There is something deeply bizarre about being a student.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The <\/strong>need <\/em><\/strong>to know<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset<\/em>, one of the most famous contemporary Spanish philosophers, posits that we have two kinds of needs: internal needs and external needs. We have the \u2018needs\u2019 that come from us – our desires – and needs that are imposed upon us by the world. For example, an external need we\u2019ve had as a society over the past few years has been to wear face coverings in public spaces. Perhaps we can convince ourselves that this is good for us, or others, and perhaps we come to tolerate it, or like it a little at best, out of acclimatisation and habit. We can at best convince ourselves that we desire them by perhaps being vaguely interested in them, liking them, or reasoning that they are in our best interests. But it\u2019s not something we truly felt an internal drive to have in the first place. It didn\u2019t come from within. An example of an internal need is a need to know<\/em> something. Think of those moments when your curiosity is piqued and you just can\u2019t sleep because you have <\/em>to know the answer to a specific question whirring around in your mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is a student?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ortega claims that the pursuit of knowledge should be like this – driven by internal needs to know<\/em>. But, most of the time, it isn\u2019t. At all. When we study, we\u2019re faced with an external need: the topic we are studying is almost always not chosen by us: it is not something we\u2019re discovering in an attempt to answer some burning inner question we have. Interest in a particular subject matter is imposed upon us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, a lot of people are studying specific subjects because they enjoy it, at least slightly. But very rarely does a diffuse enjoyment of a specific kind of activity align with a very specific internal need to know the answer to a question that is driving us: a curiosity propelling us into this seeking of knowledge – propelling us into action. Usually, at best, our interest in what we study comes from some vague, ill-defined desire to know\u2026 something. And then we study a set of pre-designed somethings that are all only approximately in the area of things that we want to know. Usually, when we\u2019re studying, we\u2019re not even sure exactly what it is that we want to know. Ortega says \u201cthe typical student\u2026 feels no direct need for science, no concern for it, and yet is forced to deal with it. This already signifies the general falsity of studying.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n How does this apply to learning languages?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But how can we ever know things if we don\u2019t study? How can I learn French if I don\u2019t sit down and learn the grammar rules, memorise vocabulary, and read paragraphs in textbooks, for years of my life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA person would never be a student of their own accord, just as a person would never be a taxpayer of their own accord. They have <\/em>to pay taxes, they have <\/em>to study, but they are neither a taxpayer nor a student. To be a student, like being a taxpayer, is something artificial that they are forced to be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we learn French in school, usually, we sit in front of a textbook and read some passages in which we have a half-hearted interest at best, about what a fictitious French school girl did on her holidays, how many apples she buys at the market, and what she has in her school bag. If we\u2019re lucky, we might even get to listen to a riveting, staged audio of her telling us that in the bag she has three pencils and a lunchbox. And then the lesson gets better: we sit and memorise verb conjugations: past, present, future, preterite, conditional, imperfect, pluperfect, subjunctive, pluperfect subjunctive. And somehow, a few years down the line, two miracles are supposed to come out of this: <\/p>\n\n\n\n We can\u2019t be expected to learn languages through studying when studying is, inherently, driven by this external imposition of interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take language learning tools that we use: Duolingo, Anki, studying from grammar books, memorising verb tables and conjugations. These do not \u201cspring up in us spontaneously\u201d. Rather, they are \u201cimposed, extrinsic, strange [and] foreign\u2026 in short, unreal.\u201d When we study from a textbook, we\u2019re not really engaging with the real world: we create an artificial environment in which to consciously, actively, try to add knowledge to ourselves. When we see a foreign language as an external thing that we impose upon ourselves in these artificial environments, we \u201cwill remain untouched\u201d: we\u2019re not engaging with it from our internal needs. More often than not in language learning, languages are studied, and not treated as lived experiences that we engage with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Knowing versus Being<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Languages aren\u2019t about knowing: they\u2019re about being. That is to say, we don\u2019t study languages: we live them. Language learning is a kinaesthetic process: we learn by doing, not by conscious memorising, correcting, studying. This is like the difference between learning the mechanics of how a bicycle works versus riding it: watching someone else, imitating their motions, falling off, getting up and trying again. This internal need <\/em>we have to speak in and understand the foreign tongues of French, Italian, Russian and Japanese doesn\u2019t come from the thrill of a GCSE textbook about “my hobbies” and “how many siblings I have”. It doesn\u2019t even come from a need to know certain information. Rather, it comes from a yearning to want to be <\/em>in a certain way, or be able to do<\/em> a certain kind of thing. Acquiring a language is not an accumulation of facts – of a body of knowledge we study – but rather an accumulation of the pieces that form a new facet of ourselves – a way to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n