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Sep 23 / François Normandeau

Deeper Reflections

Somewhere today, two people are holding a fluent conversation in French, and one of them does not speak a word of it. A device in his ear hears English, speaks French, catches the reply, and hands it back before he has finished nodding. A hundred languages, in real time, for the price of a phone. Whatever else it is, it is the end of the only reason most people ever had to learn a language.

For the first time in history, no one needs to learn a language. And that is the best thing that ever happened to it.

Necessity was always the worst reason to learn one, and for a century it was the main one: the exam, the visa, the job, the trip. It got people in the door and dragged them, resentful, to the first plateau, where nearly all of them quit. Technology has now taken necessity away completely. It did not kill language learning. It killed the alibi.

What that exposes is the thing the app ads never admitted. The difficulty was not a flaw in the product. It was the product. The showing up, the plateau, the ordinary humiliation of speaking badly in front of people who speak it well, that was the whole machinery that turned a person into someone they had not been before. A tool that asks nothing of you builds nothing in you. So the learners who remain are the ones who choose it, for nothing but the wanting of it. They turn out to be the ones who were always the real ones. They will learn a language for the oldest reason there is: to be among other people, some like them, some not like them at all.

"Empathy is the ability to feel and understand what another person is going through, and to be moved to help. It turns a stranger into a person and builds trust through real attention. It's biased, it tires, and it can be faked for a moment, but not for long, because being genuinely understood has a texture people feel."

I think about this often.

Four years from now the surrender will be near complete, and quiet, the way the important surrenders always are. The social media feed will choose what we see, the AI assistant will choose our words, the earbud will carry our half of every conversation. One convenience at a time, we will hand over the small daily acts of attention and choice that used to add up to a person. No one will take our agency forcefully. No one ever did. We will set it down, because it is heavy, and something is always there offering to hold it. I feel the pull myself. I use these tools every day, and I can feel how easily the reaching stops. A horde of tiny, perfect micro-solutions, and one at a time we hand away the weighing, the choosing, the concluding, the very things that make us.

And once we have lived that way for a while, some of us will start to miss the mess: the friction of being among other people, a plain low room where you can rely on nothing but yourself and your own small stock of words. That friction is not a defect of the human experience. It is the human experience.

An immersion is the week you pick it back up. Not a course with a trip attached, and not a holiday. A week when you take the device out of your ear and find out what you can still do without it.

I will not pretend the weeks are tidy. They are hard to run. Personalities rub. Plans bend. It is often awkward, and always imperfect. And immersion after immersion, that is exactly where I watch it happen. In Nice last December, seven of us, most with only the most basic French, spent our days inside a whole city speaking it, the winter light off the sea, the vendors patient and amused. They fell short, unable to have half the conversations they wanted. And instead of shrinking them, the falling short became fuel: they went home not discouraged but lit, certain that next time Nice would not outrun them.

The other immersions showed the same thing again and again. In Quebec City, I watched ten learners keep speaking French to one another on the street, among themselves, when no one was making them and no teacher stood near, and I will admit it made me proud. In Montreal in March, three of them pushed each other to stay in French through every awkward, difficult hour, because they had decided together that they would.

That is the thing no device will ever hand you. Someone will tell you the technology will simulate this soon, a headset, a flawless artificial companion, and perhaps they will build something that resembles it. But the change does not happen to the person in the headset. It happens to the one who showed up. By the fourth or fifth day the sentence that would not come arrives on its own. A vendor waits while you find it, and understands you, a person understanding a person, with nothing in between. Strangers on Sunday are a circle by Friday. And somewhere in it you notice that for the past few days, you have been fully present in your own life, choosing your own words, for longer than you have been in a year.

And some of it stays. Presence is a muscle, and a week of using it leaves you a little more able to be where you are once you are home, a little more able to resist the quiet handing-over. The week does not only remind you that you are human. It makes you more so.

The device can carry your words anywhere now. It cannot go where you are going, and it never will. Come reach for the words yourself. Come back to simplicity and humanness, for a week.

Why Learning Any Languages Feels Difficult? What French Reveals About the Human Mind

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