Today, AI can impressively help anyone to write and read in almost any language. This allows a surface-level exchange of ideas, but comes at a steep price: the loss of honest engagement with the magic organ that makes us human. The challenges of learning a new language are exactly why it is still so important to do so in the AI era.
Recently I’ve received many emails in flawless English from Chinese readers of my writings. At first I was amazed at such readers’ superb English, but soon I realized they’d exploited AI—either to translate a text they’d written in Chinese or to turn a text in wobbly English into glib native-sounding English.
Such readers probably imagined they were thereby drawing nearer to me, but I felt the opposite. I told them I felt I was dealing with a false façade. It was as if a video of me dancing salsa (I’m intermediate) had been run through an AI system, and now showed me dancing like a pro. That would be truly creepy. I feel the same way about super-smooth English that arrives from afar, courtesy of AI; suddenly I feel a vast, creepy gap between us.
As a teenager, I fell in love with foreign languages—first French, then Italian, then German, Spanish, Dutch, and Hindi. Over my lifetime, I’ve worked on at least 10 languages, several for many years. The results have often left me highly frustrated, but also have given me indescribable joy at the fact of having absorbed (although only partially, of course) some of the elusive beauty of those marvelous, magical, mysteriously alluring tongues.
Why did I tackle all those languages? Out of love for different sound systems, different writing systems, different grammars, different sets of concepts, different idioms, different ways of seeing the world. I also loved repeatedly listening to songs from other lands and feeling the culture and history silently lurking in the words, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms.
To me, it is a deep joy to try to internalize another cultu
