Tim F Nash in front of the background photo of barred gate from Max Payload on Unsplash

By Tim F Nash

I grew up in an airline family, where I was continually exposed to a diversity of languages. Predictably, I loved language lessons at school when we settled in England, but as I looked around the room I realised that this was not how most of my classmates felt. For them, the oddities of French and the even odder characters in our text book were having a profoundly negative impact on them. Though few would admit it openly to this day, they were left with the impression that French speakers were stupider, weirder and further behind the times than we were. And that has surely shaped their default disposition towards speakers of other languages ever since. 

When I moved to Taiwan, I experienced the problem from the other side. It did not matter how long I had lived there, nor that I was living with a Chinese family; whenever I encountered a local, they would take one look at my skin tone and label me “American.” And with that label came a whole heap of assumptions that were immediately projected onto me, spanning everything from my diet to my musical tastes, from my politics to my religious beliefs. That would have been problematic enough were I actually American; but given that I’m not even American, it was hugely irritating. It meant that there was instantly a huge amount of baggage that needed to be cleared away each time before we could even meet with each other. And, of course, neither of us generally had either the time or the energy to do that, which prevented us from actually connecting and left us both the poorer as a result.

Studying Chinese

I had been persuaded to study Chinese in the first place by a French teacher at school: because I was considered to be “good at languages” and Chinese was viewed as the “language of the future.” A year into my studies I was convinced I had made a mistake and needed to start university again with a more sensible subject. But before I quit, I made that trip to Taiwan and my world turned upside down.

There I met Chinese speakers who were kind and welcoming. As I got to know them, I realised that (of course) we were alike in every fundamental way: we needed food and shelter and sleep; we cared about our families; we built friendships; we studied and reflected. The Chinese language ceased to be a stultifying, abstract, academic puzzle and became a beautiful, intriguing and dynamic gateway to a more vibrant world. The language hadn’t changed; the heritage it represented hadn’t changed; its speakers hadn’t changed: but how I felt about it and all that it represented had flipped completely.

When I started with the diversity of real people who spoke Chinese, the language became something human rather than alien. I started comparing it less to the ways in which I had hitherto assumed language should work and began instead to see it as an equally valid alternative way for me to make sense of the world. That shift simultaneously helped me to become more of myself and to connect me more deeply with others.

A different kind of language

There are three characteristics of Mandarin Chinese which mean that it is often referred to as the world’s most difficult language: it is really two languages not one (written and spoken forms can operate independently of each other); its spoken form uses tones (not just consonant and vowel sounds) to differentiate between words; and its written form is character-based not alphabetic. In other words, Chinese is not just a different language; it is a different kind of language. If we treat it as just another language - applying our usual MFL pedagogies and simply translating the curriculum - it does feel fiendishly difficult (five times more difficult than another European language, by some estimates). But if we approach the language as fellow humans - seeing the differences not as artificial barriers deliberately designed to make things complicated for us but rather as having an inherent logic - then it is delightful.

Having a written form that is independent of the spoken means that people from Siberia to the tropics can communicate with one another without losing their diversity of speach. Using tones means that the same sound can be recycled, with the result that Chinese has built a vocabulary as vast as English but with just one tenth of the phonemes for us all to learn. Characters allow us to keep in view the original concept behind the various meanings that each word has developed over time, and also make it easier to see connections between concepts that we may have forgotten or overlooked.

Barriers or... gateways?

It was an embarrassingly long time later that I realised that the “measure word” for languages is “gateways.” In other words, in Chinese we don’t ask: “How many languages do you know?” but rather “How many gateways of languages do you know?” What I had experienced myself was baked into the language itself. (The reassurance is that native speakers have generally not clocked this either, because the phrasing is so familiar to them that they’ve never stopped to notice the words themselves).

We are accustomed to talking about language barriers, but Chinese has taught me that the very barriers we face have the potential to become gateways instead. Given that the word “barrier” comes from the “bar” we used to secure a gate, this insight is before us in English too; it’s just that we’ve likely never noticed it before. All that it takes to turn the barrier into a gateway is for us to change the way we approach it. 

This is something I have learned from language study, but it has universal applications. As I look back over the various roles I have had in public, private and third sectors over the years, in a variety of industries, and across continents, I have come to realise that this same principle which I have continually been relearning in my wrestling with Chinese has been key to a wide range of problems I have helped the organisations I have worked for to overcome.

In conclusion

Today, with good translation available to us instantly with AI tools, the temptation is to believe that language is now a “solved problem.” But it isn’t, because the transfer of information was never the biggest problem in the first place. AI translation finally allows us - both individually and corporate - to move beyond the accessibility issues that have dominated our attention and on to the emotional, cognitive and relational riches that remain for us to discover by exploring the world through the lens of the different languages we now have within our organisations and communities. This is the work of turning language barriers into gateways.

Tim F Nash is a linguist, keynote speaker and advisor who, for more than three decades across sectors and continents, has been helping organisations to turn barriers into gateways.
 

You can contact Tim on LinkedIn and see his TEDx talks on Language Gateways.
 

Views expressed on CIOL Voices are those of the writer and may not represent those of the wider membership or CIOL.