On the languages I have pursued, the languages I have not, and what the pattern reveals.
There is a question I have been asked enough times that I have come to recognize the moment it is approaching, and I have learned to answer it carefully because the careful answer is not the same as the quick one. The question, in its various forms, is some version of this: given that you have spent so much of your life learning languages, why have you not learned any Chinese? Or any Hindi? Or any of the languages of your near neighbors in mainland Southeast Asia? You are Indonesian. You live close to enormous and important languages that you have made no real attempt to enter. Why?
The quick answer is that I have been drawn elsewhere. The careful answer requires me to think about why.
What I have noticed, looking at the languages I have actually pursued — French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Japanese, German — is a pattern that I did not consciously plan but that has revealed itself in retrospect. With one exception, the languages I have given my attention to are languages written in alphabetic scripts that I could learn quickly, and they are languages whose grammar, however complex, does not depend on tone for the basic distinction of meaning. The exception is Japanese, which I will come to. But the pattern is consistent enough across the others that I have come to think it tells me something about the kind of language lover I am, and the kind I am not.
I am not making a claim here about the languages I have not pursued. Mandarin Chinese is a language of enormous beauty and depth, with one of the world's great literary traditions and a billion native speakers whose lives the language organizes in every detail. Hindi is one of the great languages of the subcontinent. Thai and Vietnamese and the various tonal languages of mainland Southeast Asia each carry civilizations within them. Cantonese, Korean, Tagalog, Tamil — every one of these is a language that some serious language lover, somewhere, has given a substantial portion of their life to, and has been rewarded for the giving. The fact that I have not pursued them is not a judgment. It is, more honestly, a confession of limitation. There are kinds of attention I have not had to spare, and the languages I have learned are the ones I had the attention for.
What I want to think about in this piece is what kinds of attention I have had — and what those particular inclinations reveal about the temperament of one specific language lover.
The first thing to say, plainly, is that I have always been drawn to the Romance languages. Spanish first, and most centrally. French not far behind, and learned in some respects earlier. Portuguese acquired in adulthood through the workplace course that yielded a return trip to Brazil. Italian engaged with more lightly, more recently, with no formal study. The four of them sit in my life as a single gravitational field — different planets, each with its own atmosphere, but all orbiting the same Latin source.
The pull has never been intellectual exactly. I did not choose the Romance languages because I had decided in advance that they would be more useful or more rewarding than other options. I was drawn to them — first to Spanish through music, then to French through a particular teacher, then to the others — and the drawing felt natural in a way that pursuing, say, Mandarin would not have felt natural to me, despite the practical arguments I could have made for it.
I have thought about why. The honest answer, which sounds self-indulgent until I unpack it, is that the Romance languages reward the kind of slow, accumulative, returning attention that I am temperamentally suited to. They are languages whose grammar reveals itself layer by layer over years of exposure. Their vocabularies are interconnected in ways that learning one of them genuinely accelerates the others — an etymology you encounter in Spanish reappears in Portuguese, a verb pattern you learn in French illuminates a parallel pattern in Italian. The languages share a common ancestor, and the family resemblance means that the work of learning one is partly the work of learning all of them, slowly, across a lifetime.
This is the kind of language project that suits me. I am not a fast learner. I have never been a fast learner. What I have been, for as long as I have been working on languages, is a patient one — willing to sit with a language for years, willing to return to grammar points I once thought I understood, willing to read and listen and make small accumulations rather than dramatic breakthroughs. The Romance languages reward this disposition. They yield slowly to the kind of person who is willing to keep showing up.
There is also, I should admit, an aesthetic dimension to the pull. The Romance languages sound, to my ear, the way I want a language to sound. The melodic quality of Spanish, the precise musicality of French, the openness of Italian's vowels, the soft consonants of Portuguese — these are not objectively better than the sounds of other languages, but they are sounds that I find personally pleasing, and the pleasure has shaped what I have been willing to give my time to.
This is, I recognize, a confession of taste rather than a defense of choice. Taste is shaped by what one was first exposed to, by what one heard in childhood, by the cultural products one happened to encounter at the formative moments. My own formation was shaped by Western popular music, by films I watched as a young person, by the cassette my father kept that turned out to carry the Spanish-language recordings that began my obsession with the language. Had my early exposure been different, my taste would be different. I am not arguing that Romance languages are intrinsically more beautiful than tonal languages. I am saying that for me, partly through accident of formation, they have been the ones whose music has reached most easily into the part of me that loves languages.
Then there is the question of script.
Of all the practical considerations that have shaped which languages I have pursued, the question of script is the one I am most embarrassed to admit has mattered. But it has. The Romance languages are written in the Latin alphabet. So is Dutch. So is German. So, with extensions and modifications, is Indonesian, the language I learned to read first. The result is that for most of the languages I have learned, the script was not a barrier to entry. I could read the words from very early in my study, even when I did not understand them. The visual presence of the language was familiar.
This is not a small thing. The visual presence of the language matters more than people who have only learned languages with familiar scripts realize. To pick up a book in a language whose script you cannot read is to confront a wall before you have begun. To pick up a book in a language whose script you can read, even imperfectly, is to begin already to engage with what it says. The script is the threshold. Languages with familiar scripts have lower thresholds for me. Languages with unfamiliar scripts have higher ones.
Arabic was the exception that broke the pattern, and I want to say something about how it became an exception. I learned the Arabic script as a child, through Quranic recitation. By the time I was old enough to choose languages consciously, the script was already inside me — not as something I had to learn but as something I had grown up with, the way a Western child grows up with the Latin alphabet. The script's familiarity is what has made my engagement with Arabic possible, even at the modest level I have engaged with it. Without the early exposure, I doubt I would have approached Arabic at all. The script would have been the wall.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, Tibetan — all of these have scripts that I never learned in childhood, and the prospect of learning them as an adult, while studying the languages they encode, has always seemed to me to be the work of a different kind of language lover. There are people who undertake this work and find it deeply rewarding. I am not one of them. The languages whose scripts I would have to acquire from scratch have stayed at a distance from me, and I have not pursued them — not because they are inferior languages but because the work of crossing the script threshold, on top of the work of learning the language itself, has consistently been more work than I have been willing to undertake.
This is a limitation. I am admitting it as one. The serious language lover should probably, at some point in their life, undertake at least one language whose script is genuinely foreign to them — should know what it feels like to learn to read again from the beginning, to recover the experience of being a child confronted with marks on a page that do not yet mean anything. I have not done this. Perhaps I will. But thirty years of language learning have shown me that I gravitate toward what I can read, and the gravitation has been consistent enough that I have stopped fighting it.
The other dimension of avoidance is tonality.
The tonal languages — Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, and many others — encode meaning partly through pitch. The same syllable spoken with a high level tone, a rising tone, a falling tone, or a falling-rising tone produces different words. Ma in Mandarin can mean "mother," "horse," "hemp," or a question particle, depending on the tone. This is not an exotic feature; it is how perhaps a third of the world's languages work. Tonal language speakers are in no way disadvantaged. The languages function perfectly well for the people who grew up inside them.
What I have noticed, however, is that my own ear, formed by Indonesian — which is not tonal — and trained by decades of Romance languages, also non-tonal, has not developed the kind of pitch sensitivity that tonal languages require. I can hear the tones, with some effort. I cannot reliably reproduce them. And when I have, in casual experiments, tried to learn a few words of Mandarin or Vietnamese, the experience has been less of "this is a difficult new feature to master" and more of "this is a feature I am being asked to deploy that my mouth and ear are not prepared for, and the preparation would itself be a project of years."
I am not opposed to projects of years. Language learning has been, for me, a series of projects of years. But the project of acquiring tonal sensitivity from scratch, in adulthood, on top of acquiring a script from scratch, on top of acquiring a grammar that has nothing in common with the Indo-European languages I am familiar with — this has consistently struck me as a project that someone with my temperament and my available attention is unlikely to complete. So I have not started it. Other language lovers, with different temperaments and different attention, do start it, and many of them complete it brilliantly. They have my respect. They are doing a kind of work I have not chosen to do.
Japanese, which I mentioned at the beginning as the exception, is the exception because of a person. My wife studied Japanese seriously — studied it formally, lived in Japan for a year, worked as an interpreter and a teacher. The language was a substantial part of her professional and intellectual life before I knew her, and it remained one when I did. When I decided to study Japanese for a year in my early twenties, I was responding partly to a general curiosity about a language whose grammatical structure was completely unlike anything I had previously encountered, but I was also responding, I think, to the proximity of someone for whom Japanese was a serious life project.
The script — three of them, in fact: hiragana, katakana, and the kanji adopted from Chinese — was something I learned with effort, not pleasure. I never came close to mastering the kanji. The grammar I found genuinely interesting; the postpositional particles, the verb-final word order, the elaborate system of politeness levels were each fascinating in their own right. The phonology was easier than I had expected — Japanese is not tonal, and its sound inventory is small enough that pronunciation is not the obstacle it is in some other Asian languages.
But my Japanese has stayed at a beginner level. I can read hiragana and katakana. Beyond that, the language remains mostly closed to me. I cannot read a Japanese newspaper at all. I have lost most of the kanji I once knew, and the kanji I still recognize are too few to assemble meaning from. The year of study gave me what a year of study honestly gives a beginner: a foothold in the script, an ear for the rhythms of the language, a sense of how its grammar arranges the world differently from the languages I am used to — but not the working command that would let me live inside it. This is consistent with what I said earlier about the languages I have touched more lightly than I have mastered. Japanese is one of those.
The reason I have not gone further with Japanese is that going further would require me to take on the kanji seriously, and the kanji project is a multi-year commitment that would in turn require me to begin again at the foundations of the language. That is not a project I have yet been willing to undertake. Perhaps I will. My wife's continued relationship with the language keeps it present in our shared life. I am not closed to deepening my engagement with Japanese. But the obstacles I have described — the script, the absence of any cognate vocabulary connecting it to languages I already know — are real, and they have kept Japanese at a respectful distance even though it sits closer in my life than any other Asian language.
What I want to say, at the end of this, is something about the honesty of what these inclinations reveal.
Every language lover loves some languages and not others. The pattern of their loves and their non-loves is, in a way, a portrait of their formation — what they were exposed to early, what their ear was trained to hear, what their attention was shaped to give. The romantic-languages disposition I have described is not a virtue. It is a feature. It has its costs — entire civilizations of human linguistic achievement that I have not entered, and likely will not, because the time I had was not enough for everything. But it has also been, on its own terms, a coherent and rewarding life with languages. The Romance languages have given me what the Romance languages give, and what they give has been worth the time.
If I were starting again — if I had the energy and the years to undertake what I have not yet undertaken — I would probably try to learn a tonal language, and I would probably try to learn a language with a non-Latin script, just to know what those experiences feel like, just to be the kind of language lover whose portrait includes some of those colors too. I have not done this yet. I may still do it. But I am not pretending to be a more ecumenical language lover than I am. The pattern of what I have actually pursued speaks for itself, and what it speaks of is a person drawn toward a particular family of languages, for reasons partly aesthetic and partly temperamental and partly accidental, who has spent decades inside that family and has been, on the whole, glad of the time spent there.
The languages I have not learned are not lesser. They are simply not mine. And the languages I have learned are mine, in some real sense, partly because I chose them but partly also because they chose me — in the sense that my ear was prepared for them, my eye was prepared for their script, my temperament was prepared for the kind of slow accumulation they reward.
This is a portrait of one language lover. It is not a prescription. The reader who has been drawn elsewhere — toward Mandarin, toward Korean, toward Hindi or Thai or any of the languages I have not pursued — should follow that draw rather than mine. We are not all the same kind of language lover. The variety of language lovers is itself one of the small pleasures of belonging to the broader category. I am the kind I am. I am glad to be that kind. And I am genuinely interested in the kinds I am not.
— A.C. Maas