Babel and language learning
/I am traveling today, so I don’t have tons of time to work on my blog. I thought that I would give a quick review of a book that I am reading: Babel by Gaston Dorren.
I heard him on a podcast, Lexicon Valley (yes, I listen to too many podcasts)
His thesis, or discovery or just interesting fact, is that if you speak the 20 languages he dives into, then you would be able to talk to half of the world in their mother tongues. Just a bit of math there, with Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi-Urdu, and English, you reach about 3.9 billion according to his numbers. He kind of fudges with English, since English is not really a mother tongue. But that’s the only way you get to more than half of the world’s population. I’ll allow it, so many people do speak English.
I love books about language and studying languages. I have tried my hand at learning a few, and I now speak two languages well (English and Arabic), two somewhat (French and Spanish), and one a tiny bit (German, mostly forgotten). Plus, I am learning Vietnamese, slowly.
Each chapter is a different language, and he orders them from least spoken to most spoken, so from Vietnamese to English. Vietnamese is also the only language that he tries to learn while writing the book. (He speaks a bunch of languages, so he is not a novice at language learning).
Spoiler: he fails to learn Vietnamese. It seems to me like he just doesn’t spend enough time on it. As any language learner knows, you have to put in the time. You can shrink that time needed by having better study habits, but ultimately you need to memorize a lot of vocabulary. And that can take time, especially as you get older.
Few interesting items:
Vietnamese just doesn’t borrow that much from the West, so it is hard for him to take advantage of cognates like he would in German or French. According to him, 30-60% of vocabulary is from Chinese, but very little from French or English, or even Russian (except for Chu Nghia Mac-Lenin or Marxism-Leninism), despite the long period of Soviet cooperation.
Another thing that he talks about is how Google translate doesn’t work that well for Vietnamese. This is interesting, because it has gotten so much better for so many languages. And supposedly is also better than it used to be for Vietnamese. Some people are worried that these translation machines will eventually mean that we won’t have to learn other languages, but it seems unlikely to me. I think this is a clear 80:20 problem - getting 80% of the way there is easy (or easier, it’s been pretty hard), but fixing that last 20% may just not be possible, at least now. By that I am mostly talking about a translation that is perfect, like of a novel or a legal document. But the strides in just general conversation and vocabulary have been amazing.
He never gets that far in learning Vietnamese, partially because of the tones. This is something that Westerners really have a problem with. I have heard stories where Americans learn Vietnamese well enough to understand Vietnamese people but not well enough to make Vietnamese people understand them! But then again, I have a Thai friend that knows plenty of farang that speak Thai well. And tons of Americans have learned Chinese.
Overall, I found the book very interesting, but some chapters are better than others. The section on Persian was especially interesting. Also Turkish. Both of these are languages I have dabbled in, so it was exciting to learn more about then. I felt like the chapter on Arabic was a bit basic, but I speak Arabic and have studied it for years. So maybe the book works best for people that have some knowledge already of the languages.
As I am studying Vietnamese, I don’t know if this book makes me more excited or more depressed. Do I want to beat him and learn Vietnamese really well, or does this reinforce my feeling that Vietnamese is too hard and I will never learn? Guess will see over the next few months. Check back.