学一门新语言的四个理由 – John McWhorter

TED 精选 2019-01-07

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学一门新语言的四个理由 - John McWhorter

English is fast becoming the world’s universal language, and instant translation technology is improving every year. So why bother learning a foreign language? Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter shares four alluring benefits of learning an unfamiliar tongue.

00:00
The language I'm speaking right now is on its way to becoming the world's universal language, for better or for worse. Let's face it, it's the language of the internet, it's the language of finance, it's the language of air traffic control, of popular music, diplomacy -- English is everywhere.
我现在说的英语正逐渐变成全球通用语言，这有好处也有弊端。我们会认同，这是互联网标准语言，是金融界通用语言，是空中管制标准语言，流行音乐，外交活动。英语无处不在。

00:22
Now, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more people, but more Chinese people are learning English than English speakers are learning Chinese. Last I heard, there are two dozen universities in China right now teaching all in English. English is taking over.
实际上，说汉语的人数更多一些，但是学英语的中国人要比学汉语的英语母语者要多。我之前听说，现在中国有二十多所大学使用纯英语教学。英语已占统治地位。

00:41
And in addition to that, it's been predicted that at the end of the century almost all of the languages that exist now -- there are about 6,000 -- will no longer be spoken. There will only be some hundreds left. And on top of that, it's at the point where instant translation of live speech is not only possible, but it gets better every year.
除此之外，预计在本世纪末期，绝大多数现存的语言，大约6000种，将会失传。只会有几百种剩下。另一方面，现在同传翻译不仅已经成为可能，而且每年都在变得更好。

01:05
The reason I'm reciting those things to you is because I can tell that we're getting to the point where a question is going to start being asked, which is: Why should we learn foreign languages -- other than if English happens to be foreign to one? Why bother to learn another one when it's getting to the point where almost everybody in the world will be able to communicate in one?
我跟大家说这么多是因为我要引出一个问题一个大家或许已经在问的问题，就是：“为什么我们需要学习除英语的外语？既然很快英语会成为通用语言，为什么还要去学习新的语言呢？”

01:30
I think there are a lot of reasons, but I first want to address the one that you're probably most likely to have heard of, because actually it's more dangerous than you might think. And that is the idea that a language channels your thoughts, that the vocabulary and the grammar of different languages gives everybody a different kind of acid trip, so to speak. That is a marvelously enticing idea, but it's kind of fraught.
我觉得理由很多，但是我首先想要弄清一个概念，可能大家也都听过，但它可能比你想象的还要重要。这个观点是语言能塑造你的思维，不同语言的词汇和语法结构给了每个人不同的思维方式，类似于此。这是个挺诱人的观点，但却有点误人子弟。

02:01
So it's not that it's untrue completely. So for example, in French and Spanish the word for table is, for some reason, marked as feminine. So, "la table," "la mesa," you just have to deal with it. It has been shown that if you are a speaker of one of those languages and you happen to be asked how you would imagine a table talking, then much more often than could possibly be an accident, a French or a Spanish speaker says that the table would talk with a high and feminine voice. So if you're French or Spanish, to you, a table is kind of a girl, as opposed to if you are an English speaker.
这个说法也不全错。比如说，法语和西班牙语中 “桌子”这个单词，由于某些原因，都是阴性的。比如 “la table"、”la mesa”，你知道就够了。研究表明如果这些语言是你的母语那么当你被问到要想象一张桌子突然开口说话，那么大多数情况下，不排除意外，一位说法语或西班牙语的人会说桌子说话的声音是女性的高音。所以如果你是法国或西班牙人，你会把桌子看成女孩，而说英语的人的看法恰恰相反。

02:45
It's hard not to love data like that, and many people will tell you that that means that there's a worldview that you have if you speak one of those languages. But you have to watch out, because imagine if somebody put us under the microscope, the us being those of us who speak English natively. What is the worldview from English?
我们都很喜欢这种观察结果，而且很多人会告诉你这意味着当你说话时，你继承了那种语言的世界观。但是你要谨慎些，想象一下有人把我们放在显微镜下，我们这些母语是英语的人。那么英语的世界观是什么？

03:06
So for example, let's take an English speaker. Up on the screen, that is Bono. He speaks English. I presume he has a worldview. Now, that is Donald Trump. In his way, he speaks English as well.
拿一个母语是英语的人来举例。这是波诺。他说英文，他有一个世界观。现在这个人是唐纳德·特朗普。他同样也说英文。

03:27
And here is Ms. Kardashian, and she is an English speaker, too. So here are three speakers of the English language. What worldview do those three people have in common? What worldview is shaped through the English language that unites them? It's a highly fraught concept. And so gradual consensus is becoming that language can shape thought, but it tends to be in rather darling, obscure psychological flutters. It's not a matter of giving you a different pair of glasses on the world.
这是卡戴珊，她也说英文。现在这里有三位说英文的人。他们的世界观有什么共同点吗？英语塑造了什么样的世界观让他们有共同之处？这个问题很难说。逐渐达成的共识认为语言能塑造思维，但只是非常模糊的一种心理暗示。它并不是能让你用不同的态度来看待世界。

04:02
Now, if that's the case, then why learn languages? If it isn't going to change the way you think, what would the other reasons be? There are some. One of them is that if you want to imbibe a culture, if you want to drink it in, if you want to become part of it, then whether or not the language channels the culture -- and that seems doubtful -- if you want to imbibe the culture, you have to control to some degree the language that the culture happens to be conducted in. There's no other way.
如果这个想法不成立，那么我们为什么要学习外语? 如果外语并不能改变你的思维方式，那么我们学习的原因是什么? 有几个理由。首先，如果你想学习一个文化，如果你想吸收并让自己融入这个文化，那么不论如何，这个语言是否为此文化的载体，或许有人会质疑，如果你想汲取这个文化，你就必须对这个文化使用的语言有一定程度的掌握。没有捷径。

04:37
There's an interesting illustration of this. I have to go slightly obscure, but really you should seek it out. There's a movie by the Canadian film director Denys Arcand -- read out in English on the page, "Dennis Ar-cand," if you want to look him up. He did a film called "Jesus of Montreal." And many of the characters are vibrant, funny, passionate, interesting French-Canadian, French-speaking women. There's one scene closest to the end, where they have to take a friend to an Anglophone hospital. In the hospital, they have to speak English. Now, they speak English but it's not their native language, they'd rather not speak English. And they speak it more slowly, they have accents, they're not idiomatic. Suddenly these characters that you've fallen in love with become husks of themselves, they're shadows of themselves.
举一个有趣的例子。可能这个例子没那么直观，但是你应该可以理解。加拿大导演Denys Arcand 执导的一部电影，如果有兴趣，你可以上网查一下，英语是Dennis Ar-cand。他拍了一部电影叫《蒙特利尔的耶稣》。电影中很多角色都是说法语的法语区加拿大女人，充满活力，为人风趣，充满热情。在影片结尾有一个场景，他们要送一个朋友到讲英语的医院。在医院里他们需要讲英语。她们会说英语，但是不是母语，她们不太愿意讲英语。她们的语速慢了下来，讲的话有口音并且显得生硬。突然间，这些你已经爱上的角色变成了空空的躯壳，变成了她们自己的影子。

05:27
To go into a culture and to only ever process people through that kind of skrim curtain is to never truly get the culture. And so to the extent that hundreds of languages will be left, one reason to learn them is because they are tickets to being able to participate in the culture of the people who speak them, just by virtue of the fact that it is their code. So that's one reason.
了解一种文化，如果只是透过表面那一层面纱，我们是无法真正理解的。所以既然未来几百种语言会存活下来，学外语的一个理由就是它是我们理解和融入一种文化的一张门票，因为语言就是打开文化的钥匙。以上是第一个原因。

05:51
Second reason: it's been shown that if you speak two languages, dementia is less likely to set in, and that you are probably a better multitasker. And these are factors that set in early, and so that ought to give you some sense of when to give junior or juniorette lessons in another language. Bilingualism is healthy.
第二个原因：有研究指出，同时讲两种语言的人更不容易痴呆，而且你可能更加的擅长多线操作。这些都是目前的研究结论能够给你一些参考，帮助你决定什么时候让孩子们接触新的语言。双语教学有益健康。

06:14
And then, third -- languages are just an awful lot of fun. Much more fun than we're often told. So for example, Arabic: "kataba," he wrote, "yaktubu," he writes, she writes. "Uktub," write, in the imperative. What do those things have in common? All those things have in common the consonants sitting in the middle like pillars. They stay still, and the vowels dance around the consonants. Who wouldn't want to roll that around in their mouths? You can get that from Hebrew, you can get that from Ethiopia's main language, Amharic. That's fun.
然后，第三点语言本身非常的有意思。比人们一般认为的要有意思的多。例如在阿拉伯语中”kataba“ 表示“他写了”， ”yaktubu“表示“他写，她写”。 ”Uktub“，是祈使句中“写”的意思。这些有什么共同之处呢？这几个单词的共同之处在于词里面都有同样的辅音，构成主体。它们保持不变，元音围绕着辅音变化。谁不想多说这些单词几遍呢？你能在希伯来语中找到这些，你能在埃塞俄比亚的主要语言阿姆哈拉语中找到，太有意思了。

06:54
Or languages have different word orders. Learning how to speak with different word order is like driving on the different side of a street if you go to certain country, or the feeling that you get when you put Witch Hazel around your eyes and you feel the tingle. A language can do that to you.
不同语言的语序使不同的。当你学习语序不同的语言时，就像到某些国家，在道路另一侧开车，又像是把薄荷涂在眼睛周围时，感受到的那种刺激感。语言也能给你类似的感觉。

07:13
So for example, "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," a book that I'm sure we all often return to, like "Moby Dick." One phrase in it is, "Do you know where I found him? Do you know where he was? He was eating cake in the tub, Yes he was!" Fine. Now, if you learn that in Mandarin Chinese, then you have to master, "You can know, I did where him find? He was tub inside gorging cake, No mistake gorging chewing!" That just feels good. Imagine being able to do that for years and years at a time.
例如，《戴帽子的猫回来了》，这本书我相信很多人还经常读，又如《白鲸记》。里面有句台词是， “你知道在哪儿找到他的么？你知道他在哪里么？他在浴缸里吃蛋糕，对，没错！” 现在，在中文中那么你需要这么说， “你知道是否你，我哪里他找到？他在浴缸里吃蛋糕，没错误虎咽狼吞！” 感觉棒极了。想象在未来能够做到这样。

07:44
Or, have you ever learned any Cambodian? Me either, but if I did, I would get to roll around in my mouth not some baker's dozen of vowels like English has, but a good 30 different vowels scooching and oozing around in the Cambodian mouth like bees in a hive. That is what a language can get you.
或者你们学过柬埔寨语吗？我也没有，不过要是我学过，那么我嘴里发出的元音要远多于英语中的 13个元音，而是整整30个不同的元音，在柬埔寨人的嘴里热烈的翻腾着，就像蜂巢里的蜜蜂一样。这是语言能够带给你的。

08:10
And more to the point, we live in an era when it's never been easier to teach yourself another language. It used to be that you had to go to a classroom, and there would be some diligent teacher -- some genius teacher in there -- but that person was only in there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most times. You had to go to class. If you didn't have that, you had something called a record. I cut my teeth on those. There was only so much data on a record, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a CD. Other than that you had books that didn't work, that's just the way it was.
更进一步，我们现在的时代，要自学一门语言比过去容易很多。过去你要学习外语，就需要去上课，或许会遇到勤勉的老师以及一些睿智的老师，但是那个人只在特定的时间出现，你需要去按时上课，除此之外就没有机会了。你只能去课堂。如果你没法听课，你能拿到录音带。我小时候就是这么学的。录音上就那么多信息，磁带也是这样，或者是已过时的光盘。除此之外你有用处不大的书，学外语就是这样。

08:43
Today you can lay down -- lie on your living room floor, sipping bourbon, and teach yourself any language that you want to with wonderful sets such as Rosetta Stone. I highly recommend the lesser known Glossika as well. You can do it any time, therefore you can do it more and better. You can give yourself your morning pleasures in various languages. I take some "Dilbert" in various languages every single morning; it can increase your skills. Couldn't have done it 20 years ago when the idea of having any language you wanted in your pocket, coming from your phone, would have sounded like science fiction to very sophisticated people.
如今你可以躺着，躺在卧室地板上，喝点小酒，用丰富的学习材料，例如 Rosetta Stone语言学习软件，开始自学你喜欢的语言。我强烈推荐Glossika这一个软件。你随时可以学习，所以你可以不断练习，熟能生巧。你可以在早晨感受多种语言。，我每个早上都看一点不同语言的《呆伯特》漫画，这可以不断提高你的能力。在20年前，能把你想要学习的任何语言装进口袋放在手机里，是不可能的，对于那些老于世故的人而言这就如同科幻小说。

09:25
So I highly recommend that you teach yourself languages other than the one that I'm speaking, because there's never been a better time to do it. It's an awful lot of fun. It won't change your mind, but it will most certainly blow your mind.
所以我强烈推荐你去学习除我现在说的英语之外的语言，因为现在是最好的时间。这个过程太有意思了。它不会改变你的思维，但是它肯定会让你大开眼界。非常感谢。