Why AI translation is no substitute for learning a language

Last week, a friend told me that he has a new girlfriend with whom he does not share a language. A minor obstacle, apparently. Never one to resist the pull of a futuristic device, he has found an ideal solution: the two of them communicate through AI-powered earbuds that translate between English and Portuguese, allowing them to speak and understand one another in real time.

My first thought – disbelief, laced with disapproval, that a piece of tech could be considered a substitute for a common language – was eclipsed by another: if only I had possessed such a device last February, when sitting around a Japanese hotpot table with my boyfriend’s extended family, none of whom speak a word of English.

Armed with an AI earbud, the evening might have played out rather differently. And yet, the alienating effect of a language barrier was constructive. In this case, it was the motivation I needed to take up Japanese lessons.

Foreign-language learning is an unusually rich neurological workout. Research presented earlier this year at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Forum concluded that those who speak two languages have brains that appear around six years younger than those who speak just one. Master four languages and that figure jumps to 13 years.

‘There lies in every language a peculiar worldview,’ wrote the 19th-century Prussian scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose philosophy of language laid the groundwork for a theory developed by 20th-century anthropologists known as ‘linguistic relativism’. If we accept their view that every tongue offers a unique way of understanding the world, this has big implications for foreign-language learning. But how exactly does the structure of a language influence how its speakers think?

For a start, it can shape how we map abstract concepts onto space. English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line, as reflected in our language: we move meetings forwards and push deadlines back. Yet Mandarin speakers tend to conceptualise time differently – the word xià zhōu (next week), for instance, translates literally to ‘down week’. These different metaphors are perhaps unsurprising when we consider that text in Mandarin traditionally runs vertically, from the top to the bottom of the page. Thus, in both instances, the way in which we read and write language on a page seems to shape how we unconsciously map out abstract concepts.

Different languages also force us to pay particular attention to different things, be it gender, a particular emotion, colour and so on. Greek speakers, according to research conducted by the cognitive scientist Guillaume Thierry, distinguish light blue (ghalazio) from dark blue (ble) more readily than English speakers because the Greek language treats them as two distinct colours.

I am reminded of my Japanese teacher, Aya, so insistent that the Granny Smith apple perched on my desk is ‘blue’. The puzzling interaction reflects a deeper Japanese history, in which, right up until the Second World War, the colour green was largely treated as a shade of blue (ao).

It was during the US occupation of Japan that schoolchildren were taught for the first time that blue (ao) and green (midori) were two entirely separate categories of colour. Today, Japanese speakers use the word midori widely, but certain natural objects that long predate the war – green apples, leafy vegetables – remain frozen in time, still labelled as ao. It is for this reason, too, that Japan’s green traffic light is of a blue-ish hue; just green enough to satisfy international standards, but blue enough to allow Japanese people to keep on referring to it as ao.

The perception gap between those who speak different languages can manifest in more abstract ways. It could be someone suddenly discovering a foreign word that has no equivalent in their native language, and being forced to reckon with a particular emotional state in a new way.

An oft-cited example of an ‘untranslatable’ emotional concept is saudade, the Portuguese word for ‘nostalgia’ – except that this translation captures just a small part of its meaning. There is no adequate English word to convey the depth of emotion being expressed. Saudade is a deep yearning, for a lost person or place – or perhaps for something that never existed at all.

To claim that no English speaker has ever experienced saudade, just because we don’t have a dedicated label to describe this complex emotion, would be reductive. But, for Portuguese speakers, having a specific word to articulate this feeling brings it into focus. It makes it easier for them to dwell upon this emotional state, which in turn reinforces, in a subtle and mysterious way, how often it is felt.

Japanese, too, has words that lack an adequate translation, at least in English. Many of them reflect a broader cultural philosophy and illustrate how Japanese attitudes are baked into everyday vocabulary.

They are by no means all poetic. Indeed, for a culture with such a notoriously punishing work culture, whose leader proudly disavows the very concept of ‘work-life balance’, it is fitting that a specific word exists – karoshi – to describe ‘death by overwork’. Few non-Japanese speakers will mourn the absence of this word from their native lexicon.

Karoshi aside, many of Japan’s non-translatable words reflect harmonious ideas, inspired by a mixture of Buddhism and Shintoism, about the value of impermanence, respect for nature, never taking small moments of beauty for granted, and finding meaning in a void.

Shizukesa is an evocative word for a stillness that feels inhabited or a silence that carries weight. In a similar vein, Ma translates roughly to ‘the presence of absence’ or ‘space as intention’ and conveys the idea of space and silence as active positive entities, essential for balance and depth.

Hakanai, another word that lacks an English equivalent, captures the notion of ‘fragility as value’, and is used to describe something that is even more precious because it will not last. This concept of hakanai is embodied in another Japanese word, komorebi, which is difficult to translate in several words, let alone one. Komorebi refers to the dappled pattern of light and shadow that is cast on a forest floor when sunlight filters through a canopy of leaves. It is a word that encourages Japanese speakers to pause to appreciate nature’s fleeting beauty: the unpredictable winds, paired with a shifting sun, mean that the exact pattern cast on the forest floor will never exist again in quite the same way.

Another striking linguistic feature, which points to a culture attuned to nature, is the sheer volume of Japanese words for rain. Entire dictionaries exist solely for this purpose, cataloguing up to 2,000 unique ways to describe water falling from the sky.

While descriptions of rain feature heavily in haikus, the original explanation for this abundance is more practical than poetic. ‘No rice, no life’, far more than a popular cultural catchphrase, has been close to a lived reality in Japan for thousands of years. And the rice that forms the backbone of Japanese civilisation depends heavily on rain. Too much or too little of it, and a harvest is destroyed – creating an imperative to pay close attention to rainfall.

To name but a few entries from this vast dictionary, there is harusame (春雨), a gentle, continuous spring rain that helps plants to grow. In contrast, there is shinotsukuame (篠突く雨), a violent rainstorm, which translates to ‘rain that pierces like bamboo sticks’. Then there is niwaka-ame (にわか雨), a sudden downpour, the kind that forces strangers to huddle together under a shop awning.

As for some more poetic rain vocabulary, there is yarazu-no-ame (遣らずの雨), literally ‘the rain that doesn’t let you go’, to describe a well-timed shower that seems to fall just to keep a visitor from leaving. Namidaame (涙雨) is another timely rain, albeit a more sombre one. Translated literally as ‘tear rain’, this is the rain that appears in tandem with a moment of grieving, seemingly right on cue.

Learn all of these words, Aya Sensei tells me, and you may never experience rain in quite the same way again. Uncovering the quirks of another language can recalibrate our relationship with everyday life.

Would I have paid such attention to the dappled afternoon light on my woodland walk last week if I had not learnt the word komorebi? Maybe. But perhaps I wouldn’t have thought about transience – and how this exact arrangement of dancing shadows will never be replicated.

All of which is to say, it is a marvel of modern technology that my friend can communicate with his girlfriend in the absence of a shared language. But I’m glad that I didn’t know ‘AI translation earbuds’ even existed when I entered that hotpot restaurant in Japan. Learning a foreign language offers the chance to experience the world in a fundamentally different way.