Do the D.A.N.C.E.

Day 15 (Dienstag, 30.Sept.08)

Speaking a language, for real, in public, is like dancing with a partner.

If you don’t know the steps and you aren’t familiar with the rhythms, you can’t do anything except make awkward, tentative gestures.

If you only know the steps, that is, let’s say for the sake of this metaphor, the vocabulary, then you can never connect with what your partner is doing. You hesitate for too long, or just when you get going you (or your partner) suddenly change directions or halt altogether. You’re always trying to decipher your partner’s movements. Frustrated, your partner either looks for someone else to dance with or thinks you are a hopelessly incompetent person in general and tries to teach you how to walk.

Even when you know the steps and the music, each partner has idiosyncrasies. Each moves a little differently, responds a little differently, and has different expectations of you.

To relate this to language, it seems likely that every person in the world has a different vocabulary. Supposing the average vocabulary consists of 50,000 words, the chances are slim that any two people would know exactly the same 50,000 words. And even if they did, even with, for example, identical twins raised together, it seems likely that any two people would recognize different connotations for some words and would understand different nuances of many words. Since each person’s experience of a language probably differs from everyone else’s, everyone has a slightly different knowledge of the language.

Then, of course, there are the cultural aspects of language that everyone has a different experience of. I mean regionalisms, catch phrases, jargon, inside jokes, lines from songs, movies, books, plays, and poetry, all the different institutional cadences, from the dry, stuffy legalese of fine print to the punchy, clipped sensationalism of the headlines.

And on top of all this, there is a degree of improvisation necessary for partner dancing that is also necessary for linguistic interactions. That’s one reason it’s so frustrating to talk to an answering machine or a customer service-bot. I’m put in mind of the funny scene in Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, in which a group of friends tries to use tape-recorded lines culled from an actress’s fake audition to hold a real phone conversation with her boyfriend. It worked, but it didn’t go smoothly.

One final similarity is that learning to speak a language, like learning to dance, is hard.

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I’ve been in Berlin for two weeks now. Two weeks is evidently not long enough to become fluent in a language. I don’t know what I expected, but I realize for certain now that it’s good that I’m going to be here for a while.

Now, I’m no language expert, but fluency seems to have at least the following two essential components: 1) spontaneity and 2) adaptability. Contrary to popular belief, size doesn’t matter so much, at least, not the size of one’s vocabulary. There are Berliners who are fluent in German—it’s the only language they know and they’ve spoken it all their lives—but they don’t have very large vocabularies, mostly because they don’t read and they don’t consult a dictionary very frequently.

Knowledge of grammar is also not essential. Many Berliners I’ve met don’t seem to know much about German grammar. They would rarely, if ever, use the conditional or the preterite, for instance, and they couldn’t tell you what the genitive case is, although they may use it correctly.

What I mean by spontaneity is that one is able to speak the language without thinking about the language. Using the language has to become second nature. And by adaptability I mean that one is almost always able to find a way, insofar as it can reasonably be expected, to respond appropriately to linguistic prompts, and to issue appropriate linguistic prompts to others. To use the dancing metaphor, one has to know both how to lead and how to follow.

Literacy is not the same as fluency. And the difference doesn’t just have to do with the medium—print versus speech. Literacy is not like dancing.

Part of literacy is reading ability, which is purely passive. Having the ability to read is like being able to appreciate dancing. You do need a special set of skills to recognize good dancing, but it’s different from the set of skills you need to dance. The other part of literacy is writing, which is purely active. Having the ability to write is like being able to choreograph a dance.

For native speakers, fluency precedes literacy. For me as a second-language speaker, literacy precedes fluency. That’s one reason the stakes feel so high to me. I can appreciate beautiful dancing and I can even choreograph it. But now I have to dance…and I know excruciatingly well just how bad I am.