have some primal language that is directly associated with the objects, and then when we learn a second language, we "translate" hmmm.. I see a ball.. what's that in Japanese? hmmm. .. ah yeah, tama!

Since it is abstracted in this way, it is never truly _our_ language. It is something that we refer to outside ourselves. However, I am quite sure it is the case that words, phrases and sentences from as many languages as you can know will be directly linked to objects "out there" by a star shape rather than the line as above.

Of course, this is a somewhat strawman version of the argument, but it's easy to see that it's incorrect from a few viewpoints:

#1) The person espousing this viewpoint could not speak any other language than English. Far be it from me to take advice about polyglotism from a monolinguist, sorry.

Ok, that was easy.

#2) There was a time in the past, as a part of a personality quirk, I thought it would be fun to always say in Italian, "thank you, hippopotamus" whenever a "thanks" would be required in social circumstances. Soon enough, it came without thinking. I never thought "hmm I should say thank you to this person, how do you say it humorously in Italian?" It became a standard part of speech. Which leads me to #3.

#3) If you forget about certain things like pronunciation and grammar, You could replace a word from your native language with a word from any other, and simply say THEY ARE SYNONYMS. Even in your native language there are synonyms, I.e. words that refer to the same thing. It makes the second illustration ridiculous if you think about this. Sure, there are different connotations, but a ball is also a sphere. If you see a sphere, do you then observe it, think 'sphere' and then 'translate' 'sphere' to 'ball'?

#4) Our languages themselves contain words from other languages and flexible enough grammar to imitate almost any other language. To take Japanese for example, we often use ninja, sushi, kimono, and so on as English words, while they are Japanese in origin.

So, 4, that's pretty good. But most of them deal with replacing words and phrases but not really "owning" the second language like you own the first. And that's where my personal experience comes in. Can a second language directly refer to objects and feelings without translation and so on?

Yes. And this is part of why I brought up that the person who created that philosophical topic only knew one language. As a person that understands more than one, I have had countless experiences that simply show that position not to be true.

#1) I experience a change in personality, in way of thinking, in the way of handling the most simple of grammatic/syntactic forms (yes or no questions, positive and negatives in statements, etc.) when I switch into the "other language mode."

#2) At work today I was trying to express a concept on paper, and like countless times before, I couldn't think of the English (my native language) word. What I _could_ bring to my mind was the Japanese word for it. So what did I do? I opened the dictionary on my PC, and typed in the Japanese word, to get some ideas as to what the English word is I was looking for.

#3) I dream in foreign languages. That's big. For years now. Not all the time, just sometimes. Even when I have a dream of something that happened in my past in real life, all of a sudden the conversation will be happening in another language. In a dream, I might meet someone new (not something from my past) and we'll converse in Japanese. I understand it as its happening, and when I awake I can remember the Japanese we used, etc. If this doesn't prove the no-second-language theory wrong, I don't know what would.

#4) When I stub my toe, I bark "itee" rather than "ow" or "ouch."

"To have another language is to have a second soul". (Charlemagne).