Friends with Words

On language learning and life

There is something inherently cosmopolitan about the desire to learn a foreign language. You have to be open to the world to want to do that. Language is an equalizer between all humans because every human speaks at least one. Learning a language is a quiet act of recognition that on some basic level, we are all the same, we're all just human.

That place of feeling like a citizen of the world was very easy for me to access until recently. Two months ago, for example, I started learning Finnish, for no other reason than it had been a while since I learned a new language.

I made good progress, getting as far as being able to understand the entire Finnish Peppa Pig episode about tooth fairies (“Hammaskeju”). I shared some of my Finnish learning adventures on Facebook, and I enjoyed that too.

But then October 7th happened here in Israel and things stopped making sense. And learning Finnish made the least sense of all. After the massacres, and much of the world’s reaction to them in the weeks that followed, all I wanted to do was to curl up on my Jewish and Israeli identity — to listen only to Israeli music and eat only falafel, to read and write only in Hebrew. 

But as time passed, I started feeling the need to go back to the person I was before and to lead her back into this new reality, even if she didn’t quite fit here.

So I opened a new YouTube account where I’m only allowed to watch Finnish cartoons and nothing else. The version of me that watches Peppa Pig in Finnish is a child-like version that can contain all the grief, fear, and pain, but also has very clear and simple goals in mind: e.g., try and understand what is it that Daddy Pig said to Mommy Pig that made her so annoyed.

That’s how children cope. My eight-year-old daughter knows that awful things happened. She is scared to go brush her teeth by herself for fear she’ll be kidnapped. But she also knows she wants to be in the Olympics when she is 14 and she practices her back-handspring on my bed every day. 

Children have to develop no matter what. I want to be like children.

I started this newsletter to document and share my language-learning adventures and everything else around it. It probably won’t be just about Finnish as, knowing myself, I’ll get bored with it pretty soon and will need a new fix. I guess learning a new language and discovering all the mind-boggling ways that our brains choose to organize linguistic information gives me a rush of dopamine (a totally unscientific guess), and these days I'll take any dopamine that doesn't come from constantly refreshing my social media feed or from drugs.

The person I was before October 7th would have maybe added that learning languages is a way for us to understand each other, and to bring people together. But I don’t know if I believe in that anymore. I think we are beyond help. They do have fascinating brains, humans, you gotta give it to them, but I’m not sure I actually wanna talk to any of them any time soon.

Or maybe I do. I know I’ve always been friends with words, but somehow, I want to become friends with the world again, too. Perhaps language learning will get me there.