This was originally posted on blogger.

How good is my English? Really, quite good. In fact, yours is too, if you can understand every word I’ve used in my blog. I’m beginning to understand that being fluent in a language is no easy task. It took me two decades to get to my level with a sponge-like, child’s brain and a fully immersive English environment. And not to brag, but I was speaking rather fluent English by maybe age 6. From then on, my diction and sophistication has only grown.

It sounds like a flex – but this is the case for I believe about half a billion people in the world. And for the remaining several billion, another language serves as their “mother tongue”. For the second language learner, though, learning English is a monumental task. One that even after a whole lifetime could be said to be incomplete. The second language learner doesn’t have the same intuitive grasp of diction, rhythm, or pronunciation that the native speaker is blessed with from a young age. Perhaps if they are lucky, they live in a country where English is spoken, and from can catch the thrown-about phrases from people on the streets. Yet that doesn’t mean you’ll easily learn the English used in novels, policy memos, or political manifestos – that work has to be done day-by-day for years on end. Learning a language is like trying to swim among the fishes.

Some days it seems that learning Chinese becomes harder and harder the more I do it. Imagine a slowly expanding ball of knowledge; in the beginning, it only contains a few polite phrases (你好, 謝謝, 我是美國人); but over time, it grows and grows, and so too does its surrounding area. After long enough, it encompasses all the “conversational topics” it could ever have imagined; but the conversations get longer and longer; and its aspirations grow and grow; and it realizes that topics like the geography of Taiwan’s Jade Mountain and the pros and cons of nuclear power require their own specific set of vocabulary and fluency; and the ball wonders if attaining such mass is ever possible.

The de facto ideal for Chinese learners is set by reknown foreign “Sinologists”. Also called “China experts”, “China hands”, or “China watchers”, these are foreign professionals that have studied Chinese for many decades and made their careers out of mastering and utilizing their proficiency in the language. Take this clip of Perry Link (林培瑞), a literature professor, comparing the Chinese administrations of Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong. To the untrained ear, it’s impossible to tell that he’s not a native Beijing-er (I include myself in this categorization). Yet a native Chinese speaker might tell you that his grammar has English influences, or that his “zh” or “ü” are not quite right. Another interesting example is Reverend László Ladányi, a Hungarian-born Jesuit priest (1914-1990). He specialized in interpreting the public statements of the Chinese Communist Party that was and are layeered in rich language, idioms and CCP-only allusions. László Ladányi was perhaps the only Westerner able to decipher such documents in the 1950s and 60s. Now, many more such burgeoning academics exist.

It seems to me that each of these students of Chinese gave up a great deal to “master” the language. Language, like rocket science or brain surgery, is something anyone can do if they dedicate themselves to it. The more pertinent question may be – are you willing to do what it takes? It’s rather like Wormtail cutting off his arm in Harry Potter, or Voldemort carving his soul into seven pieces…  Of course, learning Chinese is hardly a torturous process. Yet its opportunity costs are real, and it’s benefits are uncertain; and certainly not as monetizable as a more practical language like C++ or Python.

I haven’t made any horcruxes. Nor have I sprouted any gils. But you can catch me out here in Kaohsiung City, swimming with the fishes.