Every time I tell someone that I’m a Chinese and Italian Foreign Languages major, I watch them do a slight double take. It bothers me, I’ll admit, but not for the reasons you’d expect. I’m frustrated that I can’t seem to conjure a response to their unspoken questions.
“Why learn languages you have no personal connection to? Ones spoken by so few people so far away? Why spend hours memorizing conjugation tables when you’ve already met the language requirements?” In short: “Why learn a new language at all?”
I’ve been studying Chinese for practically my whole life, Italian for a little over a year and French and Nepali during high school and my gap year. And still, I find that the more I throw myself into learning languages, the further I am from conjuring any answer to that simple question: Why?
If you have ever sat through lunch with native speakers at Oldenborg, agonized over verb agreements in office hours or even tried to converse with locals or extended family members in a foreign country, then you already know how it feels to exist in a sort of linguistic exile.
On good days, I feel a mix of pride and exhaustion. On bad days, I feel like setting myself to this impossible task is almost comically akin to Sisyphus’ struggle, except that, unlike him, I have a choice.
I’ve learned that however fluent you may think you are, there is no finish line in learning a language: The mountain remains perpetually stretched out before you, and you must continue to push that boulder further and further up.
Freshman year, I decided to take Italian on a whim and joined the class on the last day of the add/drop period. As I write this now over a year later, my desk is piled with visa forms and course registration paperwork for the University of Bologna, the fully immersive Italian university where I will study at in the spring.
I’ve fallen into a habit recently: Every time I feel myself about to freak out about being unprepared to live and study in a language I’ve only just become acquainted with, I turn on an old Italian movie.
Towards the end of Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 masterpiece of Italian neorealist cinema “Umberto D.,” the main character, a lonely and destitute old man, seems to almost break the fourth wall in his grief. “Tutti ne approfittano degli ignoranti,” he says, which translates to “everyone takes advantage of the ignorant.”
Like “Umberto D.,” the films that I watch are usually in black and white and filled with rapid, colloquial Italian. I understand very little of the dialogue. As a result, the little snippets that I do catch — like Umberto’s solemn condemnation of society — hit me that much harder.
Growing up as the child of Filipino and American expatriates at a Mandarin-speaking school in Hong Kong, I am no stranger to the curiosities and frustrations of linguistic exile. The language of my home, Cantonese, has always eluded me. Because of that, little interactions — moments of connection through or across linguistic barriers, whether it’s over Oldenborg lunch or through the silk screen — feel magical, and sometimes I wonder if that isn’t the “why” in itself.
“At its most basic level, language is connection, and growing up in linguistic exile, there’s a fundamental part of me that longs for it.”
There’s a Nelson Mandela quote that I often return to in thinking about these questions: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his mother tongue, that goes to his heart.” At its most basic level, language is connection, and growing up in linguistic exile, there’s a fundamental part of me that longs for it.
The longer I sit with the question of “why,” the more I realize that the crux of language is not in the “why,” but the “how.” Throughout the semester, I want to dedicate this space to exploring what it means to throw yourself into learning a language, drawing on ideas ranging from the lives of exophonic writers to the joys of watching old Italian movies, translating poetry and stumbling through Oldenborg lunches.
Whether it’s in Nepali, Italian or Chinese, I know that by virtue of opening my mouth I’m vulnerable to making mistakes that range from poor grammar to complete nonsense and the subsequent embarrassment. Sometimes, just the idea of it sends me running home to English.
That’s when I put on a trusty old film by Fellini. Suddenly, I hear a new phrase or recall an interaction that wouldn’t have been possible without my efforts; I remember that I never would’ve felt that connection without falling on my face many times before.
To quote the Italian-speaking Bengali-American author Jhumpa Lahiri, “The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.”
Claire SC ‘27 wants you to know that she has a pug, is addicted to Malott cold brew, and has a deep attachment to the Italian Department at Scripps.
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