Learning Languages

 I think there's something really unique about being multi-lingual phenomenologically. We grew up speaking two languages, and were then in dual immersion education for many years, so being *bi*lingual was always part of our baseline. That alone was very interesting, and many times we've wondered about early child language acquisition in multiple settings. I imagine that before one develops a conscious sense of 'different languages' one simply experiences all of them collectively as communication, slowly developing a sense for which sets of words go with others.

After I started learning German I felt things expand further, especially once I realized that I entirely intended to keep learning languages after German. English and Spanish had always been part of my mind but with German for the first time I was learning a language from scratch, and I felt my mind expanding over the course of years as I assimilated an entirely new form of knowing into my mind. It started to affect the way I thought in English, and the way I thought *about* English, and even just my experience of thought itself.

Now that I'm learning Italian I'm feeling things get all blended up again. Spanish and Italian keep blending in my mind, and sometimes the blending is detrimental, as I'm unable to assimilate new features of Italian into my mind, while other times I find I'm able to discern tenses and conjugations I haven't learned yet merely by familiar extrapolation, despite not being superficially recognizable. There's something incredible satisfying about realizing that there's a deeper structure that you've subconsciously assimilated into an automatic process in your mind. It's still early in Italian for me, but that experience has never been more satisfying for me than when I started naturally being able to speed through relative clauses in German, which has some of the most satisfying syntax to my autistic mind.

Speaking more generally, I think being multilingual is really phenomenologically distinct from monolinguality, especially in the ways it encourages metacognition. You become more aware of the 'software' your mind is running on, yet at the same time none of these 'operating systems' are fully separable, the mix of languages you know will always operate in unison to structure the tenor of your thought and your mind. Like Wittgenstein's fly bottle, each addition expands and reshapes your cognition, yet it also creates subdivisions within your mind, allowing different modalities. I think there's something especially satisfying about intentionally mixing languages, about forcing rulesets to work together. It's no wonder to me why people love loanwords so much. One of my favorite features of German is how much it adopts English words and then conjugates them germanly. Ich chille. Du chillst. Wir chillen. Ich habe gechillt.

I hope to keep learning more languages. There's a limit to how many I'll reasonably be able to know fluently though I wont know that limit until I hit it. And unfortunately I do think it's necessary to know a language fairly fluently in order to really experience this multilingual phenomenology. So I'll have to choose wisely! I'd love to pick something really different next time, but who knows if I'll have the time. Regardless, there's something both beautiful and disconcerting about the fact that most of us probably can't really become fluent in more than a handful of languages, and few will ever even reach that. Our capacity for thought is limited by the exigencies of life-time and daily-time, yet there's still so much possibility for exploration within that space. I think that's great.