Doubts about becoming a polyglot - does a language-learning hobby conflict with spiritual growth?
I have asked a few people close to me to share guest posts in the coming weeks. They will be writing about whatever is on their heart.
This one is from my friend, Zach.
Doubts about becoming a polyglot - does a language-learning hobby conflict with spiritual growth?
I was already full of delusion and confusion while being a monolingual English speaker. If I continue to work toward achieving fluency in Spanish and Persian, will my spiritual growth be negatively impacted? Perhaps I will simply be deluded and conflicted in three languages instead of one? Or, I might be even more distracted with the happenings of the world, and less centered on the spiritual foundation of my life. I'm worried, in other words, that my language-learning pursuit is a vain ego trip and that it takes me further away from "putting God first" and “being in the world, but not of it” as the Christians say. I don’t happen to be Christian. Rather, I’d consider myself a Buddhist. But, as I see it, the principle is the same. The goal of my religious life involves converting my Karma (learning to outgrow my habitual bad habits to live a more honest and pure life) and transforming my ignorant selfishness into the full realization of the immaculate Unborn Buddha Nature. This process would seem to involve going further into simplicity and humility, NOT collecting more words and becoming a know-it-all smarty pants. So why won't this language-learning obsession of mine go away?
Either:
1) Learning multiple languages for fun is not necessarily in conflict with spirituality/religion, and I'm being too hard on myself. I just need to be careful and mindful with my intentions and with the materials, resources and people that I engage with to practice my languages.
OR
2) Learning multiple languages for fun IS intrinsically in conflict with spirituality/religion.
Let's set the stage by looking at the Buddhist context on the one side, and then the process of language learning on the other, so I can make my particular grievances and worries more clear.
On the one hand, we have Soto Zen Buddhism, of which I am an ordained lay member. One of the foundational teachings of Buddhism includes the noble eightfold path. One of the branches of the eightfold noble path of Buddhism (to pick at only one of the possible conflicts with language learning) is "right speech" - which includes the exhortation to avoid idle chatter. Of course, at the time of the Buddha, there was no such thing as digital media. But if there had been, I highly suspect that 99.9% of what we swim through each day in terms of social media, advertisements, TV, movies, podcasts, etc...that is to say, all this stuff around us that is merely distracting and does not tend towards enlightenment - all of it would be put under the "idle chatter" category.
On the other hand, I'm convinced by the Mass Immersion Approach to language learning. Mass immersion means "acquiring" the language organically rather than "learning" it, and acquisition happens through thousands of hours of engaged consumption with media and input of different kinds (listening to podcasts, watching shows, reading, having conversations, etc.). One starts with simple material that is easier to understand with the situational context clues - such as a children's cartoon, wherein one can guess what the characters are saying based on the context even without knowing the language - and slowly increases the difficulty of the material, until the learner is speaking with natives and reading literature in the target language. This is the approach most conspicuously articulated and argued for by the linguist David Krashen. It has since been adopted and espoused by many language learning Youtubers, and for good reason. It works. However, it can also be very dangerous for the sincere spiritual seeker. I must be very careful about the immersion materials I choose. In the desire to immerse myself in the new language in order to acquire it, I may be exposing myself to scads of unwholesome, superficial stimuli that have the potential to waylay me from my spiritual path.
Yet, my experience has taught me that an inordinately large amount of exposure to daily speech patterns and participation - in culture and cultural references - of the new language is needed to develop a high proficiency of the vocabulary and a ‘feel’ for the language. One cannot get the latter; that is, an understanding of the personality and the distinctive character of the target language, through solely book learning.
Yet again, maybe this apparent conflict (between living relatively media-free on the one hand, and the need to immerse myself in tens of thousands of hours of a new language/culture in order to acquire it, on the other) only arises in theory and resolves itself in actual practice as long as I do my best to carry mindfulness and intentionality with me in my conversations and my consumption of immersion material in my target languages.
The reality is that most media content created in the world is not compatible with my spiritual aspirations. One has to deliberately put blinders on to the noise and all the shiny baubles of the world when one follows a spiritual path. Even if one doesn't consider him or herself spiritual, one still has to honor his/her limited time and energy in this human incarnation and choose to engage mostly with what is enriching. Of course, nobody is perfect, and many young people who are otherwise well-intentioned have had plenty of late nights in their 20's (or 30’s) going down senseless Youtube rabbit holes. In fact, (and I'm going on a slight tangent here) in terms of the modern economic structure, those Youtube or social media rabbit holes of wasted time are not a bug, but rather a feature of our economy. A lot of our economy seems to be built on addiction these days (this is the so-called "Attention Economy," so well-articulated by Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism). By committing to language learning, I'm worried that I've just become a greater pawn of this attention economy. For example, I wouldn't typically get on Youtube or Netflix past a certain hour or more than a certain amount per week, but when it comes to language learning, and watching a Spanish-language Netflix show or a Persian Youtube channel, although I justify to myself that I'm "learning," "studying," "being productive," (which may all be true), I'm also feeding more and more time into the attention economy. Language learning has been competing with my times of solitude and reflection, and in a busy life with social and work obligations, can I afford to be giving away my solitude and reflection time?
Ok, so I’m beginning to talk in circles here and I’m simply restating the problem in different ways. Maybe I can compromise and come to some sort of deal with myself. I don't need to make a black-and-white decision to either continue language learning or not. Based on this post, I see that my conscience is a little bit troubled by all the time I’m spending on the internet and Youtube. So, maybe, instead of choosing to treat the conflict I’ve discussed as binary, I can refine my language-learning process and the type of immersion materials I choose. I can go on a total detox from Youtube for a while in order to appease my conscience. I can do a trial run of limiting my language development time to the following:
Reading books/literature
Having conversations with friends and people I care about - (in the target languages of course)
Watching feature films (movies that lengthen my attention span instead of shortening it, and are edifying and uplifting and/or educational in some way)
Living the above described compromise lifestyle for 3 to 6 months should be enough to let me decide whether I feel better/less conflicted about language learning and its compatibility with spirituality and the other foundations of my life that I feel it necessary to honor.
The rub, after all this rambling, is that, deep down, I intuit these two things that I'm pitting against each other in my mind are NOT mutually incompatible at all. It is just my methods that need fixing. There have been many examples of religious/spiritual leaders who spoke more than one language. In the Zen Buddhist tradition alone I can name Dogen, Buddhadharma and Suzuki Roshi off the top of my head. But the language for them was always incidental - a tool. It was never an end in itself that took priority over their spiritual practice. So, to tentatively conclude for now, I guess I should just be super mindful with what I engage with and resign myself to making slightly slower progress in my language fluency than the person who is going all-out immersion style.
This was written by Zach, not Paul? Who's Zach?
Absolutely. Choosing cultural works that enrich our souls and lives with excellence. That's what it's all about.