(This chunk of whatever is from last year and cross-posted from my other, secret, shitty blog. I still like it, though. It has been mildly edited, mostly because I wrote it at like 2AM on a Wednesday night)
There’s one concept we went over in Psych class this year that really stuck with me: linguistic determinism, or the theory that (loosely worded) the language one speaks affects one’s thoughts. I guess this concept fascinates me so much because most of the things we learned about in Psych were interesting, but so obvious and observable as to be pointless—after all, it’s plain to see that people help those who help them first, or that people will continue behavior that they receive rewards for. However, linguistic determinism is the kind of thing I never would have been able to put into words previous to Psych, despite seeing its effects firsthand.
I’m in a strange place, linguistically speaking. English has been my first language for seventeen years, and I don’t take that as a casual circumstance—throughout my entire life, I’ve been more or less obsessed with the English language, and I’ve never once struggled with the concepts and rules that have always seemed to plague my peers. Speaking and writing and reading in English come as easily to me as breathing, and at this point in my life I’ve grown incapable of understanding the difficulties that others have with these things, simply because not knowing how to employ English seems to me like not knowing how to use one’s limbs.
However, I’ve also been a student of Spanish for six years, and in that time, I’ve become more fluent in the language than is generally expected of a painfully white high-schooler. I can communicate my ideas efficiently, I can read and analyze Spanish literature from pretty much every era, and all in all I would say that I am very capable in the realm of the Spanish language, although my vocabulary sometimes suffers due to not speaking Spanish outside of a classroom environment.
I have one problem that a dictionary cannot really solve, though. I find that in class, when I am assigned an essay or analytic questions for a piece of literature, I struggle with the assignment much more than I would in my regular English class (the coursework of which is basically equivalent to my AP Spanish class).
But this makes sense, you say (possibly)! It’s only natural that I find the assignment more difficult—after all, I am undeniably a more accomplished speaker of English, and that aforementioned dearth of useful vocabulary is surely harmful! Indeed, this accounts for any mechanical difficulties I may experience while writing. I am not focusing on these particular problems, though, which can be overcome quite simply with a tiny dictionary and a cool head.*
The trouble is this: when I am planning out an essay or trying to answer a challenging thematic question, I struggle with the concepts themselves, a difficulty I almost never have in my native language. In English, I am the undisputed master of essay-writing and analysis—in Spanish, I produce work that the English-speaking me would raise an eyebrow at.
It seems to me that my thought processes grow, if not actually simplistic, then certainly more muddled when I am thinking and writing in Spanish. I am so used to having a plethora of very specific, meaningful English words at my disposal when writing essays that when I set pen to paper in Spanish class, the ideas that I connotate with those words might as well have vanished into thin air. I have so many more limits in Spanish, because the thoughts that race through my brain when I am writing in English can only break through that language barrier to a certain extent.
I do wonder if this is the heart of linguistic determinism, or if this is a peculiarity specific to me and any others at my levels of fluency in two separate languages. I deeply suspect that even if I attained perfect fluency in Spanish, I would still encounter similar mental roadblocks. I also suspect that I would start to run up against them in English as well, though—a phenomenon that I can already start to see when I read very capable English translations of my favorite Spanish stories and am left cold.
At the risk of verging on the depressingly obvious, the world is full of different languages because each language is different. If there were one universal language where the thoughts and ideas of every culture could be perfectly conveyed, then we would almost certainly be using that language.
However, there is no such thing, because the little differences in structures and tenses and pronouns have, I think, a vast psychological effect on the individual. There are phrases in Spanish which I can understand perfectly in context but could not translate into English for the life of me, and vice-versa. What does this indicate?
Well, I’m sure it indicates a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people, but to me, this suggests that fluency is not just a matter of understanding a languages, but living it—I can speak Spanish until my throat dries up, but I won’t know Spanish until it, like English, comes as easily to me as breathing.
*and it's a well-known fact that nothing is cooler than a tiny dictionary
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