#59 Language learning

People talk about the value of growing up in a bi-lingual family, but this was something else. As the story goes, Maximilian Berlitz (of language school fame) had an extended family with a rich mixture of ethnicities, and many different languages were spoken around him. When he was very little he thought that everybody spoke their own individual language, and if you wanted to communicate with them, you had to learn it. So he did. The way I heard the story, he was not overwhelmed or upset by this situation; it was just a fact of life.

I was recently with a group of people discussing the challenge of communicating across religious language barriers. If you and I don't have a religious language in common, it's hard to communicate. I think this is true of political and values language as well. And it's particularly confusing when we think we're speaking the same language, using the same words but mean different things by them.

Perhaps that little boy has something to teach us. Maybe before I start making easy assumptions about what you are saying, I need to consider that I don't know your language. Maybe I need to stop and do a lot of listening (as I'm sure he did), and asking questions so I can hear your words in many different contexts, and sort out what a comparable word in my language might be.

Maybe I need to ask the question, "What will allow me to understand you?" It's hard to be around language we don't understand, hard to feel drawn toward others whose words we can't make sense of. Yet, rather than seizing on the signs that the chasms are too deep to ever be crossed, maybe we can stay in learning/translating mode, waiting and doing the work that will allow us to move toward the other person. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have the confidence of little Maximilian Berlitz-that we can learn any language, decipher any human being?