Learning and Languages

As many of you know, I been doing a lot of language learning lately. I recently set aside a month of time for some experiential learning of Spanish, since I'll be living in Central American for awhile.  Doing some one-to-one learning intensively 5 days a week, 4 or 5 hours a day, definitely got me thinking about language. 

But looking at the bigger picture of language learning got me thinking too about how we're all living in a global economy.  And when "global" moves beyond just a catchphrase or some characteristic of how the world works, and instead starts to have a more direct impact on each of us as individuals, then language, especially the ability to speak multiple languages, becomes a significant issue.

Many of us belong to project groups and communities of interest that are composed of members who speak different languages: in academic circles, in most industries, medical professions, in avocations, and so on. So how can we work (and play) together better if each of us has multiple language skills?  To what degree does being multilingual help us to significantly improve our effectiveness and efficiency, and enhance our ability to accomplish things? 

One part of it is obvious; that is, the simple ability to communicate, just as it always has, is certainly still true.  But I also think that communication is becoming even more important as we change the way we work to a more cognitive or cerebral level.  We're sharing less tangible things more and more—ideas and concepts. We're working through differences and are trying to understand each other, and these things really depend upon our ability to communicate well.  So when you have an idea, and as these ideas become more complex and more rich, then language becomes even more important (both the written word and graphical communications).

Moving Beyond Words

So we're looking at new ways to increase and improve our ability to communicate. What if individuals could be free to use the language that is most effective for them so they could focus more on their expertise or what they are interested in and less so on a specific language?  I'm not referring to language just in a literal sense, such as the jargon and vocabulary of a domain, but the conceptual models of the domain.  For example, in music, there is both a language as well as a rich set of theories, concepts and understanding.  What do we need to do to increase our ability to both grow in our thinking and our ability to share that?  How do we communicate these ideas and concepts when members of a group do not share a common language?

We want to tackle this problem on two levels that are somewhat converging:

• How do we improve our ability to be multilingual?
• To what extent can we more effectively communicate in those languages?

As we progress in a language, we move beyond word-to-word translation, and even stop consciously thinking in one language and speaking in another.  As speaking in a language becomes less conscious, we begin to move to a different level of communication.  In my own experience with Spanish, I didn't want to say specific words, but rather, I wanted to communicate an idea, and I wanted to convey that idea using the same phrasing as a native speaker. In conveying an idea, the words, verbs, and phasing might all be very different from one language to the next.

Most trouble in communication seems to arise when the words do not convey our actual thoughts.  What we say may not be what we actually mean.  Inflection, for example, can completely change the meaning of what is being said. I think that in the next 20 to 50 years, we may be able to transcend language as we know it, and instead connect with each other at a semantic level.  We all have ideas and thoughts and they are not necessarily expressed in our heads as words. Might we be be able to bypass language altogether and simply convey our ideas directly to each other? 

A New Model of Language Acquisition

But until we have this capability, we are stuck with language.  So what do we do in the meantime? Could we be more effective working with each other by increasing the languages we are fluent in? I think that the acquisition of languages will become easier and more affordable. In my own recent experience, I found that in this one-to-one intensive way of learning Spanish, the content of the conversation didn't matter other than it was relevant to both of us. We avoided artificial, arbitrary topics, such as going shopping, and instead our conversation was unstructured and unplanned. 

So might it be possible for  us to achieve two things instead of one when we work in multilingual teams?  For example, what if two people who spoke different languages were put together on the same project team, with the goal of not only completing a task or project, but also helping each other acquire the other's language? This model could become possible and desirable when the acquisition of those language skills is of sufficient value to make it worthwhile, since the completion of the project would surely take longer.

One of the values of this approach is that it would enable us to expand our choice of individuals when assembling a project team. If we removed language as a limitation, our pool of potential team members would probably expand by an order of magnitude.  We could now do a better job of finding just the right people at just the right time. And if these teams were a better fit in terms of skills and expertise, I bet they would be able to work at the same level or better than a monolingual team. When we can start to make language less relevant and make staffing a project team depend more on skills and aptitude, we will all benefit.

If all of this talk about language has gotten you interested in learning more, here's something to get you started. One of the many agencies that you can use to connect with schools all over Guatemala can be reached at www.guatemala365.com.  Here are the specifics of my own experience:

Antigua, Guatemala

I spent 2 weeks at the ANTIGÜEÑA SPANISH ACADEMY

Julio Garcia is the Director and you can tell him I sent you (for whatever that is worth)

Email:    antigueno@itelgua.com

Phone:      +502-5752-8961 or +502-4178-6331

San Marcos on Lake Atitlan (about 3 hours from Antigua)

If you are interested in a gorgeous and very remote location on incredible Lake Atitlan, I can sure recommend the tiny village of San Marcos. My Spanish instructor was also the Director of the school and his name was Rene Lopez and you can contact him directly at orbitaspanishschool@yahoo.com or phone +502-5872-7485 or +502-5287-1308

Suchitoto, El Salvador

And I can also HIGHLY recommend a trip to Suchitoto about an hour’s drive North of San Salvador.  Visited mostly by local “tourists” from San Salvador, it's a great town perched up on top of the hills overlooking Lake Suchititlan, which is formed by El Salvador’s only hydroelectric dam.  I used the Pajaro Flor Spanish School and was VERY pleased, plus their view over the lake is to die for! <g> My instructor’s name was Evelin Saavedra evesaa@hotmail.com or evesaa-26@yahoo.com

Emails: info@pajaroflor.com aporeducar@yahoo.com nelsonsuchi@yahoo.com

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