Thread by @erikaheidewald

i love languages and never speak any of the ones i learned because white people managed to turn learning other languages into something paternalistic and insulting. How the fuck did we turn speaking a shared language into the polar opposite of human connection and communication

https://twitter.com/PandaoramaLink/status/1382375819809492994

I feel like this is a good example of cultural appropriation versus appreciation. Language is about communication so learning Mandarin should be about communicating with Chinese people. But there's no interest in actual communication here. He isn't seeing her as a person

Like many language learners, I love learning the structure of languages and how they work - but they're not just grammar and vocabulary. You cannot divorce the language from the people who speak it and the culture that language shaped and was shaped by. That is appropriation.

Chinese people aren't usually impressed when a white person can speak Mandarin. In my experience, people complimented me on my nihao bc they were being polite, or they were briefly surprised and then went full steam ahead talking to me like I was a native, no training wheels

I lived in Beijing for seven months and spoke Mandarin most of the time and what was thrilling for me was that by the end of it, I could have normal interactions at the post office or grocery store without needing to think about how to talk so I got to just *exist* there

When I was leaving Beijing I took a taxi to the train station and I talked to the driver for an hour bc he was excited to ask me questions he'd been curious about - mostly about how Americans perceived China - and for me, it felt like the culmination of everything i’d learned

it felt like that was exactly why I'd spent seven months studying Chinese all day every day, it was for the small, real moments like this. He was someone I never would've been able to talk to otherwise. It was a great conversation and it was worth every hour of studying

That's what learning languages can do. They have the ability to connect people from different cultures with very different lives who never would’ve had the chance to communicate otherwise. So it feels really sad and sick to me that this guy missed the whole fucking point.

For him, another culture’s language is just another thing to be gameified, conquered, and paraded around for an ego boost. He doesn't want to interact on a human level, he wants her to genuflect in the face of his white man skill that he assumes will shock & impress her

he presumes she has spent any time in the past thinking about what skills white men can and cannot learn and he is sure she’s underestimated him. holy motherfucking projection. and i just wonder, aren’t you tired of nothing ever being real? why aren’t you tired of that?

why aren’t white people tired of always positioning themselves above other people in an attempt to manipulate every interaction? i know talking to people like human beings requires listening and it requires the other person’s consent and white people don’t tend to care for those.

but it seems to me that it goes even deeper. why are you so afraid of being on an equal playing field with other people? why are you so afraid of just connecting on a human level? are you afraid you’ll look within yourself and find there’s nobody there?