For my one and singular language learning tip: skip to the last few paragraphs in the second section.
I’m not sure! I’m pretty the scholars don’t really know either. But it is strange that it has to be difficult. We don’t have the same difficulty representing information in very different ways in other contexts. So yes, there is something about language!
I think it’s because our consciousness and our capacity to communicate are deeply entwined. My belief is that our ability to perceive our own thoughts probably came about in order to, or was at least instrumental to, communicate. I don’t feel like we would have needed the fidelity to examine our thoughts that we do if we hadn’t needed to clearly communicate them. There are lot of other things our body is fine relegating to the completely unconscious. I feel this way because I’ve seen over and over again that I do not know my thoughts until I express them.
All this to state the obvious: that learning a new language is often learning an entirely new way of ordering your thoughts. It also changes the thoughts that are closer to you and within reach.
I think a reason ancient literary languages became liturgical so quickly (like Biblical Hebrew, Sanskrit, Quranic Arabic) is because people found that their thoughts automatically point more to God when thinking in those languages, because thoughts about God are all they ever heard expressed in that language! So it became a firewall, keeping regular thoughts, expressed most commonly in regular speech, out.
I don’t think language is thought and therefore God / Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) like a lot of Hindu as well as Christian and Jewish and Muslim sages have believed. But I do believe it is the best vehicle to examine thought. Learning a new language, at the very least, gives you an entirely new entryway into your thoughts.
Perhaps writers might be scared by this idea, but something I noticed happening once I started learning more languages well is that my internal dialogue got quieter. And now, I don’t hear it at all unless I want to. I remember how, when I could only really claim to express myself well in one language, how all my thoughts would come to me only as I would have expressed them in English. I would save images I saw with captions, which were the words that came to my mind when seeing that image. But after learning a few languages very well, I’ve found that thoughts no longer come to me in words. They come to as something more basic.
I think that more fundamental form of thought has always existed in me, beneath the words that used to make up my internal dialogue, but I suppose it lingers there without needing translation now that I have multiple avenues to express it. It allows me to linger on the raw experience of that for longer. But I also I find that it makes them more fleeting. I can fix them in place, of course, by translating them, assigning them words in one language or another, but that would be taking a photocopy of them. You lose information, compress it, when you do so and can’t always go back to the raw data as easily.
The benefits of learning a language on brain health are clearly demonstrated in the scientific literature, but I do think learning a language is in some capacity more fundamentally empowering for your thought processes than an equivalent activity that stimulates the brain as much but doesn’t force you to restructure your thoughts as fundamentally. I do believe it helped me unlock a greater level of abstraction in my mind. If there’s a double-blind controlled study with an impressive sample size that refutes that idea, please fold it into a paper airplane and fly it towards me. I will review it in my leisure.
Anywho, I don’t know why it’s hard. I don’t know why anything has to be hard. I don’t know why life has to come with its difficulties in order to be meaningful, but it does, and here we are within it, alive. So enjoy your thoughts while you can, in whatever language you can. They’re all you have. You have never experienced anything outside of your thoughts.
In terms of advice on learning languages, do as the Youtube videos with thumbnails such as “This One Insane Language Learning Trick Changed My Life! (100% Fluent Native Accent)” say you must do. Most of it is good advice for people who are very lost and don’t know where to begin.
But a piece of advice I would give, and which they rarely do, is this: learn your own language first. Try to find a course dedicated to teaching your native language to non-natives. That, surely, can’t be intimidating! Learn the names of all the tenses and parts of speech you use every day but never even really thought had a name. Once you’ve done this, it’ll be easier for you to understand the structure of another language, because at least now you’re familiar with the structure of your own. Expect to rethink so much of your own thoughts as you do this. You’ll already find yourself investigating your thoughts deeper as you do this.
Recursive thoughts, thoughts about thoughts, thinking about thinking, in Cabalistic Judaism as well as Buddhism and pretty much all branches of Non-Dualistic Hindu Philosophy, are considered the bedrock of spiritual thinking. And perhaps, you need to join us, on this side of the river of language, to see why we say so.
Language is such a beautiful tool. If I ever had to re-write Genesis, I would have Eve grasp for the fruit of knowledge and Adam grasp for the fruit of language to express that knowledge. I don’t think one would have reason to exist without the other. I think it was the utility in expressing our perspective that made it important to have a perspective, thus creating the self, thus pushing us out of Eden, into this strange fugue state called consciousness, where we see the Dao, and the world and Spinoza’s God, unfolding continually before us but can no longer simply be a part of it, here where we feel we must ask questions about its every turn, even though we know the true reasons for things are indelibly beyond us, and always will be.