The Architecture of Language: What My Students Taught Me About My Own Tongue

Which languages do you speak and how did that impact your life?

To be fair, I only speak one language fluently: English. More specifically, American English—which, as I’ve learned, has some distinct variations from its British counterpart.

I took French in high school and even attempted to pick it back up in college as a potential minor. After a few years away from it, I hit a brick wall. The speed of native speakers felt insurmountable, and the precision required for the French accent was simply beyond my current range. However, that high school experience led me to travel to France during the summer of my sophomore year, an experience that remains a cornerstone of my writing.

Language has always fascinated me. I love to read and write, and I pride myself on being a strong communicator and an active listener—though public speaking remains a different beast entirely. That lifelong fascination with literacy and communication eventually led me to the classroom as an English teacher.

Studying a foreign language also taught me the full, painful impact of the expression, “it loses something in the translation.” During my senior year, my teacher had us read The Little Prince in French. I hadn’t read it in English beforehand, so I had no basis for comparison. But as I became immersed in the original text, I could feel the disconnection whenever the teacher translated a passage—the loss of cadence, the diminished potency of the words, and the missing fluency of the original sentence. For this reason, I’ve always wanted to learn enough German to read All Quiet on the Western Front in its original language. The power of that book holds up even in translation; I can only imagine how it reads in German.

Perhaps the most unexpected takeaway from studying a foreign language was realizing that I learned more about English grammar in those classes than I ever did as a native speaker. This is a point I try to drive home with my high school students. It’s funny—whenever I say it out loud, I can immediately spot the students who already speak a second language because they nod in recognition. They get it.

When you’re a kid studying grammar in your native tongue, you couldn’t give two shits about direct objects. But when you’re learning a foreign language for the first time, you have to pay attention to the architecture of the sentence—the fact that a direct object is the entity receiving the action, the specific word order, and the structure. You pay significantly more attention to these mechanics in a foreign language than you ever do in your own.

Unless, of course, you’re a grammar dork like me.

Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Having crossed the 1,000-day milestone, I’m now charting the territory beyond. The mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.

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The article “The Architecture of Language: What My Students Taught Me About My Own Tongue” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.

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