Don't Bother Learning It

“Why is your phone all in English?” the woman at the carrier store asked me. “Did you buy it abroad?” I was in a decent mood and didn’t mind the small talk. Despite the unkempt stubble on my chin giving me what people tend to read as some kind of artistic temperament, I told her I actually teach English. What I didn’t bother explaining was that virtually every phone in the world lets you change the system language, and it has nothing to do with where you bought it. My phone has been set to English since high school — and as someone who never once paid attention in English class yet still topped the class, I think that little habit deserves some of the credit.

The woman, who looked to be around forty, started complaining to me and her coworker simultaneously about how terrible her kid’s English was. “My kid always says, ‘What’s the point of learning English!’ And honestly, I don’t know what the point is either.”

If you’ve ever taught English, you’ve heard this question more times than students have asked you the difference between -less and -ness.

A seventh-grade girl once asked me: “What’s English even for?” My answer was very me: “It’s a way to participate in the world, or simply to avoid being shut out of it.”

Thirteen years old, just started middle school, drowning in coursework, obsessed with anime, family of modest means. Put it all together, and she nodded along on the surface — but I didn’t really think she understood, not yet. At this point in her life, you can’t participate in the world just by going online. More often than not, what you end up participating in is the steady construction of stereotypes.

In my first year of teaching, I had no good answer for this kind of skepticism about English. Especially from the elementary school kids whose prefrontal cortices hadn’t even started developing yet, already deep in nationalist feeling. They’d tell me proudly that they were Chinese and they would speak Chinese. I couldn’t be bothered — maybe the hourly rate just wasn’t enough to cover what it would take to talk them out of it.

Middle schoolers were easier to reason with. By then, whatever fantasies they’d had about school had been ground down by reality. Early mornings, late nights, endless assignments, social drama, homework that could keep you up past midnight — all of it conspired to make every subject equally miserable. English, in this context, had a certain charm. Most of the grammar they’d already seen in elementary school. Total vocabulary to master: under 2,500 words. Spread over three years — 1,095 days — that’s an average of two words a day. And the exams were mostly multiple choice, with minimal writing required. The most right-hand-friendly of all the core subjects. So for a while, I threw myself into convincing students that English was useful and, actually, really easy.

“It’s fine — if I need to talk to a foreigner, I’ll just use a translation app.” This was the counterargument I heard most. And it’s not a bad one. Today’s technology really has broken through the shallower barriers between languages. Even the awkward silence while you wait for a translation is being filled — by things like Apple’s real-time translation in AirPods Pro.

But the deepest gap between Chinese and English isn’t vocabulary or grammar. It’s the difference in how the two languages think — even the way a joke is constructed is fundamentally different. The trouble is, a middle schooler who’s never written a bilingual paper, who’s never sat through a stand-up set completely unable to find the punchline, has no personal experience to draw on.

As for the usual talking points — “you might study abroad,” “it’ll help you find a job,” “you’ll be able to read foreign sources” — sometimes it’s more honest just to drop the pretense and say: “It’s on the exam, so you have to learn it.”

Over time, I developed three different pitches for different kinds of students. The first was a test of my own patience — an elaboration on the classics. Connecting with the world, and so on. Access to information, and so on. Developing a new way of thinking, and so on. It’ll be so much harder to learn when you’re older, and so on.

The second was blunter: learning English is for flexing. Speaking a foreign language is cool. Understanding things other people can’t is cool. There’s this Chinese girl called soph1ee — the moment she opens her mouth and sings I love you so in the videos she posts, the corners of my mouth just go up on their own. What’s the point of looking for meaning in everything? Being cooler than other people feels good.

The third was pure hedonism. If your English isn’t good enough, how are you going to watch all those niche shows no one’s bothered to subtitle? How are you going to shop on international websites? How are you going to “mistranslate” lyrics on purpose on streaming platforms to make melancholy strangers cry at 2 a.m.? And you won’t be able to read David Sedaris’s diaries.

I don’t remember — and have no way of knowing — what that kid who topped his class imagined he’d eventually do with English. He probably never pictured himself, years later, reading a Ronan Farrow longform at midnight, or tuning in every Sunday afternoon just to see Colin Jost’s very punchable face. He definitely never pictured himself teaching it to other people.

Once I confirmed that my SIM card had been reactivated, I looked up at the woman behind the counter. “You can tell your kid,” I said, sliding my ID back into my wallet, “that there’s really only one reason to learn English.” “To make money off foreigners.”