Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s news, fermented:
A few weeks ago, I re-struck up my casual relationship with Duolingo, the free language learning app with a funny green owl as its mascot. I don’t love it; I learned to speak Spanish at vegetable markets, so tapping buttons on my phone feels underwhelming and not super real.
Why do I keep coming back, you ask? Because I can yammer on about food access and dismantling capitalism, but cannot for the life of me order a sandwich. Conversation has come easy to me, but remembering which past tense to use, or how to be respectful/formal (honestly an issue for me in any language) just don’t stick.
All of this aside: I ended up on their email list, and opened a recent digest with the subheading plus: Debunking the fluency myth.
The central point of this article, written by a linguist, is that there are many metrics for measuring competence in a language. ‘Fluency’ is just a (misleading) shorthand for all those other metrics, like language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) and language knowledge (grammar, pronunciation, vocab). You can also measure how much you say, how accurate it is, and how much people understand what you’re saying.
On its own, I found this fascinating. Then, one idea made me want to apply these concepts beyond language learning:
“Communication is really the most important part of language learning, so if you're on your way to communicating your needs in the ways you want to express yourself, then you are making good progress.”
Obviously. And, how rarely do we talk about being able to communicate our needs (and understand others’) as the pinnacle of language competency? This to me feels like the secret sauce of being a person. Who cares if you can conjugate every which way, if you cannot say to someone that they make you feel a way that nobody else does, or that they’re hurting you over and over again?
Taking this further, what happens when we try to communicate through conflict, and two parties talk past or over each other, each in their native language? Each “understands” the words the other is saying, but this has essentially no bearing on comprehension…which raises the question of if either of those people are actually fluent in the language they’re speaking.
Conflict is a fundamental part of being alive, and is what makes life rich, I think. If we all agreed all the time, we’d have no culture, no governance, no identities. Conflict is the extra thing that comes along with the huge brains we human animals have.
I’ll leave it there; today’s my last day as a Professional Communicator, for a while. Who knows if that will yield even more rants like this, or…what.
After I wrap up my Job today, I’ll turn to my work of planting this year’s crop of wheat, part hedge-against-climate anxiety, part opportunity to be dirty. In celebration, here’s my favorite wheat field.