Ughhh you need another language

like come on, dude, really?

pictured: a neoclassical spanish friar

So, here’s the thing, you turn twenty-nine or thirty or thirty-one or thirty-five and you begin to suffer from these sort of intense reflections on the you that you thought you’d be. I mean, you begin to examine the person that you are and you inevitably compare them with the person you thought you’d become. In high school, I thought, for example, that I’d be an eccentric novelist by now. That I’d have survived at least one war and several life-endangering liaisons. But also that life would be easy; like a Jack Johnson song.¹

But, unlike a Jack Johnson song, life is hard and so instead of thinking about the difficult/expensive things you can do to improve yourself (like get a fucking law degree) you tend to reach for objectives with cheaper and more immediate results. A law degree takes three years to come upon (and they say one of those years is quite difficult) — so instead, you begin to explore easier ways of improving yourself. You look back over the you that you are now and you get a bit ashamed that you only speak one language. And so (probably not for the first time) you download an app like Duolingo or Babbel and you decide — you commit — that you’re going to learn a second language.

And, there’s a good chance that this all happens at the same time that you’re staring parenthood in the face and because you’re one of those people who has decided to take parenthood seriously, you feel like a bit of a failure that you’ve only got one language to teach your kid. So hell yes, you are going to learn a new language. Just like you underwent difficult endeavors like quitting nicotine before the baby came along. You had to quit nicotine at some point anyway, there was no point in waiting it out. You might as well just get down to it. And isn’t learning a new language the same way? There are no good-hard-facts but a simple media-literate Google search will show you that something like half the world is bilingual. What’s your problem?

So you’re going to join the ranks of the bilinguals. Not that it makes you any smarter, of course. But it will allow you to profess your stupidity in two languages — and yet, what to learn? Pete Buttigieg learned Norwegian so that he could read Erlend Loe’s untranslated writing. But Pete Buttigieg is a narc. I mean, come on, you’re not going to learn Norwegian. The only people who learn Norwegian are the people who have spontaneous sad-orgasms while contemplating Karl Ove Knausgård and they’re the most annoying crowd in the world. Even arguably worse than the people who like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.

No, you’re a practical fellow. It would be nice to learn French. Imagine what you could read in French. Voltaire and Camus and Balzac and Stendal and Colette and Beauvoir Dumas and Sartre and Maupassant and Moliere and Muriel Barbery and Patrick Modiano. And Proust. You could read Proust in French!