Learning a foreign language shouldn't have to be too hard...

but could it be too easy?

Last week, I wrote about Katrina Firlik's Another Day in the Frontal Lobe and the possibility of getting an implantable chip to improve one's memory for language learning. I wondered if language learning could become a surgical procedure, as opposed to a lifestyle. Steve responded:

Language learning is about fun. It is about the enjoyment of the language, of reading, listening and speaking in the language. There are no shortcuts, and I do not believe that operations will provide shortcuts, or at least they will eliminate the enjoyment of the language as a necessary step to getting there.

This response seems to put him in the lifestyle camp. And frankly, that's where I am too. But I wonder...

Depending on who you talk to, generation-y has the shortest attention span or the fastest visual processing abilities of any humans in history. Nintendo gives these couch potatoes top notch reflexes. MTV gives them the ability to decode, process and context disparate images while older generations scratch their heads. Cell phones, text messages, the internet and expanding travel possibilities give them a different sense of distance, proximity and immediacy: They've grown up in a CNN world where people in Dubuque know more about what's happening on the other side of Baghdad than correspondents in a hotel in that same city and the cell phone and wireless internet have brought that full circle because now the person you get your information from may be a friend on the other side of town who's even closer than the CNN crew. The internet has also given a whole new standard about the availability and reliability of information. And finally, 200 channels and a seemingly infinite internet mean that you can't know it all, only instead of the whole nation knowing the same thing - what Cronkite says - and being blissfully ignorant about everything else - whatever Cronkite didn't say, we're now faintly aware of how much we don't know, and we can pick and choose what to know.

Firlik talks about the plasticity of the brain: most of our brains are pretty much the same, physically, but we do different things with different parts. Blind people process braille where sighted people process text. People with brain injuries find other ways to access information behind neural pathways that were cut off. Stroke patients learn to walk and talk again because another, similar part of the brain steps in.

We know the brain changes if you change its inputs. We know it figures out how to function another way if one way isn't working. We know, as well, that the essence of a brain doesn't have to change too much for this too happen. So, is it possible that the generation-y brain is evolving or altering because we live in a world that is epistemologically different from that which came before? Would it even need to alter? Or could it just adapt the way a Chinese baby's brain figures out Mandarin while and English baby's brain figures out English?

When I started as a self-taught language learner, 20 long years ago, I took a passing interest in Arabic. I went to Books in Print (I worked in a bookstore) and found approximately 30 books. Most of them were over $100. I was 16, and purchased the 3 or 4 books I could afford and that was what was available to me to learn Arabic. Today, I can type in "free Arabic lessons" in google, "Arabic music" in youtube and so much more. Further, the internet, Amazon and the growth of Barnes and Noble and Borders has broadened commerce so that Arabic language learners and publishers can meet up more easily. Consequently, there are as many Arabic titles available and affordable at a decent size Barnes and Noble as there were in the whole Books in Print 20 years ago.

In a generation, it has become amazingly easier to get the resources to learn a language. The advantage the me of today has over the me of 20 years ago boggles my mind. Granted, there's a lot of work, still, and it's a long way from having a chip in my brain that makes the memorization a piece of cake. But it's fair to ask: Are my efforts to learn Chinese today less meaningful than my efforts to learn Arabic 20 years ago? Am I less a language learner because after playing games with the Pimsleur narrator, I speak more Chinese after a week than I learned Arabic in 4 months with J.R. Smart's Teach Yourself Arabic? I don't think so. Which makes me vaguely uneasy about the language chip possibilities. Will they water down what language learning's about? Or make it better for those who get the procedure and take the follow-up training?

Every polyglot or would-be polyglot knows that some languages have more cachet than others. Learning Italian will take you cool places, but language geeks give a lot more points for Mandarin, Korean and Tibetan because the resources are less plentiful and the learning's a lot harder for Western non-natives (forgive the pleonasm). On the other hand, even though basic Spanish isn't that hard, I know a lot of people in San Jose, California who have no idea beyond Buenos diás. Would language chips be used by everybody to broaden communication and usher in that universal understanding and consequent world peace that language planners use to dream of? Would American xenophobes make them mandatory for immigrants so no one any longer had an excuse for not knowing English? Would the rest of the world get them while the Anglosphere rested on its laurels, unaware that its lunch was about to be eaten by people who knew English but also their native languages? Or would we find out, alas, that even if it were as easy as getting a chip popped in and taking a few weeks lessons, multlingualism is really a lifestyle choice and only the usual suspects would bother.

I suspect that if the language chip came available, the list of languages known or being studied on the typical language learning blog would get longer. But until somebody invents something as easy as a Babel Fish, I don't know how much further things would go. Generation-Y has taught us that with the whole world at your feet, you have to pick and choose which bits to take. One channel at a time (maybe 4). One internet site at a time (maybe 4 or 5). One conversation at a time (okay, six or seven). And, likely, one or two improving chips at a time. Until humanity figures out omnipresence, we'll always have the advantage of our limitations. Which brings us to the conversation of two weary mothers in 2045:

First mother: I don't know what to do about our Jimmy. I tried to get him to get an empathy chip, because he's got all the other skills for person to person selling. But he says he's happy being a mechanic.

Second mother: Even when they do get a chip, it's hopeless. Tommy got a language boost. He's learning Nepalese now - met some girl from Kathmandu on the internet. I wish he'd find something to do with his life.