Anyone who (like me) teaches a foreign language today realizes sooner or later that students are brutally confronted with the question of “why bother?”. Of course, students may always ask themselves this about anything they are taught. But the question has become newly pressing for language-learners.
Learning a foreign language is arduous, time-consuming, and never leads to perfect knowledge. Of the traditional reasons to undertake this toil, only one still applies strongly with regards to many languages: the possibility of conversing with others in that language. Even this promise is less enticing now that translation programs on telephones can allow for a measure of in-person exchange across languages. As for reading or writing in a foreign tongue, this can now largely be circumvented by translation software and LLMs.
Learning a foreign language is arduous, time-consuming, and never leads to perfect knowledge.
Of course, exchanging messages via Google Translate, or shoving a text through a translation program, or outsourcing one’s prose to an LLM, are an impoverishing dilution of true knowledge of a foreign language. But to commit to the hard work of learning the language oneself now requires precisely caring deeply about this impoverishment. The merely practical incentives to learn have lost most of their potency. All that work of memorizing grammar and vocabulary, clumsy attempts at self-expression, late nights with dictionaries and recordings, is far less of a necessary requirement for getting to know some foreign part of the world at all, far more of a positive choice to get to know it in a certain way. Most would perhaps prefer that deeper and wider knowledge, but this preference is not the same as being prepared to do the work required to gain that knowledge. There are other options: they provide far less, but they also demand far less.
This shift in our position relative to language-learning is quite new, but it is characteristic of the machine age. Technologies turn necessities into choices. Writing long ago made oral story-telling unnecessary, and then television and radio in turn made reading stories dispensable. Recorded music eliminated the need to sing or play in order to have music in one’s home. The freezer, the microwave, and cheap restaurants have turned cooking from a requirement for eating at all to a “lifestyle” choice (the entire concept of “lifestyle” is a manifestation of this new panoply of choices). Thanks to the pill and IVF, parenthood is no longer a necessary corollary of pairing up, and vice versa, so that forming a couple and procreation are now two discrete options.
Technologies turn necessities into choices.
All of this has certainly made us more free, in the sense that our sheer survival entails fewer obligations, and that less of what we might want comes with certain inescapable consequences. I no longer have to choose between cooking or going hungry, between celibacy and becoming a parent. Whether or not such developments are desirable, they certainly give rise to new agonies and temptations. “Should we have a child?” is a question that was unknown through most of history, and one that is very hard to answer, once set in those terms.
However these dilemmas are not going away. Individuals and communities may decide to eschew an entire technology, just as I (mostly) eschew translation software. But the eschewal and the possibility are two sides of the same coin. Learning a vocabulary list, or having a baby, although in themselves the same as ever, take on a new meaning when workarounds are easily available.
The old sort of language-learning will continue, as of course will the begetting and birthing of children. What remains to be seen is whether such unmechanized ways of being will reassert themselves as ordinary, or whether they will become anachronisms, requiring for their maintenance constant resistance against the surrounding world of screens and engines.
