language and mindfulness

  I am continuing today to reflect on language learning as specifically a mindful practice. I thought about quite a few things during my readings of the Buddhist psychology assigned readings. One such thing is how language learning must have very different phases of being. In the beginning of learning Mandarin, for example, I found it very difficult to retain my memory of the words and their meaning, since there is hardly an equivalent of many of the sounds and pronunciations in English. As I became more familiar with the context of certain words, I was able to retain more, and the way the language is structured helped me remember individual words. And still later, there was a kind of delight in remembering certain words, akin to scoring points in a video game.
   All good and well, you might think, but how is this tying in with mindfulness? My answer is that learning a new language forces a person to really be reflective on what the word is and what it means. It is not an automatic process but is a deeply conscious one, and it doesn't take for granted what I might think a word would mean. Whereas a familiar language can be built up from many random associations of words, a new language takes a person to a beginner's mind. In that sense, it is truly a discovery to deal with every word and its meaning. More importantly, learning a new language can be a way of thinking without the baggage of the self, which is often constructed from one's native language around many associations.
     I would like to explore a more intermediate experience of language--such as that of learning and reading French. Though I take French to be my second language, my fluency in this language would be moderate and not 100% at all. This kind of language learning would be somewhere in between the familiarity of a native language and the unfamiliarity of something completely new to me.