One’s Personality Dissolves in a New Language Like a Sugar Cube in Tea

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. There’s a new play that I’m aching to see. It’s called English, and it’s by Sanaz Tusi. She’s an Iranian-American playwright. She’s the daughter of immigrants who settled in California. The play takes place in Iran, and it’s about four people in a class who are learning English, and they’re working on becoming fluent. And the play sounds like this brilliant depiction of the frustrations and the rewards and the funny mistakes you make when you’re trying to learn another language as an adult, and also how it means that when you’re trying to learn a language as an adult, you’re trying on a whole new identity.

And reviewing the play in the New Yorker magazine, Alexandra Schwartz describes the process this way. To learn a second language as a grown up, when the pliable plastic brain has hardened into brittle glass, is to know the locked-in sensation of being shut out from other people with their enviable, easy fluency, and worse, from your own articulate self. We are as much made of words as we are of flesh and blood. Personality dissolves in an unfamiliar language like a sugar cube dropped into a cup of tea.

I just love that, Grant. It’s such a great description, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s what happens. Here I am in my 50s trying to learn German and realizing the best I can hope for is to read it. And I mainly want it for academic purposes because there’s so much good language stuff written in German. And I’ll be jiggered if I can speak it. I’m just going to settle for reading it because it is. It’s a fragile classworks in there, and I don’t know if I can add much more to it.

I will tell you that I do miss being in my teens and 20s when I was an avid shortwave listener, listening to shortwave radio, and I would listen to Spanish radio from around the world. I swear it’s the only reason that learning Spanish now works for me is because in there somewhere is a residue from when my brain was plioplastic, and it’s kind of coming back to me.

And don’t you find when you speak Spanish now that you do try on a different personality?

I know I’m far more expressive when I speak in Spanish.

Yeah, I do.

But yeah, it’s confusing. I’m looking forward to hearing more about that play and seeing it myself. There’s a great deal of empathy that I have for people who make that journey. And they don’t just abandon their family and their history and their ties to the old place. But they abandon themselves. They abandon who they were and become someone new in the new place with a new language.

Well, if you ever get a chance to see this play, it’s called English by Sanaz Tusi. I’m going to be there.

Me too.

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