You can find this episode here, if you want to listen to it.
Welcome to Smash the Class, a podcast that discusses topics in education from an anarchist perspective. This project is part of the Anarchist Pedagogies Collective, which seeks to create a space for anyone interested in anarchist education, regardless of expertise or background. For our eighth episode, we were joined once again by Carl Eugene Stroud.
He previously joined us back in episode three to discuss especifismo and digital learning, but this time the tables are turned because he comes in to interview us and to discuss language learning and its various impacts. Since he wonderfully introduces how this topic came to be in the opening to our discussion, I do not want to speak over him and will let that stand on its own. As a reminder for those who haven't heard Carl speak before, he's a tutor who teaches French, Spanish, and English online to students of different ages who all live in different parts of the world.
As for the three of us present—Sonia, Yotam, and myself, Nicole—we are people who all either live in non-English speaking environments or who do not speak English as our first language. So without further ado, here's Carl to start us off.
Carl: So yeah, I'm Carl, and I was part of a writing workshop that was hosted online and in person with a group that's in Chile that is called Solidaridad FCL. The workshop was organised to teach us how to write opinion columns, specifically a militant writing of opinion columns. I learned a lot of things in that workshop, but we were all sort of supposed to be working on something throughout it. So we were kind of bouncing ideas off of each other and people were reading each other's writings up to different points and getting feedback. And so I learned a lot about collective writing and also about how that feedback is not really like, when it comes to militant writing, that feedback is not actually, you know, coming at your opinion. It's coming at the task at hand, right? And how well the tool is able to accomplish its goals.
So one thing I really learned that I've been able to convey to a lot of other people in different contexts already, and that was part of my own writing in doing this, which is the writing I did that came out of that workshop, is the idea that there's an intertextual objective and an extratextual objective. So you have a kind of thing you're trying to do with the arguments and the reasoning and the rhetoric in your writing. And, you know, that relates to making it logical and progress and thinking about what order to put it in. But then there's an actual external objective, which is like, why is this piece being written? What is it accomplishing? And actually needing to answer that before is really different in an opinion column than in an essay or an informational article. And something I learned is that, you know, especially in the anarchist movement in the US, we tend to kind of produce writings and then not know what to do with them exactly.
And so that fits very much into zine culture and spreading ideas, but it makes it so that you end up being someone who has to go around convincing other people of some writing. And that can be very, not only very hard, also just very awkward and kind of alienating to the person that did the writing and to the people listening to you, right? It's a strange thing that like seems like self-promotion, even if that's not really the point. And so actually having an external objective is sort of what lets you know, like, what needs to be written. It's not a personal reflection. It's like this thing is needing to be accomplished in an actual context and a writing to a specific publication or to a website—or in this case, us doing a podcast—is there are ways of accomplishing that task through that writing and making sure that the text fits to do that. That's something that I learned and that's, yeah, like really changed my perspective on what the point of engaging with the writing even is to begin with. That having a good idea on your own is fine, but then it actually needs to be an idea about something already happening. It's not actually legitimate to just start from your idea and then go find a place to put it. So yeah, like we did this kind of sharing stuff along the way and this article that I wrote, which was originally written in Spanish, as the workshop was in Spanish.
And yeah, I mean, I speak Spanish. I teach Spanish. I do private lessons of French and Spanish and English, but I am also interested in improving my Spanish. I've written a lot less in Spanish and especially when it comes to militant writing. So I was just interested in engaging with that as some good practice on my own. And I ended up learning just a lot about writing in general. But when it comes to the Spanish, my article was originally written in Spanish, and the result of it was kind of through this method that I was taught through the people in this group, specifically Marcela Morales and Pablo Abufom. They were the two militants leading the workshop, and I learned a whole, whole lot from them. And I've continued to be in contact with them and see them as really important mentors in this experience that I had.
So in Spanish, the column is called "Idiomas Secundarios, Frutos del Turismo o Juegos del Cellular," which we eventually translated into English as "Tourism and apps, all you need to learn a language", right? And so the process of writing it was already a kind of collective thing through this feedback I was getting. And originally, I thought I was, you know, writing something about a situation that it more or less affected people in my local context. And actually, in that writing workshop, the feedback I was getting from people in a whole different place in the world, in a different language, was actually the same thing. They related a lot to these points I was making, and I realised that was part of the objective of this column, is that, like, there are a lot of people who are experiencing this exact problem. And while the solution proposed by my column of just, you know, corresponding more and talking more with people in other places and in other languages, is not super grandiose.
I think that it actually just isn't proposed kind of in that concrete and really just clear terms. And so even the translation that we have here is the result of some of the students that I have. I work a lot with comrades who are wanting to study other languages. And so with some other anarchists in town, we've been meeting for several months. And we study sometimes like short stories, sometimes news articles and different things like that together. And so we undertook like translating the Spanish into English as a group task. We'd never done anything like that before. And so we learned a lot through doing that as well. Those of us participating are at different levels and everything. And so it allowed us to have a kind of project that everyone sort of took charge of a part of it. And we trusted like, yeah, that paragraph is that person's, you know, and when it's your turn to go through and give an edit, what you do, we trust what you did, you know, and that what's going to come out isn't going to look like anyone's thing. It's going to look like the thing that says what we think it needs to in that same idea of the original thing.
So yeah, that's kind of the background behind this. And so I wanted to speak to the to y'all in particular, to the Anarchist Pedagogist Collective, because I know that the the premise behind this is already international and multilingual. And because of that, it seemed first like the ideal place to send my Spanish article. And that when we started discussing like how the conversation around that would work, the need for the English translation also became apparent. And so yeah, like the dialogue between like the destination for this and how it has shaped has already been kind of coming from lots of places. And this seemed like the ideal platform for that kind of discussion. And so yeah, I'm interested to talk to to y'all about this and hear your perspectives. And maybe yeah, we can come up with some new ideas or new things to tackle in our local context as well. So I have some questions here. And I'll just go ahead and pose the first one, which is how are internationalism and multilingualism related in theory and in practice? So yeah, anyone have any ideas on that right off the bat?
Nicole: I kind of tend to see more people using it as a basis of translation. Like, obviously, we get a lot of translation of movements of events. But kind of like, I also kind of see that there needs to be this expansion, kind of like the expansion of knowledge, but including like our perceptions of people, concepts, places, both of these for better or worse. Because oftentimes, like we might be using language that can be quite harmful, and not knowing in what way it can be harmful, whether or not it's like a bigoted concept, or if it is one in one place. But also not being able to actually get across like an idea, or even just a general concept. So I feel like there is a lot of room between both internationalism and multilingualism—or some people also call it plurilingualism, which is just like a whole range of different ways of talking about it.
But yeah, so that's kind of where I would think a big chunk of it is, is not just in translation, because I think that's where people's brains automatically go to. But in just being able to understand people on their own terms, rather than having our terms kind of thrust upon them in order for them to be understood.
Sonia: I think it's important also to, well, when it comes to multilingualism, in theory, in the last couple of decades, everything that has been done when it comes to research, it has been very focused on the neurological aspect of it. While before that, in the 20th century, it was more focused in what Nicole was mentioning, right? How do we learn? How do we code it? What kind of meanings we have behind it? How is it related to culture? Because some people think that, oh, it's just a language, like it's just words without no context, no meaning, no history. But actually, it's quite the opposite.
That's why actually translating tasks are so difficult, because actually, there's a lot of words in one language that you don't have in another, because perhaps there has been no necessity for it. And the thing is that this is something, I guess, multilingualism has been used now again as a... I think, in practice has been too attached to the capacity of workers to move around, but not necessarily into building up solidarity because, you know, it takes time. But I think that, yeah, it has been instrumentalised in practice in the last 40 years, perhaps. And one example is, well, we will talk more about that. But one example is these apps, right? That it seems that you're going actually to learn to communicate. I don't know, I've never learned anything through these apps. I mean, you know, languages are tools, and you have to be in a context and use them socially actually to learn. So, I guess that as in the same way that we have more boundaries now, national boundaries, and, you know, we have also these compartmentalised or fragmentised way of learning languages without a context, without the history. And this is something I think that actually damages the international solidarity. And, well, I guess there's something we have also to work with in our anarchist movements and organisations and groups, right, to return to the more militant aspect of being multilingual and translating and trying to engage in creating communities, not only a thing that we are just going to throw words around and, you know, be able to, you know, get some food somewhere when we are traveling. I mean, it's much, much more than that. It's the activist context or the background of it.
Yotam: I guess when I was thinking of that question, and especially when I was listening to Sonia's response, which I think was absolutely great. I'm constantly reminded of Esperanto. And how that wasn't really that successful as kind of some sort of a, you know, attempt to create a language that is outside of context, outside of time, belonging to all for all, that sort of thing. Of course, none of it is true to that experiment, even if we can kind of salvage some good intent. But even then, you know, there's a bit of a problem there. But I think one of the lessons from that and a key thing that I keep coming back to when I think about multilingualism and internationalism in the context of radical leftist politics, I guess, if I'm trying to be very general, is a sense of humility, I guess, that we need to kind of take on.
I am not a native English speaker, and I've been living in a native English speaking place for quite a while now. And the more I'm here, the more I understand how different what I think English is, is to what English is to people who kind of grew up with it. I'm a Hebrew— a native Hebrew speaker. And I know that people who learned Hebrew who speak to me tend to make interesting choices with their language that are not choices that I would make. And when you even drill down further, I studied Chinese for a while, and I've come to learn very quickly that the language itself changes literally from town to town. So when we think about internationalism, in the context of language, I think international solidarity is far more the point, rather than some hope for an international language, that will somehow, somehow solve all, because in the attempt to be international in how we study languages, we flatten the languages that we want to study into an object that is neither the reality nor helps us communicate. It's kind of an object outside of time, outside of text, outside of context, that doesn't really help anyone. Rather, maybe the better way forward is to, you know, to the extent that we can speak a different language that is not our own, engage with it with humility and with respect, but also make accessible things for others that they cannot reach. In that sense, I think we'll be very much in the international sphere, or in the maybe global sphere, if we're not assigning anything detrimental to that term. But doing so with respect to the local context that we all find ourselves in.
Carl: Yeah, so I think that kind of leads into the next part of this question, which is like, whether internationalism and multilingualism or plurilingualism, bilingualism are actually just two parts of the same principle, or whether they really are kind of separate, separate things to be working at. And I think this relates to actually a lot of the different things that y'll said, like, Nicole was mentioning how the translation fits into this. And I think like the, yeah, the way that like, concepts move is, is actually part of what we need to be thinking about when in relation to this international solidarity, because we need to expect that they're, they're expressed in different terms, maybe even within the same language as they move from place to place. And we need to be able to recognise consistencies, which are maybe, maybe require us to have a kind of theoretical understanding of how we're connecting them.
And then also, like, like Yotam was saying that like the, the connections actually are not universal in a sense, like we're not going to come up with one tool that fits into all the places that actually we need to make connections that are real. And that internationally, yeah, they can maybe seem kind of tenuous, right? They might not be held together by the, the most overlapping fibers in a sense, right? But that that's not actually a limitation to how the ideas can move. And so I think then related to what Sonia was mentioning, I think we want to avoid this idea of like the learning another language being a topic, or like a subject, we sort of study. And, and that that's why it needs the context. Because yeah, we could study, you know, a certain, we could study chemistry, or we could study US history or something. And we're going to limit that to like a certain like ingredients of materials that we're going to look at. But if we're going to study language, it really requires being like with other people.
And, and that even if we're studying old ingredients, like texts from centuries ago in that language, we're going to need to be with people in the present. So I think that that, yeah, that leads into this next aspect of like, whether they're, they're both the two parts of the same thing or not. And I guess from my perspective, it seems like we we actually benefit more by... by separating these into like, internationalism needs to be something that people in local contexts can see themselves engaging in and can see their own interests reflected in. And that that includes people who don't speak multiple languages. And that we can't actually wait until people feel some kind of proficiency in some other form of communication, that actually learning to be proficient in our own like, first languages is already really challenging when it comes to political concepts and getting people together. And so I think that that setting multilingualism as a bar sometimes actually is an excuse that people use for not engaging in internationalism already.
Nicole: I agree.
Carl: But at the same time, I think that a lot of times, what happens is that multilingualism gets treated as something that's always happening somewhere else that isn't happening here. And if it is, it's only kind of like we've already said, like, it's because workers from somewhere else have moved to this place. And so it looks like a problem of the worker population that wasn't in a locale. And that that's got problems inherent to that. But it's also just not even always true everywhere, where sometimes multilingualism is something that's already been kind of lost somewhere. And what exists there is a sort of homogeneity that is itself a post-colonial effect, right? And we need to see that as a way of like, I guess, from my perspective, how do we take those the master's tools in a sense, right? And what do we do with that from there? And so I think like, sometimes we're trying to plant seeds of multilingualism in places that yeah, they maybe don't look like they're supposed to grow anymore. And I think that that's... It's different than the internationalism, which we need to start engaging in more immediately without like, needing to solve such a conundrum, let's say. So yeah, anyone else have an opinion on that part of this?
Nicole: I think you're going to hit something that I was already thinking about. Because while you were talking about multilingualism, I think there's also this kind of failure to engage with the fact that some places pushed monolingualism and some places still push monolingualism, or maybe they push a supposed bilingualism, and then don't recognise other languages. So like, in thinking about the pushing for bilingualism, I'm actually kind of thinking of Canada, and the fact that it's expected to be French and English, but then you get like, one of the indigenous ministers, who sadly, I don't remember her name. So maybe someone can chime in with that later. But she's bilingual, but not in French. And so like, she gets penalised by people for being bilingual in the wrong way. And I find that kind of frustrating.
But then also, like, when you're mentioning this, I was thinking of the monolingualism of the United States, where it's like, it was intentionally pushed, because it was a way to homogenise the population. It was a way to Americanise the population. And it was a way to remove these kind of cultural markers from people who were migrants from other places. Very often, particularly in my own like research of generally like gifted and talented programs, and also special education, you tend to find a lot of stuff talking about how they wanted to Americanise the children, particularly of like, German-speaking families, Italian-speaking families, of Slavic families, and you find this push to force them all to speak English, which kind of de-cultures them. And so I think there's just a kind of refusal to understand, like whenever we're talking about multilingualism as being necessary. Which I think it is necessary and very useful, but I don't think it's necessary in the productive sense. I think it's just necessary because that's how the world should work, that people should have access to being multilingual, and it should be simple. But like in this push, we tend to put multilingualism on this pedestal of being a kind of capitalist enterprise, of being only for people who need it, whatever 'need' means, and it typically is like: Is it necessary for work? Or is it necessary for study? So there is kind of that, but something else is also like this promotion of acceptable languages.
So I'm also kind of stuck at like thinking about how, like where I live. I live in Slovakia. Before the fall of the USSR, children in public schools were taught Russian. And my students, most of whom tend to be Slovak, and most of whom tend to be adults who kind of lived through this, they often will tell me stories about how they were in school. And once the USSR fell, they had teachers who were teaching Russian, who were then forced into teaching German as their next language, regardless of whether or not they actually spoke German. And so there was this kind of weird dichotomy of what was an acceptable language and for what purpose that language was deemed acceptable, because under the USSR, obviously Slovak people, then Czechs and Slovaks, since they were one, had to learn Russian in order to engage with this. And then once they didn't have to, they then had to switch over to learning the language of the next door neighbor, which would be German. But also another mandatory language that's in our schools here is English. And it is required that they learn this. So there is just kind of this support for acceptable languages that are 'useful' in terms of productivity and business and so on. So it's like, here they're expected to be multilingual, but in the US, many of us are expected to be monolingual.
Sonia: I guess that shows that we have a linguistical imperialism, that it's been much more again in the last decades. And it's mostly with English, but we know now that there's other languages to stay on top, like Mandarin. It's just because of the population that there's a lot of people talking Mandarin. But in this case, I would like to point that when we talk about, I mean, when we think about languages, most people, for some reason, think just about oral languages, or even languages that have a phonological alphabet. And in many territories, actually, they were international in other ways, because I've learned recently about the khipus in the Inca Empire. And this was, you know, with ropes, they made knots. And that's the way they communicated because the Inca Empire was so big. And I'm sure that it was not just people talking Quechua in this case, but they were, you know, in touch with many other languages. And this was like kind of an international code system. They didn't have anything written in the way we know from the European or Western tradition. But they use these ropes, like an international way of doing it. As much as in the US, in the plains, they had the Plains Hand-Talk. So, you know, among several tribes and indigenous groups, they used hand-talk because orally speaking, they, you know, they didn't have that much in common. But instead of struggling with that, they used their hands or even images that they could draw that everybody could understand because that's much more universal.
So in this case, I think that both when it comes to Esperanto and the linguistical imperialism we have with English, in the last decades, those are examples exactly of when people are being pushed to learn a certain language to be able to, again, to understand each other in a quicker way. But at the same time, we have, I think it's important that I have been in places and this is something bilingual and multilingual people do, we mix languages. That's why that's one of the reasons that languages, you know, are not tools that are... We don't speak like we did in the 15th century. No, nobody does. But that's because languages are moving, they're alive. So in some places, like I guess the US, they have pushed this monolingualism, which I think is awful, and it's a genocidal project, of course. But at the same time, in other territories, it's always been. They have also tried to push monolingualism. But what has happened is that people have mixed it.
And this is something that then we know this, for instance, I can just speak about, in my case, Spanish. But when we move around, people think that when you learn Spanish, you learn Spanish, like the 'standard' one, that it's Castellano. But if you move to other territories, thankfully, they have their own dialects, they have their own ways of talking. They have mixed with indigenous languages, not just the words, but the grammar. So for me, as a Spanish-speaking person, when I moved to Yucatan, for instance, it's very much mixed with Maya Yucateco. So actually, I could hear Spanish words, but I didn't understand the meaning. It was a very interesting experience. Which says that when it comes to the international solidarity, you need time to decode all the history. And this was a colonised place. And now a way of resistance, actually, is both the mixing of languages. In a way, adopting this intense of linguistical imperialism, but also the revitalisation we see now.
And as Nicole was pointing out, we have some languages that are seen as the important ones. But again, it's the colonising languages, mostly English, French, German, Spanish... Those are colonising languages. And when it comes to the international sphere, I'm sure in other contexts, happens the same in small contexts. But you see, especially being immigrants, a lot of us, our own mother tongues or our own first languages? They are not valued in the same way. And this is something as anarchists, I think we also have to be aware of, right? I'm sure that if we are living in colonised lands or occupied lands, if we are going to learn some languages, we really need to think about what are the most oppressed languages, how are we going to revitalise them, how are we going to join that linguistical resistance. And this comes both when it comes to indigenous languages, but also languages that belong to ethnic minorities or even disabled communities, like the sign languages everywhere, or even braille, like the alphabet. You see, it's written, but it's another way of communicating. So when I think multilingualism, I think anarchists should think about communication. And we communicate in a lot of different ways, not just with our mouths. I hope that this is clear. So actually, this is a wonderful way that we can actually grow this diversity that both colonialism and imperialism have tried to kill the last 500 years. But also, again, that it strengthens the internationalism, I think, right? We can still use all the tools that are not oral to communicate and grow this solidarity among us.
Yotam: I just have two comments that I think might add a little bit to this discussion. One is, in listening to Sonia, I was reminded of the Chinook language that indigenous people of the northern west coast, I guess, so northern US and into Canada, into Alaska, have kind of developed amongst themselves. That is different from their own first nation language that they've developed solely for kind of international communication. I think Canada today refers to it as a trade language, which it has been used for trade, for sure. But it's, from what I know, at least, has been yet another example of this kind of attempt to create another language, and has been successful for thousands of years until the colonists did what colonists do in creating communication across cultures, across social groups, across First Nations. That's one thing.
Another thing that I think maybe creates undue complication here, but I think it's still interesting and relevant, especially for English speakers, is to recognise how our own anarchist and radical socialist theory has been influenced by language blindness. I'm reminded here of Kenyon Zimmer's work. His book is called Immigrants Against the State, where he shows that in the US, a lot of the anarchist texts and theories that we associate with the anarchist movement in the US has been ignored. The scholarly literature, at least, has ignored immensely Yiddish, German, and Italian anarchists who spoke and read and wrote in Yiddish, Italian, and German in the US and in Canada. And it's actually there that the majority of the conversation around anarchism and radical socialism has happened in the 19th and 20th century.
And that really opened my eyes to how complicated this kind of conversation on languages is in the context of anarchism, and how biased a lot of people who are interested in anarchism, who generally just really have a good hearted interest... how biased their interpretations might be because they just don't see that language bias. And if you even go a step further, we can talk about Yiddish, which was, again, a very important language in writing anarchism in the 20th century. And that is, at least grammatically, ancient Hebrew with German and Russian and also some Polish and a little bit Lithuanian. And you get into a whole mess of languages, grammars, and real international connections that are embedded in the language that we speak. So I think that's really important for us to also, as people who ascribe to certain anarchist principles, to also take a good look at ourselves and how we understand ideas around us and where we read them, why we read them in those places, and how might biases in those kinds of things affect how we understand the concepts that we use.
Nicole: I'd also just point to the fact that in the US, at least, there are a number of places that have Yiddish in their English. So in the Midwest, we often use a lot of Yiddish phrases, and many people don't even recognise this. And even though we're doing that, we're still overlooking it completely.
Yotam: Oh yeah, Yiddish is really embedded in contemporary English in many ways. And I oftentimes go, excuse me, this is... Yeah, definitely.
Carl: It makes me think about how one thing that happens in the US is that, and I mean, I have a tendency maybe to just accuse all Anglophones of this around the world, but what definitely happens in the US is that people engage with a translation, and that- there's nothing wrong with engaging with a translation. But one thing that happens is the actual work of even doing the translating is also lost in this. No one recognises the work of translators as being part of this. And so, like, not only is the respect for the origin of those ideas and the way that they articulated it lost, but the actual work done to help communicate that to other people is lost. And it's sort of just not only assumed in a very privileged way and entitled way, it's also a way of not seeing the actual, like, diversity that is there and assuming diversity is a kind of thing to establish or create or instill, when I think that that's one of the effects of that kind of homogeneity is. We sort of see a flatness of things that are not actually as flat as they maybe appear. But I know that there's some maybe strong languages, or some strong opinions about this, and I think that we have touched on this a little bit.
So relating to the idea of these kinds of tools for being between languages, or for communicating in spite of these differences, or efforts to overcome them, like, what are the opinions that y'all have around things like Esperanto? And recently I've encountered Interlingua, which is like, kind of the idea is it's composed of things that are coming from multiple common Romance languages, and also with English. And so it's bizarrely kind of comprehensible to people who maybe themselves don't think they speak that language. But yeah, what are your opinions of those things? Not, you know, like we said, not abstractly, but actually like today, right? Like, given our internet culture, or given the fact that like, why do we even know about those things, right? There is some kind of some sort of relevance that has even informed us about them. And kind of like we're saying, they are things that crop up in anarchist ideas and anarchist internationalism. So yeah.
Nicole: I've been kind of frustrated by Esperanto since about fifth grade. So that's almost like three decades of frustration with a constructed auxiliary language. Mostly because like, you know, in fifth grade, I was going like, "Why am I learning this? Why can't I just learn German?" Or like, why can't I learn something that is relevant to my community? Like, the community of people I grew up around was like, you know, mostly people who were born in the US, but then you had a lot of people who still had a lot of connection to their German, like, family roots, to a lot of people who still had a lot of connection to Czech and Slovak. Polish was another really big community around me. Almost the entirety of the V4. So it's almost unsurprising that I ended up here. But like, I found it really frustrating that we could not actually engage with things that people were genuinely using. Like, or sign language, like, why couldn't we have done, like, American Sign Language in my fifth grade class? Like, why are we learning Esperanto? Like, I've literally just been so frustrated by Esperanto since I was in fifth grade. I am not a fan of constructed languages, personally.
There is another one that you could include here because there is a Pan-Slavic Language, which tries to tie like, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Polish, and so like, all the Slavic languages into one. So there's another constructed language for you to kind of investigate if you're interested. But I've always just found them kind of frustrating because it's kind of this way of removing things from a context and trying to make them... Like, I have no problem with making things intelligible, but I do struggle with the idea of making them intelligible on someone else's terms. Like, I think it's very frustrating to not engage with what little I can find of the Slovak and Czech anarchist movements, like historically, and, you know, do this and be like, well, I'm going to do this through a constructed language that makes it, you know, easier and more intelligible rather than actually engaging with the Czech anarchists or the Slovak anarchists or even the Polish anarchists. Like, I find it very frustrating that we're not engaging with them on their terms.
And it kind of reminds me of like a book I read that I absolutely love. It's not anarchist at all, but it is this book called Midnight Robber. And it's written in a Jamaican dialect. And so for me, who did not grow up with the Jamaican dialect at all, or did not grow up with Jamaican creole at all, it was a very big learning curve in the first couple chapters. But once I started getting into it, it started like, you know, it was communicating itself to me. Like, I had to understand that book on its own terms. And I kind of appreciate that. So like, if someone were to put that back into standard American English, I think I'd be really frustrated. But I also feel like I'd be equally as annoyed if they put it into Esperanto. I'd probably be more annoyed, honestly.
Yotam: Can I break the order? So yeah, I'm in no way expert on the history of Esperanto. And I've tried to learn it for about a week and then just decided it was just not useful in any way and moved on to the next thing. But I- My impression has always been that to the extent that you can reach a language that is kind of encompassing of the globe, I guess, you can do that by either forcing it on someone, which English is a good example of that, or by trying to create something artificial. Those attempts at creating artificial languages usually are really just covering up for a blind spot, which is thinking that I have some sort of a universal take on what language should be and that my universality is kind of encompassing of the whole world. And that's, of course, never the case. You're going to be hard-pressed to even create a grammatical, literally one grammatical structure that can be in some way encompassing of the globe. So there's just no way... It's a practice in futility.
But even if you were able to do that, and I return here to the example of English, the moment that you force language on a region, that region is going to fight back. And it's going to fight back not only by protecting its own indigenous languages, but also by changing your language. Changing your language dramatically. English is spoken differently everywhere. What that teaches us is that languages are not just technical tools to convey information like... produce that is passed between the trader and the consumer, but are rather objects of love. They're a thing that people find identity and love and care in, and they develop and cultivate and live through. And so the very act of trying to somehow create a linguistical object that is outside of people's lives and also convince people to adopt it, well, even if they will, they'll make it their own very quickly. And every region that you would do this in will have a different language in no time. So maybe a better route, a more practical route for anarchists would be to engage with other languages with care and with respect, and also invite people who are interested in your language, and giving them comfortable space, hospitable space, to make a lot of mistakes and kind of stumble their way into your linguistical home. I think those practices are far more effective in creating some sort of an international community than trying to create a language outside of people's experiences and expecting them to adopt it.
Nicole: Along with the fact that in creating that language you're still implementing a lot of your own bias and perceptions of what a language looks like. So Esperanto tends to pull a lot from what Latin languages. Doesn't really consider the fact that Sinic languages are a thing. Doesn't engage with South Asia in any capacity. Kind of misses out that there's a whole chunk of the planet somewhere. So yeah, again, I've always just been really frustrated by Esperanto. It's hard for me to just understate how much it annoys me.
But also, I like constructed languages as a concept because I do like... I am nerdy enough to really like the linguistics of how people, particularly linguists and linguistic anthropologists, put together constructed languages for fictional universes, like Klingon, for example. But no one's enforcing Klingon on everyone, which would be really bizarre. I think that would just be something that people would push back on. But also, it would just be a really strange world that we live in where the constructed language that people have decided we should all speak is Klingon. And for some reason, people don't seem to see the same issues in other constructed languages. Where it's like, if you say the same thing about Esperanto, people tend to kind of push back and be like, oh, no, this is really useful. If you say the same thing about Interlingua or Pan-Slavic Language, people tend to push back and explain like, no, these are actually really useful tools.
And it's like, yeah, but is it? Is it more useful for me to learn Pan-Slavic Language and all the wonky grammar that comes along with it? Or would it just be easier for me to learn Slovak and kind of navigate Polish through that lens where it's like, I can kind of read some Polish. I know some of the pronunciations. And if I can say the words, I can at least understand some of them because they share roots. Similar with my interactions with Italian and Spanish. I can kind of guess Spanish based on some of what I know of Italian. Um, and I'm not like struggling in that capacity. I mean, like, I'm not understanding Spanish on Spanish's terms, but I am still trying to engage with it and be like, "Okay, hey, what does this mean? Because to me, this is how I understand it because I speak this language." So I kind of don't think you have that opportunity either with constructed languages to really be like, "What are you saying by this? Like, what do you mean by that?" Because like, there's supposed to be this expected intelligibility.
Carl: I guess, uh, um, it makes me think of kind of like Nicole was saying there, like not being against, uh, the concept of this and maybe, maybe it relates back to, like we've said before, uh, these, these sort of, um, practices of multilingual practices or, or practices of transcending, uh, regional boundaries, uh, if they're coming out of these direct connections that are being made, those tools are not looking for relevance, right? So something that, that seems to be accomplishing that same function, if it's divorced from just being an idealistic dream, right? And so maybe, maybe like, uh, a lot of these things just relate to other problems we see come up in anarchism of just a strong, uh, kind of idealist tendency, right. Of, of kind of inventing ideas and looking for a place to put those ideas or coming up with tools and looking for a place to put them, which, uh, yeah, maybe as a problem we share with, with Marxists also, right. And so I think that, um, we shouldn't be against the idea that, that, that in context, new kind of, um, constructed solutions could establish themselves, right, that in practice, uh, these kinds of incidental blending languages could start to become something more formalised and that today, you know, we could maybe become aware of that happening a lot sooner before it's kind of anthropological, right? Uh, we see that in the way that like, um, uh, English is, you know, uh, we don't, we don't really need to worry about coming up with a, an idealized kind of, uh, international language since we're sort of forced to use English in that way. And so, um, I think that's, that's related to this idea of like, um, maybe, maybe how, how that affects different people in different places.
And specifically, I'm wondering from y'all's perspective, since, I mean, obviously this conversation's happening in English, uh, what, what do you think are those effects and, and I'm thinking not just like, you know, universally obviously, but like, if we kind of have to break this down into three categories of like people who, who, uh, English is their first language or let's say their dominant language, uh, versus people who speak English as a secondary language and people who don't have access to English and, and who are, yeah, live in this world where English is forced on us. And so there's, uh, sort of, uh, separate from that, that whole experience. Um, if y'all have any reflections or, or thoughts or yeah, even personal takes on that might be really interesting.
Nicole: I guess I get to be the weird one as the, um, the one person out of the three of us whose first language is English, because like, you know, it's like when I first left the United States or rather when I first left the Anglophone world, cause when I first left the US I ended up in Australia and guess what, they also speak English. Um, so like when I first actually left the Anglophone world, like I did have a huge learning curve where it's like, logically in my head, I understood that people spoke languages that weren't English. Like, I know this, it was a thing and it was in my brain. Like I acknowledge this, but it wasn't until I was actually in those places that I actually kind of had it hit me in the face.
Um, because again, like I come from the rural Midwest, like, you know, English is pretty much thrust upon us. There are people who speak other languages. Like my family also spoke German. So duh, I knew that people spoke other languages, but the way that the US presents other countries is that everyone will speak English. Like when you hear about them, when you see their presentation in the media, they are never really engaging with people who speak whatever language is local to those places. They are almost always engaging with someone who speaks English. And so you kind of get barraged with media that tells you that the world will speak English. No matter where you go, you will speak English and everyone will talk to you in English. So even though like logically in my brain, I knew people did not speak English. Like it was kind of like a wake up call at the same time.
Like when I first moved to, um, like the first place I moved to for work was Taiwan. And while I was there, that's where I really started picking up a lot of like Mandarin Chinese. And, you know, like I had to engage with them on their terms. Like while I was there, uh, a lot of the people who were close to my age, um, so like when I was there, I was probably in my late twenties or so. But a lot of the people I talked to who were around my age didn't speak English at all. Uh, it was a lot of, like, elderly people. And so I typically was sitting around with a lot of like people in their seventies and eighties, because those are the people I could actually communicate with and they were the ones who were sitting there helping me learn Mandarin Chinese because, you know, like they wanted to share stuff with me and they wanted to kind of not just... They liked having the idea of being able to talk to someone else just because like sometimes like the elderly often get overlooked, and this seems to be a 'strange' concept that I've noticed happening in a lot of places. Old people just like to be talked to. And I think that's great. Which I think is another whole other topic we could get into where it's like, we need to actually start engaging with the elderly and people of different ages.
But anyway, it's like, so I had that whole experience kind of like for the first time and ever since I have not lived in a country that speaks English as its dominant language. Like they do have people who obviously speak English, but I also find it very much a struggle to communicate with people, even if I do try to learn the language, because I've always tried to learn the language of where I live. 'Cause I just think that's the right thing to do. So like I have also lived in Italy and so I'd have picked up a lot of Italian. My partner is Italian and at the same time, like, I know I'm not fluent in Italian.
When I was using Duolingo, 'cause I know we're going to go on the topic of apps, like I only ever got one great sentence, and I have nowhere to use it because it sounds like a bizarre mafia threat, which is "la tua enatra e la mia cena", "your duck is my dinner." Where am I going to use that? And so like, even though I would try to communicate with people in Italian, not using that sentence, because obviously I'm not going to go to the local bar or cafe or whatever, and just try to use that on the person waiting on me. But like anytime I would try to communicate, people would immediately notice my Italian was bad and run away. And I had no idea like what to do at that point, other than just wait, because they would just, if your Italian wasn't good, they just assumed you spoke English, which in my case is a correct assumption, but then they would just go off and like either hide or try to find the one person who did happen to speak English in the vicinity, and I didn't need that. And I found that really kind of detrimental to my own learning of the language because, like, I didn't want them to prioritise my language over theirs, but they kept doing it to me for me.
So I kind of feel like that's something, and I have the same issue here in Slovakia, too, to less of an extent because like a lot of people will try to engage with you. Although the bigger thing is that most people, if you fuck up, still tend to get mad at you for some reason, or like they get frustrated with you that you're not communicating correctly and you're just kind of going there like, "I'm really sorry, but I don't know what the Slovak is for like this specific form I need to fill out." Like, so I do kind of feel that like as a person whose first language is English, a lot of people assume that I don't want to engage with the language because I... They expect, like I was taught, that I should expect that everyone speaks English, which I think is a very weird thing because I also live as an immigrant here where they're constantly telling me that I need to learn the local language, and I have to learn the local language and so on. Like they have this whole belief and like these two things don't really mesh where it's like they both expect that I should speak the local language, but also they do this thing where they enforce upon me that I need to talk to someone in English, and I find it very strange.
Sonia: Well, in my opinion, having English as the, let's see, third language, I have to admit that again, the last years, decades, I think that people are not aware of all the ideology and the political and economical ideologies that comes with English because you're speaking about English. But most people, when they think English is the US, is the—I'm sorry to tell you people—is the gringo English, right? So that means that with that English comes a lot of culture.
And in this case, the culture among a lot of stuff. But when I think about the English we have now, it has to do with a way of living that people, like Nicole was saying, people actually expect, wherever you travel, in places where English is not a language whatsoever in the context, they expect us to use it because it's the easy thing to do. And, you know, both with media and movies and fast food and all this stuff, everybody can, at a certain degree, use some words, right? And now if we're talking, of course, music and all the, well, with the Internet, everybody has that access now to, you know, think about, well, have ideas that comes also from the US, because you're learning that language. I mean, it's specific from the US when we hear the most. And in that matter, actually, I deny to use English in a context where that's not one of the local languages. I'd rather point or use body language. You know, as an anarchist, I think, "No, I'm anti-colonial and anti-imperialist. Why should I be using English?" And yes, I can use it. But I also choose actively not to. And again, also in colonised places. But I know that, again, it's this balance. Everybody wants to understand each other. And especially among adults, I think it's very interesting.
Now, Nicole opened for Duolingo. I'm so sorry. I don't like those apps, exactly because it's constructions that makes no sense. Right. It's sentences that somebody thinks that grammatically speaking are easy, but it's sentences that probably we will never use. When I speak fluently four languages, four, and every time I want to learn a new language, what I do is that I learn like kids do, right? Because if you think everybody, I mean, children, uses seven, eight years actually to be able to have a functional use of their own first languages, right, or second or if they're bilingual or whatever.
But why is it expected that adults are going to learn languages in the most unnatural way, learning sentences that have no context? And actually, when I use the fourth language, that it's Norwegian, I started making my own sentences with everyday things I had to do. And I remember clearly that the first sentence I learned is, can I have a stamp? Because this was a time when people still send letters physically. So that's where I learned. And of course, the problem is always that suddenly they think- they assume that you can use the language and I didn't. So actually, the person just answer a lot of things that I didn't understand. But at least we communicated. I get my stamp.
So I continued learning, you know, with children's books in Norwegian because, again, I denied completely to use English. Everybody speaks English here in this country, in Scandinavia in general. I didn't want to, because if you keep using a language that it's not belongs to the context, it's really difficult, actually. And this is something that it's called this linguistical immersion. That's why I think using apps is so difficult. And in this case, I think we have a richness of languages everywhere. I'm not a fan of, again, apps, but YouTube have a lot of great people there trying to, you know, where you can also learn. The thing is that, again, to learn a language, you need to have somebody to speak or use it with, right?
That's the thing. You cannot just... I mean, I could have a dream of learning Gaelic. Yeah, that's wonderful. But of course, if I don't go to, you know, Southwest Ireland in this case, it will be difficult because nobody speaks Gaelic in Norway. I mean, I'm sure there's somebody, but not that I know. So the thing is that, again, when it comes to this, if it's detrimental, having English as this so-called universal language. I think as anarchists, we actually have a moral duty to deny it and we are still doing it here. But again, we could have done it in other languages. And I think people, like Nicole was saying, we need to to try to learn what in the context we are in. And even more being more anti-colonial, try to learn the indigenous languages in the place you are at. I think that that could be an ethical stand that anarchists do, actually, right? And to come to just to break that hierarchical, linguistical imperialism that we have now with English going on.
Yotam: My take is much more feelings based. Which I say this quite a lot to native English speakers that I engage with daily because I'm in a primarily English speaking space right now in West Canada. I am not myself when I speak English, I am not- You are right now talking to a version of myself that is vastly different. In demeanor, in tone, in vocabulary, there's always going... and that's never going to change. There's always going to be a distance between myself and the person who speaks English in an English-speaking context. There is an otherness that is embedded in the practice of going to another language because my native language is embedded in my identity. And there are things that I just cannot translate.
It's not only terminology that sometimes is very difficult and if not impossible to really understand. But even the sound of letters that I find different. So I've practiced for many years to develop this quasi-West Coast accent that I use now. But oftentimes we have this little game that we play where someone asks me if I can speak with a Hebrew accent, if I can speak English with a Hebrew accent. And I can, but it takes a lot of work because I've conditioned myself not to do it anymore. [changes English accent to Hebrew] But if I speak to you now in a Hebrew accent... It is very, very different, right? [changes back to the quasi-West Coast accent] It was very different because letters sound differently.
Now, I understand that this now right now feels closer to a native English speaker, but it's further away from me. It is a step outside of myself that I have to take in order to be in an English-speaking world. I think it is important to notice these things. I think it's important to understand the kinds of sacrifices. It might be too harsh of a word, but maybe sacrifices that non-native speakers have to make in order to engage with you, you being the native speaker, in order to be with you in the conversation. I think it's as an ethic of care is something that maybe we should think more deeply about.
Carl: I think that so from all of your comments, I have sort of some different things to reply. But to start with what you were saying right there, I think that there, you know, maybe to share my own sort of emotional experience... I sort of feel kind of lost in between all of them where I don't like... Yeah, I get what you're saying, like you're not there in the English, but like, I feel not there in the English, like so much of my experiences, so much of my knowledge is not in English, and I cannot share it with the people I'm closest to. And that... that doesn't just mean like, oh, it's in this other language and that's like in this weird way, like, yeah, it relates back to what we were saying before with the internationalism and the multilingualism.
Like internationalism feels like, like my home. It doesn't feel like a principle. It is just a fact of my life, because even to the people I'm closest to, I'm the most like, like foreign thing that they encounter, you know, because I'm not foreign from another place, but I am formed by things from other places. And that, yeah, in the same way, maybe anarchists can relate to being the only anarchist in a space or something. I think a lot of times, like if you are the only multilingual person in a space, you become a kind of parlor trick... just someone who's supposed to perform this thing and like do this, like, like fulfill this myth that people have of like how you just go from one thing to the other. So I can really relate to what you're saying there. But also, like, I don't feel like I know where to find the other part of it. And so multilingualism also feels like... And this relates to what Sonia was saying before.
I actually have a pretty hard time blending the languages. I'm a lot more comfortable if we can just pick one, and we can we can deal with that one. I'll make whatever mistakes or I'll deal with that. I have a hard time switching all the time and that I'm pretty comfortable with whatever conversation it is in the three languages that I speak. But like I'd rather just know, "Okay, that's what we're going to speak, and we're not going to jump around." I have a really hard time with that. And I think that that relates to... Again, to sort of share my personal experience. I don't find, you know, Duolingo and other apps like that are obviously flawed. But from my experience as someone who spoke English first, kind of like we're like—and I think this is what Nicole was saying, too—and we mentioned this earlier. Things seem kind of flat. So they seem flat from your home. But even when you go other places that you expect, like this will have to be different. Things have flattened that space for you, and people are willing to collapse it right in front of you to make it as homogenous as... It's like we're all part of it in this way. And so even when you assume you're encountering innocent bystanders, this same reproduction of this like mass dominant culture reproduces itself.
And so like my experience of—not exactly Duolingo, because I definitely learned languages before these apps existed—so using, you know, other kinds of grammar worksheets and stuff like that... I actually learned a lot from how English is really expression-based and that grammar has very little to do with it and that actually learning a lot of grammar to help me understand other languages was enormously helpful and learning kind of structural patterns from that actually taught me a lot back about English that no one had ever taught me about English. And that actually kind of as you know, I've lived longer being multilingual. It seems just like actually we don't know a lot about English, right? People do English, but people who speak it don't know as much about it. And this goes back again to the internationalism is, I think also it helps us to learn more about our own first languages or our own dominant languages by having other people communicate to us with them because we don't always see them. We can't encounter them in that way.
And that maybe that's, you know, to kind of move into just the full conversation about Duolingo here, maybe something that could easily be overlooked by these is actually the sort of dabbling and the sort of... just clicking on a language to do it for a couple of days. And that I am very, you know, I discount that tool in a big way. I hate this sort of general "I'm just into languages, and I don't ever actually learn how to talk to anyone." But at the same time, I think for a kind of, you know, gaining a multifaceted perspective, maybe there is something to that, that like actually being able to encounter even a really fakely fabricated sentence in another language. It shows us things about ourselves that maybe it's a kind of mirror in a way that we maybe are also using nowadays.
So that kind of yet to open up the question around like why you think these things, these things like Duolingo are so popular and what your own experiences are or what you've heard from other people who've tried to use them. Like, I mean, I'm a language teacher, so obviously, like, almost all of my students have, you know, used some form of these apps. I say Duolingo because that's what I reference in the, in the column. And, you know, that's the one that's kind of most popular everywhere.
And again, like, it's kind of when I was in the writing workshop, and we're speaking in Spanish, I encounter people having this exact same experience, trying to learn English, who are native Spanish speakers, and seeing the limitations of Duolingo. So I think that in a weird way, technology has forced itself to be this intermediary between almost wherever you're starting and wherever you're trying to go. And so in a certain way, like the popularity isn't something we choose, it just is a fact, right? Like, I mean, as someone who works with people trying to learn languages, whether Duolingo is helpful or not, we have to deal with it. It's like a thing we have to wrestle with in this reality. So yeah, what about y'all's personal experiences with it, or why you think it's, it is so popular?
Nicole: I'm just gonna go back a little bit, because when you were talking about how learning other languages helped you understand English more. I had the same thing, even though I grew up speaking German. So like, I kind of grew up speaking English and German together. Even though I grew up speaking that, I ended up kind of cheating my way through high school and taking German classes so I would get easy A's. And in those classes, I was learning like German grammar, like directly learning German grammar for the first time. So like, I had already kind of had the German grammar in my head because my grandparents had been teaching me German as a small kid. And so I already kind of knew it, but like, I didn't know why we did stuff like that. And I remember the first time that like a teacher taught me how to use the words "wer" and "wem" in German, which are just "who" and "whom."
And then I suddenly understood how it was that we were, quote, supposed to, unquote, use "who" and "whom" in English. Because the grammatical structure is pretty much very similar. It's like, "Ah, so that's why every time I hear that." So like, those were kinds of connections I've actually started making a lot in, like, just understanding English. Because like, I never really learned these grammar patterns. Like, even though we have direct instruction in school about how to use it, I never- it never connected until I started learning, like, learning how grammar worked in other languages. And it's like, "Ah, okay, I get it now." So I find that very interesting that you also had a very similar experience in how, like, you know, our understandings of English. And it almost makes me wonder how other people kind of understand their own languages.
But like, going back to the Duolingo thing, though, it's like, I have tried so many times to use the app. And partly, I cannot use it because I'm ADHD. Because it requires going back and doing something that I find immensely tedious and incredibly dull, and superbly boring, and forcing myself to do this. And I don't understand- in my own brain, I do not understand how anyone can maintain a streak at all. Because it's just so immensely dull. And in trying to learn, like, different languages, like, I find it very perplexing. Because, like, you just cannot learn some of these things... At least, I don't think I can learn some of these things through those apps. Like, my own personal experience has just been, like, trying to use it. I think the most successful thing I've ever found it useful for was, like, how to write the Korean alphabet. And how to understand the Korean alphabet. Like, that's it. That's the most value I've ever gotten out of Duolingo. And the only reason I ended up doing that was so I could kind of help some of my current students who are all Korean children, like, right now. So that's, like, the most value I've ever gotten out of it.
I haven't heard any positive stuff about Duolingo from most people. I think most people tend to find it very frustrating... That I have talked to. Not that everyone does. Because obviously, someone is using it. But I also kind of have been listening to other people. Like, I forget which podcast I was actually listening to. And it was someone who comes from Hawai'i. So, like, a native Hawai'ian. I wish I could remember his name. If I happen to, I will put it in the show notes. But they were talking about how Duolingo provides a platform for learning, like, indigenous languages, but then doesn't actually engage with the people who speak those languages. It doesn't really provide a lot of resources for the maintenance of those languages or for making them more accessible.
I think even at looking at Duolingo before recording, I saw that they also had Navajo. And it makes me wonder how much support they give to Navajo people or any native Hawai'ians—which I know they also have a native Hawai'ian course—but it's, like, how much support do they actually give to these communities to maintain these? And who gets to access those? And that was a really big key part that that podcast was talking about. Which is, like, who is actually accessing this? Is it the people who want to maintain and retain or relearn their, like, language? Like, their cultural language? Or is it people who are on the outside?
And it's, like, they said that people on the outside, it's not inherently a bad thing. Like, they don't mind. But if it's only people on the outside who have access to these tools, who have access to these resources, or who are benefiting from providing these courses. Because some of these courses do come with payments because they do have ads. And they do run, like, subscription models. And it's, like, who is benefiting from it? And so that's another question that I often kind of stopped to ask, especially after having heard that. Because, like, it was something that, you know, Duolingo kind of presents itself as a community of languages, as a place where there are lots of spaces for people to learn different languages and to promote different ones.
But another thing to consider is the fact that they still don't even have, like, other languages that are real on the platform. Like, they are happily putting High Valerian on there. Again, to mention Klingon, Klingon is on the platform. And while I have no issue with these, like, fictional constructed languages, I find it really immensely frustrating that they aren't providing the same kind of resources to putting actual languages on the platform. Like, there is Czech, but there is no Slovak. And while there are, like, 10 million Czech people, they're kind of discounting 5 million people because that isn't there. Like, they're not looking to put those resources anywhere.
And I think this is just a broader issue with social media as a whole. Because social media often finds itself running in, like, one language with, like, maybe a couple other dominant languages: German, French, and Spanish. Or maybe, like, Mandarin and Russian sometimes. And then just discounts everyone else. And I kind of feel the same way about these apps, too.
Sonia: I mean, my own experience, I don't like these apps because they have a very, in addition to what Nicole was mentioning about, okay, who benefits from this, economically speaking. But it also, it's very behavioristic. I mean, it's a completely awful way of learning. This is not how we learn anyway. So, to me, I'm trying to... I've never used Duolingo, but I know people who has. And I mean, it might be valuable if you want to learn, if you want to increase or expand your vocabulary, I guess. But then you have to be patient because you have to go through these stages and get all these stars or whatever it is, I don't know. It makes no sense. That's why I think that it's so narrow, the value it has, actually, to be able, again, not to just learn a language, but the culture that sustains it. It's gone. The context is gone.
And you're just, you know, actually, it's a little bit like a parrot. I mean, you are repeating certain sentences and that's it. I mean, what are you going to do with it? And I think as an anarchist, I deny to think that, grammatically speaking, the sentences you got are especially anti-capitalist. I'm going to go to Duolingo just to check what kind of sentences you get. "I like my blue dress," for instance. I mean, I'm never going to say something like that anyway, right?
So even the content that they are basing these languages on, again, it has an ideology behind as well, I guess. And you cannot construct and you cannot develop the language because... I think the people I know that has used Duolingo, they think that the funniest part of it is to get the stars or the streaks. But when I ask them, "Okay, but are you actually learning to say something valuable? I mean, if you meet a person in the language you're learning, are you able to use it?" And of course they don't. So then what is the point?
Nicole: Your duck is my dinner.
Sonia: Yes, exactly. I mean, when are you going to say that? So again, when you when you're into trying this behavioristic, capitalistic motivations behind these apps, I don't see what actually people are learning. And I'm sure that people that have used these things, it's interesting and it's fun and sure. But again, how does it help the international solidarity? What are you learning to express with these apps, the content in itself? And again, I like to be skeptical, but I don't think it's especially anticapitalist in any shape or form. So this is also something we have to think about.
I mean, I think that to learn the languages, sure, it can be valuable until some extent to use these apps. But the best thing is that go and find and meet people that actually can use the language and start creating communities, not just transactional relationships saying, oh, I would love to learn English and you can teach me whatever it might be. No, not like that. But actually with the mean and the goal of creating communities out of the process of learning these languages actually, yes, to build international solidarity. I think that anarchists, we want that the means are the same than the ends. The same happens when you learn the languages then.
Yotam: So I'm going to use a little bit of a different take here. I've also failed with Duolingo miserably on multiple occasions. I tried to learn German from scratch. I tried to improve my Mandarin skills. And I've also tried Yiddish, and I've gone zero out of three. I've failed miserably on all three, and I've not been able to maintain the streak. And I agree with many of the critiques that were raised here. I think to a large extent Duolingo is kind of one of the better examples of the move towards gamification in tech where every problem can be solved through making a game out of it. And well, you know, that's not the case.
But my kind of hot take here, I guess, or lukewarm take here, is that Duolingo and other apps of that genre are attempting to respond to a very important problem in language learning, which I think, Carl, it was actually represented in a way in your text, which is what kind of gatekeeping is associated with language learning. And one of the gatekeeping mechanisms that I think, if I remember correctly, please correct me if I'm wrong, that you've mentioned, is if you want to learn a language, you have to go ahead and travel to the place where that language is spoken. And so that kind of says, well, if you can't afford that, then you don't deserve to learn this language. And that really resonated with me because I've had that experience when I was learning Mandarin. That's exactly what I was told. If you're not willing to relocate for a number of years to mainland China, don't even try. Don't even go there. Don't learn anything. It's impossible.
What we as anarchists may learn from this is that the response to the barriers to language learning, that's where we can come in and offer community-minded, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial solutions. And I think Sonia has alluded to such solutions, like creating community of speakers. That's great. We can imagine a whole host of other practices. But it is worth remembering that, and this is kind of the place where I think Duolingo does the most harm, is that learning a language, any language, is a very difficult, embarrassing, and awkward practice. That's just part of the program. It is what it is. Learning a language, and anyone... we've all been there, even if you're very good at it, is an enormously awkward practice of stumbling into the unknown, making horrible mistakes as you go along. Capitalist ventures like Duolingo and others tend to tell you that there is a solution out of this, that you can access a language without stumbling into it. Well, you can't. It doesn't work. You have to stumble into it and make a whole lot of mistakes and get really, really embarrassed and kind of scared.
This is just what language learning is. It's beautiful, it's chaotic, it's weird. What we as anarchists can do in our respective languages, and the language that we are confident in, is to, and I'm already sounding like a broken record at this point, but to open spaces and invite embarrassment, invite awkwardness, invite making mistakes, because that's how you access language. That's it. There's no other way.
Nicole: Yeah, I'm definitely going to second that because I'm also going to put out the fact that I have tried a number of times because I really want to find a place to comfortably learn Slovak and not in a class because first and foremost, I hate classes.
Um, I am a very strange person who was once a teacher, would like to abolish schools, do not see a value in language classes as... particularly as they're structured now. I have tried going to the local language school and learning Slovak, and I find that I have been inundated with so much grammar that now I have, like, a paralysis about trying to say something because I'm sitting there going, "Okay, we have six cases, seven cases, which one do I choose?" And like, I would have no problem otherwise just screwing up, making those mistakes, but I find that people here don't really want to offer spaces to do that. I have suggested to our local anarcho-syndicalist union that they could provide space for language learning so that way we could do language exchanges so people could talk in different target languages, whichever ones they want to use, and be able to teach ones to actually build a diverse community.
Um, it's something they haven't wanted to do. They either kind of enforce English as the second language for everyone, or whatever the lingua franca should be for everyone, or they enforce Slovak, and they don't want to even interact with other migrants. They barely want to interact with me. I at least speak one of those languages, and I do have an interest in trying to learn the other, but they also just don't want to interact with like... We have a bunch of people from Vietnam, we have a whole bunch of people from Iran, and they don't want to even interact with many of these communities. We've actually had a huge obvious increase in the population of Ukrainians. Ukraine is right next door. And like, they don't even really want to create spaces for us to share these languages.
So I really wish more anarchist spaces in particular, but more spaces in general, would actually be willing to create spaces for us to share our culture, share our language, share our knowledge, instead of kind of, like, finding excuses for why we can't do it. Often I get, we don't have enough resources, and you're going, "Well, you're never going to." So I kind of wish that more people would actually engage on this front, too. It's kind of in line with that: making mistakes, screwing up, and creating a comfortable environment to do that. You actually have to do something instead of making these excuses. I find too many groups just want to make these excuses and do whatever is easiest.
Carl: So yeah, maybe to touch on the more concrete proposal here, I think it's not this vague refrain that we should feel guilty of repeating, of like, y'know, form communities, get together in groups. I think that when we're talking about this trust and this comfort, that that's exactly what we're looking for, a community of comrades. That's why there is a narrowness to that already. It's not just, oh, pick someone in the whole world. It's like, no, pick someone who has these same values, right? Who shares certain aspects of what you're working toward and what your objectives are, and you can start from that basis of trust to be what the comfort is, right?
Nicole reminded me of something really important that I encountered because I teach mostly online. I definitely encountered this before in the past a lot more than nowadays, but people really like to act like there's nothing you can learn via the computer or through the internet, and we need to remember that there's nothing perfect or magical about classrooms. The same way that, like... My experience with Duolingo is, like I said, not so much from my own learning, but from my students.
First, just as far as the bad things go, everything everyone said, I echo all of that, but on top of it, I really, really, really hate the podcast because it produces this weird back and forth where it says something in other language and then goes back to English just to make you feel comfortable enough. Right when you're about to build that awkward experience, it breaks it and gives you a reprise. It does that in exactly this way that's not pushing anybody to do anything. And so... But at the same time, I think that what it's done is because it is inherently flawed, like we've talked about, and what I'm talking about in the piece is that it's flawed in the same way that just going somewhere is flawed, right? If you just decide you're going to go somewhere and that's how you're going to learn, you're also going to realise that's a pretty naive expectation, right? So in the sense that they're both flawed in the way that, "Okay, someone's going to that place, we'll work on your multilingualism when you get back," right? That's great that you're going on that trip, or once you realise, okay, you're going to need to work extra and not just simply when you get there, it'll be magic and it'll happen. Yeah, we will work online then, right?
Nicole: I think I need to just jump in just because one of the things in your piece, and you said something about how tourists aren't... I can't remember exactly what the phrasing is, but there was a thing about how tourists are not having an authentic experience of a place, and I was kind of sitting here as someone who often is forced to engage with expatriates, and I hate that term so much. That's why I always call myself an immigrant. That is the community of which I identify with and who I hold solidarity with. I do not give a shit about expatriates. To put it nicely.
But those people also, like, they are immersed in the culture, and I think it's also even, you can take it farther than just tourists. It's completely debatable whether or not these expats are even immersed at all because they often refuse to interact with local schools. They refuse to send their children to local schools; they send their children to international schools, which are usually in English. They often are embassy kids who generally have an expectation that the world is built around them, which means that their family also usually works for these big organizations: the UN, all the different embassies, and whatnot.
And so it's like.. I think it's interesting that you focused on tourism or kind of using tourism as that thing. I'm sitting here the whole time I was reading going, expats! Expats are a prime example of people who can be and should be immersed, and they refuse it. Like, they actively refuse to engage with anything around them.
Carl: Yeah, I think that that's maybe in my thinking, I was just kind of considering them longer-term tourists, y'know. And so, yeah, tourists in a very general use of the word: visitors in a foreign land. But, like, if we can see that the apps are flawed and that you're not going to learn from that, but that at the same time, this expectation that we've talked about that's been created by this capitalist system to be catered to when you want to learn, or that we've said also, meeting that demand that's obviously there. People want to do that, and this seems like the tool. And not only does it seem like the tool, it is the tool they know about.
So my experience with them is that I encounter students who just already are using them. And that I don't actually get to come in as a very helpful participant in their learning, if all I kind of can say is don't, right? So what I've tried, and again, like kind of where my own like, I don't know if you want to call it disenchantedness? Because it's not like I was ever allured by them to begin with. But like, what I find difficult is that, you know, in a lot of ways, what I've expected to be able to do is to tell students like, okay, go play with it. It's not going to be that useful for a longer term thing, but it might spark ideas, right? So if you could come up with questions that you're forming from what you saw there, we could use that as a jumping off point.
Because like, pedagogically, that makes a lot of sense to me. But what I found, especially with my English students and my students who are anglophones, is that they don't have like a... They don't have an experience of what learning a language actually is. And so they don't know that until they use Duolingo. It's actually, like we said, like the most basic thing to just show them like, "Oh, this is bigger than I thought." And without using the app, they just live in their fantasy of like, once I speak that language, life will be like this, and I'll experience these things. So also along the idea of like, maybe something to do with these apps is the same thing to do with the traveling is to be the first mistake maybe someone actually kind of makes on the process of figuring out how to learn the language. And that in that way, it's a very inconsequential first step. And yeah, it doesn't in any way guarantee anything from anyone.
But that it does cue that curiosity from someone, right? It's very, very common for people to talk to each other about their Duolingo experiences. And if we don't figure out as anarchists how to engage with that, and yeah, encourage something that becomes more anti-capitalist and more organically and collectively, like, formed and organised, then I think we are missing an opportunity. Especially as multilingual and internationally engaged anarchists because I think that there's something to how like... You can't just go somewhere else. Like I also experienced, y'know, not having the money to maybe travel somewhere else, but at the same time, like I'm very proud and I like to be able to be someone who can show people like that's not what teaches you how to do those things, right? It is the communication and that you don't need to wait for that, that this kind of waiting is not necessary. And I also think that the apps work in that way, where in the same way as everything else online, right? It promises a lot more than it's going to deliver.
But if we could learn to like use that excitement to keep moving into something else so that there is an international movement of learning these languages. Like I said, when I was in that workshop, I was there from my own language practice, but I also encountered other people who were like, "Wow, I've experienced that same thing." And that was very surprising to me. I sort of, yeah, naively didn't really consider how much Duolingo was being used from other angles, which is, yeah, bizarre anyway, because we've talked about the languages that are available. If you change your language for your app, it'll list different languages. So like you can learn Catalan from Castellano, but you can't learn Catalan from English.
And so there's all kinds of weird paths that go through the technology in that way. And so I think that we need to acknowledge how Duolingo and these other apps have put themselves in the way, but that it's also through us kind of figuring out the contours or maybe the ways to crack that apart, the ways to steal pieces from it and expropriate them other places. It's through that I think that we could start to make them more useful to us. And that, yeah, in the meantime, like we don't need fancy apps to send emails to each other.
And that it is very scary to communicate with someone in another language, but that's actually the thing to get used to is less the perfectness, like some grammar structures are great, some words are great, but in practice, like you're going to make the mistakes. And actually there's an argument maybe to be made for how that's why we feel comfortable in our dominant languages is that we don't even notice our mistakes, right? So it feels like we're doing a great job, but yeah, again, like maybe it's other people who've learned that thing from another perspective who see the mistakes we're making, maybe not in our grammar or our language per se, but in the way we're expressing our ideas or in the, yeah, kind of sentiments that those, the connotations that are attached to that.
Nicole: I think there's also a bit of, like, classism kind of related to this too, where even just within English by itself... Um, because I know I've already said it, but I'm from the rural Midwest, and people in the rural Midwest speak differently than how I actually sound, because like, you know, like we have many different accents that kind of all culminate from people being from different places and whatnot. But like a lot of how I sound kind of got beat into me in university because I was pronouncing things incorrectly. I had learned a lot of my English through reading, as many people do.
So I didn't know how to say certain words, you know, like that, I think the constant mistake that everyone encounters is that it's supposed to be said 'epi-to-me'. And everyone's like, oh no, this clearly says 'epi-tome'. And so you constantly have that kind of like in the back of your head too, where it's like, it also kind of just depends on where you had to interact with these things. And who is telling you, because I was like, I constantly think about like what I'm saying in English or how I'm thinking... rather, speaking in English. Not so much thinking. I don't really police my own thoughts other than to tell myself to shut up. But like, I'm constantly thinking about the mistakes as how other people will listen to me, but it could also just be, I think something that's been kind of like not really integrated into this, which could be yet again, another topic is just neurodivergence. Because I know I'm constantly thinking about how I'm saying things in order to present things. Cause I'm just, I'm terrified of being misunderstood.
And I think that kind of factors in too with like, can I communicate with this person? Can I even contact this person? 'Cause I know there are some people who feel just like absolutely shy of contacting people, even in the same language that they already speak. Where it's like, this is something that I've literally had to teach myself. And I think this is something that again, another conversation probably is gonna be needed for that one. Just because like, we do need to discuss like how it is okay to actually contact other people because for some reason we have developed this kind of weird culture? Attitude? Belief? Somewhere that it's like, we're going to inconvenience someone or we're going to get in their way or I don't know what. It depends on I guess what you have been taught.
Carl: I think that it's from the multilingualism that we can learn to overcome that, right? That maybe that is the domain where we can start to innovate those practices. Because there's a different motivation for it. That's not just like, "Oh, I have this problem, I need to get over it." Instead, it's like, "I know that the only way to learn is through the communication." And so the communication is itself the practice. It's not just for the sake of it.
Or it maybe is a way of getting out of some of the fears that it's just a personal like thing you're trying to communicate and no one else cares. That like, again, if we can assume we're trying to communicate with comrades and people we're sharing ideas with, then the reception of that is also, I think, yeah, like it's taken in good faith, right? And that's part of what we need is not just a network of people to send messages in another language to, but recipients that we know are already assuming we're coming from a place of solidarity and attempting to build greater solidarity.
Nicole: It was such a delight to speak with Carl again to delve into this conversation, and we're already looking forward to the next time should there be one. This discussion of language learning is quite complex, but there have been numerous patterns that we've all recognised around us. The excessive focus on learning English has had complex impacts, some of which can be viewed as positive, but can largely be viewed as detrimental to all people, including first language English speakers.
The ease of access to tools that help us learn languages has made things more possible, but those tools are rarely available in already marginalized languages and can leave a lot to be desired with their focus purely on vocabulary rather than actually using the language. Since there is so much to discuss, please feel free to reach out or create your own responses. If there are additional topics that you want to discuss, let us know.
We often look forward to hearing from anyone, so drop us a line. And if you want to hear more from us at the APC, go to our website at anarchistpedagogies.net where you can find more information and all of the links to our social media. Everything discussed in this episode will be linked in the show notes below.
Thanks for listening.