On Language Immersion, and the Self It Returns
Learning a language in the city that speaks it is not study. It is the slow recovery of a self the mother tongue cannot reach.
By Samuel Vaden
There is research, increasingly persuasive, that bilingual adults experience the world differently in each of their languages - more risk-tolerant in one, more emotionally vivid in another, more direct in a third. The psychologist Susan Ervin-Tripp documented this fifty years ago in her studies of Japanese-English bilinguals: the same question, asked in different languages, produced different answers. The self is not a single thing translated into available tongues. It is, to some degree, constituted by the tongue it is using.
This has a quiet implication for the way certain lives can be organized. If a second language produces a partly different self, then learning a language in the city that speaks it is not skill acquisition. It is a small recovery operation - of a self that the mother tongue has been unable to bring forward. The clients we know who have done this seriously, in middle adulthood, describe it almost identically. They describe arriving at a sentence in Italian, or Portuguese, or French, that they could not have said in English because the precise feeling did not exist in English. Then realizing the feeling had existed all along, and had simply been waiting for the language that could carry it.
There is a method to this, and it does not involve apps. Apps teach vocabulary. They do not teach immersion. Immersion is what happens when one is, for two consecutive months a year, in a city where the language is the operating system of every transaction - the bakery, the dry cleaner, the cardiologist, the neighbor's complaint about the recycling. The pied-à-terre is the precondition. A hotel is too insulated. A two-week visit is too short for the second-language self to come forward. The threshold, in our observation, is roughly six weeks of continuous residence per year, sustained for two or three years. Below that, the self does not change. At or above it, it does.
“A second language, learned slowly in the city that speaks it, returns a self the first language was never able to hold.”
The cities best suited to this are not the ones with the most expatriates. They are the opposite. Paris, Lisbon, Rome, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Berlin - large enough that one can live a full life in the local language, small enough that one does not need to. The smaller hill towns are romantic but produce a narrower vocabulary. The smaller seaside villages are similar. A serious second-language life requires a city. The city gives the language its full register: bureaucratic, intimate, professional, vulgar, literary, medical, ordinary.
We counsel clients to find a single excellent teacher - usually a retired professor or a working translator - and to take a private lesson three mornings a week for the full length of the stay. Not classes. Not group work. One serious adult, in conversation with another, on subjects of actual interest. Politics, history, novels, the news of the day, the misunderstandings of the previous evening. This is the loop that produces fluency, because it is the loop that produces real sentences about real things. The grammar follows. It always does.
What is returned, after two or three years of this, is not just a language. It is a version of oneself that the home country had no use for. A wittier self. A more patient self. A self that argues better, or worse, but at any rate differently. A self that has had to ask for help often enough to be slightly humbler than the monolingual self at home. This is, in the end, the deepest argument for a divided life. Not the climate. Not the cuisine. The second self. It is the most expensive thing the residence buys, and the only thing the residence cannot lose.
