There was a time that my packing list for a trip to foreign lands would include, at the very least, a small Lonely Planet phrase book, and certainly — if the destination was Spanish-speaking — a fat, orange Collins English-Spanish dictionary. I would place it at the bottom of my trusty red REI rucksack, like a linguistic anchor, before setting sail on adventures. 

This would have been the early 2000s, as I was throwing myself into archival research and attempting to dust off my high school Spanish. It was the age of rubber-cased Nokias and, if you were tech-orientated, maybe a Blackberry. There were no apps, and so a paper dictionary was a necessity on a research trip. 

I found myself thinking about that red rucksack recently, as I dipped my toes back into the water of learning Korean. I’m repeating part of level 1, despite having reached the end of level 2 last year. I simply don’t use anything complex in my daily life here. Actually, that’s a lie. What I really mean is that I use Google Translate to handle any complexity. 

I try to imagine coming to an early 2000s Korea, where I would have undoubtedly needed to pack a dictionary in the bottom of my rucksack. However, I bet that a couple of years later, I would be at a reasonable level of comprehension. Today, at a moment of friction or frustration, I just pull out my phone. I don’t think my way around it. I don’t use body language or other non-verbal communication. I pull out a phone because I really don’t want to make the other person play charades. In some ways I can’t bear the shame of it all, or the fact that I’m making this person wait, so I just pop out my phone and we communicate. 

This leads me where so many paths do at the moment, to AI. As much as I would like to ignore the growing shadow artificial intelligence is casting on society, the truth is I’ve been basking in it — in a way — since I first tinkered with Google Translate. Google developed its translation product in 2006, which was still too early to use easily in the pre-smartphone era. At the time, it was clunky at best, and unintentionally hilarious at worst. If you did any travelling in the early 2000s, no doubt you saw menus and signs that had unintentionally comedic translations. I see fewer of those today, though they are still around. That is because, in part, the technology has improved. After all, actual languages seem rather appropriate for an LLM. 

For all my bluster, I have been using AI just as surely as everyone chatting with Claude. I just didn’t want to admit it. I’m not confident in any language (you should see my spelling!) and so, yes, I do and long have run my writing in Spanish through Google Translate or the more recent Deepl. That being said, I still pay a human to edit anything that I am presenting or publishing in a professional capacity. I use it to check my French comprehension while reading. I use it to communicate with my Italian relatives. And, inevitably, I use it to navigate living in Korea. None of these are, in themselves, bad things. But I wonder, in a longer-term and possibly unmeasurable way, what has this done to the language-learning part of my brain.

I am finding that I still slowly but surely add on my Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, which I practice every day in Duo Lingo (also powered by AI), but I still read, speak, and listen in those languages in varying degrees of intensity. My suspicion is that this is possible because those grooves were dug a long, long time ago. I’ve been using Spanish for 20 years, and French and Portuguese for at least a decade. Plus, there is my ongoing attempt to speak actual Italian (I’ll save the Veneto dialecto for another day) to my family. 

Korean? Or Japanese, which I’m also doing on Duo? Forget it. It’s like the sounds blur together and my ears can’t discern the difference of many words. Or worse, they just bounce right off of my brain, like a tennis ball ricocheting against a wall. Is this because East Asian languages are so unfamiliar, in terms of sounds, alphabet, and roots, to Germanic or Romance ones? Or is it because a new neural pathway is simply too difficult to dig in the age of instant translation? 

Some people would rightly argue that, actually, this is the golden age of languages — learning a language has never been easier. This is true — there are so many online platforms, YouTube videos, and apps. But I would parse that to say that using these tools to brush up on a language you learned the old-fashioned way versus trying to learn something from scratch now feels very different. 

There is, however, such an enormous upside to this moment of mass translation. It is that we can communicate. By we, I mean Babel. The tower. It’s been rebuilt (kinda). Even real-time translations have arrived, apparently, if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or later. 

My mother hoped to see this technology in her lifetime, but sadly just missed it by a few years. She was self-conscious about her Italian and believed that this sort of technology was right around the corner, and it would help her communicate with family. I completely dismissed the idea, thinking humanity would stall out at Google Translate 1.0. But AI has supercharged this too. (Sorry mom, you were absolutely right on this one!) 

It’s difficult to know what to make of this moment. To overcome language difference is to conquer something ancient and seemingly intractable. Biblical, even. But language, ultimately, is culture. How can you truly learn about a place or a people if you don’t understand at least the basic building blocks of their language? 

I suppose that is the question that keeps luring me back to the classroom in Seoul. There is a lot about Korea I still don’t know or understand particularly well, and I’m not convinced that I will find the answers in Google Translate.

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What I’m … reading 

I finally finished Louis Menand’s tour of the mid 20^th century,  The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, which starred the same cast of characters that usually shows up in books on this period, though they were artfully arranged in this tome. Anyone who was anyone in the 1950s-70s can be found in its pages, and in some ways I suppose it’s useful to see their relationships but, on the other hand, it made me wonder if there was anyone else to talk about. The gang is all there: the politicians, the shady Cold War operatives, the avant-garde composers, the Beats, the Abstract Expressionists, the critics (or, should I say the Critics?), the key people in the civil rights movement, the public intellectuals, and so on. The thrust of the book is to show how the US went from the periphery of cultural production after the Second World War to the centre of a global world of cultural consumption. I have been reading it on and off since it was published in 2021, and the recent disturbances in the US and around the world have provided an uncomfortable context in which to digest it. The book comes across as both a relic from another era long disconnected from ours and an extensive background essay as to how we arrived at the late 20^th century perfectly poised to misstep our way into the 21^st. Yes that sounds like a contradiction, but if modern life is anything, it is contradictory. 

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For your viewing pleasure, I was recently on PBS, interviewed for the programme In the Public Square. Watch it here.

You can also see me live this week – I’m doing an online talk for the UK National Archives this Friday, 29 May at 2pm BST / 9am EST. More information here.

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