Is User-Friendliness for Weaklings?

“The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners” is the subtitle of a book entitled Babel No More, published about a year ago, to which a friend of mine, a university lecturer, drew my attention. The author, Michael Erard, is a journalist and linguist, who decided to crack the secret of language learning. His curiosity about the subject was aroused after noting that, unlike the wealth of research on the difficulties of learning a language, he found almost not research on the upper limit of human linguistic ability. He went to Bologna, Italy, to visit the archives of Cardinal Mezzofanti, a 19th century polyglot who spoke over 100 languages (including Hebrew). He visited southern India and Belgium, to experience first-hand what it’s like to learn in a multilingual culture. He delved into historical texts, to see if there was something there that explained what was special about the brains of history’s leading language learners.

My friend (himself no small lover of learning) was disconcerted, however, by one specific claim made in the book: that one of the best methods for learning a language is repetition. Not repetition of the rules of grammar, nor of the meanings of words. Rather, repetition of poems and speeches in a language that you don’t understand at all. It seems that the brain can acquire mastery of a new language in record time, specifically if – as a preliminary stage – we learn by heart texts that are not understood. After that, by means of hints, the brain will find the context. It turns out that the brain has room to store words that are not understood – and that this is separate from where we store words that we do understand. If you don’t learn by heart, you are wasting space that will not be utilized otherwise!

If that’s the case, it’s somewhat embarrassing. Do we – who are part of modern culture – put in so much effort at understanding, while primitive rote learning turns out to be the most effective way to learn? Are modern mathematics tools (e.g. Cuisenaire rods) ultimately less useful than memorizing the multiplication table? Are the Indian legends true then, when they say that the invention of writing – in the ignorant, dark age of Kali Yuga – was a sign, not of human advancement, but rather of the deterioration of the human race? Do those who recite prayers by rote know something that science has overlooked? When we use technology to make things easier for our students, are we actually raising a generation of weaklings, one in which both teacher and student have become reconciled to such weakness?

These are troubling questions which clash, head-on, with accepted ideas – particular those of inevitable progress, which sees the march of human development as a mounting race of advancement of technological knowledge until the singular event of the “end of days”, in which we will become some combination of biology and technology, of man and (probably) iPhone. This concept of “singularity” even has its own university, in California, among whose students and teachers are some of the best minds from Silicon Valley – and it has so many “hasidim” that at times it would seem more appropriate to call it the Singularity Yeshiva rather than the Singularity University.

But I’m digressing. The idea that, perhaps, learning something by heart – even without understanding what’s written there – is the “slow but sure” way, is troubling. I hope that, with our efforts to create more user-friendly, convenient tools, we aren’t raising a pampered generation.