Why I learned Chinese

(Being more reaction to Umberto Eco's lamentable lecture on the history of ugliness).

I learned Chinese because I learned English. More specifically, because I learned English early, but not too early – aged sixteen; I learned it very well – I command it nearly as well as my native language; and I learned it at the same time as my whole family – my sister especially. The learning coincided with many changes in my life: emigration; great changes in my philosophical outlook; and rapid assumption of adult responsibilities. Within a few short years my whole personality was dramatically transformed.

Since so many variables were changing simultaneously, it would be hard to say to what extent the changes of my personality which took place at the time were a function of switching languages, if any at all. Yet, there is one piece of evidence to suggest that the influence of the change in language was profound: I had grown up very close to my sister; gradually, in the course of the process of settling in our new, English-speaking country, we grew apart. That this had something to do with the language was proven to me by the fact that we got along better in our native language than we did in English; we learned a trick: whenever a problem occurred that seemed to us insurmountable – and this almost always happened when we spoke English – we switched back to our native language and -- the problem evaporated; it suddenly seemed trivial, even funny. At first, we laughed about; since everything we could say in one language we could also say equally well in the other, the dramatic effect of the switch seemed absurd, preposterous. It seemed silly.

(As English became more and more important in our lives, in time we stopped bothering to switch: the English side, mean and confrontational, seemed the more important; it proved unrelenting. We are no longer in contact).

This experience led me to my own version of the Whorf/Sapir hypothesis (about which I was to hear for the first time only some years later). Determined to understand the problem better, I decided to learn another foreign language as well as I learned English; having read that the ability to acquire near-native fluency in a language disappeared shortly after puberty, I realized I had to hurry; suspecting that the effects of language change were the easier to spot, observe, and describe the greater the morphological difference between the languages, I resolved to learn a non-Indo-European language (after some hesitation I resolved on Chinese because I was aware of its ancient literary matching the Western). Thus aged 20 I left for Taiwan.

In this decision I was guided by that intuition which guides all human sciences, linguistics and anthropology especially: in order to escape the confines of perception bias built into our own culture and to obtain a broader selection of data points on human behavior, it is necessary to compare between many different cultures, the more the better, and the less related they are the better.

In the succeeding twenty five years in all my work -- teaching, marketing, finance -- I have made out of this intuition my most important and most fruitful analytical tool: I have routinely compared the practices, theories and data from various cultures in order to learn the difference between the universal and the local aspects of human behavior. In this I was only acting like everyone else in these professions; cross-cultural comparison is the most basic elements of research in all these fields.

The truth of this intuition is so obvious today, that I simply cannot get it through my head that someone, in this case a world famous scholar, would not share it; and would start his two works, widely held to be among his most important, by stating at the outset, that he will not take into consideration other cultures. He seems to me like a linguist who refuses to learn a foreign language.