I’m not going to use these people’s names, even if the Times does, because I like them and don’t want to treat them badly. He’s a bookstore owner who speaks English, and his wife, a Mandarin speaker, and they’ve done what people have been doing for millennia, to everyone’s benefit: fallen in love and married across the boundaries of their own socio-linguistic groups. Unfortunately, the story says, despite being married for years, it appears they have become too addicted to their phones to learn to talk to each other.
As mentioned in the story, they use the Microsoft Translator app all day, every day. Times Hill writes that their phones are so important to everyday communications that they have eight external battery packs to keep them running.
Translator is an absolutely fantastic app. While many companies, including Apple, have been trying to make spoken, live-in-the-ear translation work for years, it’s still very difficult to be reliable. In the story, it appears that the husband and wife are using the “Auto” mode in the translator, which arrived in 2020. It is a robust and elegantly designed translation interface for two-person conversations.
In auto mode, you select two languages. A person speaks one language; After a few seconds a written translation appears. Without tapping anything, the other person speaks another language; First comes a translation. It’s not flashy, but it’s plain and it works. Apparently all day, unfortunately.
Increasingly, the study of English as a second language supports the idea that immersion programs give students an edge when it comes to testable improvements in English, such as TOEFL scores. There are also small indications that tandem language learners – participants in a reciprocal exchange system acting as learner-teacher – are achieving more effective language instruction than classrooms.
But here are some anecdotes: I’ve taught several classes to English beginners whose first languages I didn’t know. From “I’ve memorized a few hundred flashcards” to “I speak English, but I’m still learning,” there’s nothing in the world better than a few months of shaky, painful initial conversations to develop students.
I’ve become at least somewhat able to communicate in some of the languages I’ve been fully immersed in for a long time – Spanish and Korean – but I’m unable to communicate at all in Japanese, despite studying it for decades with apps and books. My conclusion is that I learn to speak languages by watching and listening to people who are watching me, and speaking those languages back to them. I have concluded that this is why gamified language apps are not getting most people fluent in their target languages.
And assuming you don’t live somewhere with a single, isolated language, you’ve probably noticed that people in romantic relationships with people who speak their target language are experiencing second language acquisition on steroids – such an opportunity wasted for the book store owner and his wife.
Don’t get me wrong: The New York Times couple comes across as the nicest people in the world, and I wish them the best, but that’s why I get creeped out when they’re staring at that phone instead of each other.
The man in the New York Times story says in an embedded video that he’ll never learn to read Chinese, which is a shame. But another video paints a more promising picture. The couple are shopping at what looks like Costco, and we see the husband struggling to get the phrase Mixed Greens, a corporate neologism, to appear to the translator. We see his wife’s expression completely narrowed and confused, until he says “shala” – salad in Mandarin – and recognition suddenly brightens her face. I guess she knows what kind of salad he means because they’re married. In this particular video the phone is clearly a hindrance rather than a tool.
According to a story in the Economist a few months ago, one issue may be that people in the retirement age group have become addicted to their phones. People in this age group spend more screen time per day than young adults, and are “increasingly living their lives through their phones, the way tweens or teens sometimes do,” Ipsit Wahia, who runs Harvard’s McLean Hospital Technology and Aging Laboratory, told the Economist.
There’s a particularly sweet bit in the story in which it’s revealed that the couple were looking at each other a little too much, which led to them getting messed up results from Microsoft Translator. For best results, they should see their words being transmitted over the phone, not their conversation partner, otherwise this may result in a transcription error or stop receiving input unexpectedly.
They should take this as a sign that their intuition is right: All they need to do is look at each other’s loving faces and turn off the phone completely.
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