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How Long to Become Fluent in the Language of Ideas?

It’s enormously harder to invent a new language than to acquire an existing one. The same holds true for the language of ideas. But is there such a thing as a “language” of ideas? As with many questions, the answer is both Yes and No. There is no specific language of ideas possessing its own unique vocabulary and grammar, and peculiar to some ethnic or national group. There is, however, a set of ideas that can be expressed in clear and distinct sentences in almost any language. A few people are remarkably fluent in this universal language. Most people, however, can only express ideas with difficulty: they oversimplify, they confuse their categories, they contradict themselves, they ramble.

Many years ago Northrop Frye wrote in an newspaper article, ‘Ideas don’t exist until they have been incorporated into words; the operation of thinking is the practice of articulating ideas until they are in the right words.’ It’s a half-truth, but a very important half-truth. There are people who, having read a book or thought deeply about a subject, can effortlessly articulate the ideas involved. But they’re rare. To be able to express ideas clearly and succinctly, most people would have to write their ideas out and then commit them to memory. But that’s a lot of work. A better and easier way would be to acquire ideas that have already been articulated by other people, especially in the form of aphorisms from the great and the famous.

However there are two problems with this method for becoming fluent in the language of ideas. The first is that the vocabulary of this language is scattered throughout countless books, essays, newspaper articles, lectures and web pages. Finding and choosing the best aphorisms and quotes, and then organizing them by subject—120 subjects pretty much covers the ground—would be too large a task if each person had to do it for himself. I know because I did it, and it took me about twenty years. However, that job has been done and the result is online.

Now you might object, “What you call the vocabulary of the language of ideas is just your selection, a selection that reflects your tastes and biases. Another person’s selection would be quite different.” I agree that someone else’s selection would be different, but I don’t think it would be all that different in content. There are many ways of saying the same thing or saying a similar thing. Moreover there would be a considerable overlap because the best things that were said by famous people are well known, and are frequently quoted in books, essays, newspaper articles, sermons, etc., as well as being readily accessible online.

The second problem has to do with sounding stilted or pedantic when you attribute an aphorism. More often than not it will be necessary to reference the author because no one’s going to believe that you can come up with all these pithy remarks on the spur of the moment. But you can sound less pedantic by avoiding the phrase “As Plato said. . .” or “As Aristotle said. . .” and saying instead, “According to Aristotle. . .”, “According to Pascal. . ., etc.” Sometimes it’s better to insert the author’s name into the quotation. For example, “Aristotle said that the purpose of education is to make the pupil like what he ought and dislike what he ought.” Or, “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced,” said Keats; “even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.”

How hard is it to become fluent in the language of ideas as compared with one’s native language? A baby can acquire its mother tongue in about six years. By the end of the first year the baby knows fifty words, by the end of the second, 200, by the end of the third, 1000. By the age of six a child has 10,000 words in its passive vocabulary, and for purposes of self-expression, ordinary communication and story telling, the child is fluent. On the other hand an adult can learn a foreign language, albeit with an accent, more quickly than a baby can acquire its mother tongue. The adult already knows one language, knows that languages have a somewhat logical structure, and knows a lot about the world that language describes and represents. These are advantages that the baby, though highly motivated, lacks. It has to learn its native language by brute force of repetition, by being bombarded with words and sentences from the day it is born.

How hard is the language of ideas when compared with a foreign language? In 1998 a British journalist moved to Croatia with his Croatian wife. Asked how long it took him before he was fluent in Croatian—a quite difficult language—he replied: “I never had a lesson, a formal lesson. I never sat down and learned Croatian, I learned Croatian as a baby learns a language. So I would say it took me five years before I could speak fluently. As I say, I learned in a completely unorganized way, just following life and seeing how people speak and how they interact.” No doubt he could have learned Croatian much faster if he had studied it and worked at it.

When it comes to the language of ideas, a novice, even if he’s somewhat allergic to ideas, is in a better position than he is when he begins learning a foreign language. Since he already knows the words and grammar in which the quotes and aphorisms are expressed, all he has to do is to remember the right words in the right order! Moreover, the “vocabulary” of this language is quite small, perhaps as few as 1000 aphorisms for fluency—though of course it can be expanded indefinitely. Compare this with the 20,000 to 35,000 words the average adult knows in his native language, not to mention another 10,000 to 20,000 idioms. Provided one goes about it the right way, acquiring three aphorisms a day is quite doable and should result in fluency by the end of the year. But even a hundred or so aphorisms, if judiciously chosen and thoroughly acquired, will prove extremely useful both in the realm of thought and in the business of living. (See the link below for the theory behind the language of ideas, along with some sample aphorisms.)

Click HERE for the theory behind the Language of Ideas.
For the topics click HERE.