I have spent over twenty years teaching people to speak English. Not type it into a box and let a machine rearrange it. Speak it. Out loud. With their mouths. With the wrong conjugation and the misplaced emphasis and the accent that makes “beach” sound like something else entirely and the laughter that follows when everyone in the room realizes what just happened. That laughter is where language lives. And I am watching it die.
Translation apps are killing language learning. I don’t mean they’re making it less popular. I mean they’re removing the reason to try. Why would you spend two years learning Vietnamese when you can hold up your phone and have the sentence appear in half a second? Why would you stumble through tones and embarrass yourself at a coffee stall when Google will do it for you, perfectly, silently, without the risk of looking stupid?
I’ll tell you why. Because looking stupid is the whole point.
When you try to speak someone’s language and you get it wrong, something happens that no app can replicate. The other person sees you trying. They see the effort. They see a human being who cared enough to sound like a fool in their language instead of staying comfortable in their own. And something opens. A door, a smile, a willingness to meet you halfway that didn’t exist thirty seconds ago. You didn’t say the sentence correctly. You said something better. You said, “I see you. Your language matters. You matter enough for me to embarrass myself.”
A phone says none of that. A phone says: I need information from you and here is the most efficient way to get it.
I’ve traveled to more than fifty countries. I don’t speak fifty languages. I don’t even speak five that well. But in every country I’ve ever been, I’ve learned something. The word for “thank you.” The word for “delicious.” The word for “coffee,” which is almost always some version of the same Arabic root, which means every time you order coffee in any language, you’re participating in a thousand-year-old chain of human trade and migration and you don’t even know it unless you bothered to learn the word.
In Saigon I’ve learned how to order variations of different coffees, for example: cà phê sữa đá (iced condensed milk coffee) and cảm ơn (thank you) and ngon (delicious) and xin chào (literally ‘please hello’) and how to tell a xe om driver I’d like to walk, and that may not seem like much, but it’s mine. I earned it. I said it wrong and got corrected and said it wrong again and got corrected again and now when I say ‘ngon’ to the coffee lady she nods like I’ve passed a small test and the coffee tastes better for it. Not because the word changed the flavor. Because the effort changed the relationship.
The proponents of translation apps will tell you they’re democratizing communication. Making travel accessible. Breaking down barriers. And they’re not wrong. A person who doesn’t speak a word of Vietnamese can now navigate Saigon, order food, get a cab, check into a hotel, and handle a medical emergency without learning a single syllable. That’s remarkable. That’s useful. That even saves lives in some cases.
But here’s what it costs.
It costs the cab ride where you learn that the driver has three kids and his favorite food is Bun Bo Hue and he was a tank driver on the day Saigon fell in 1975 and he laughs when you try to say his name correctly. You don’t get that through a screen. You get the destination. You don’t get the journey. (And the journey is what matters in the end…)
It costs the market interaction where the woman selling bananas teaches you the word for ripe (chín) and you teach her the English word and she repeats it back and you both stand there in the heat holding bananas and laughing at each other’s pronunciation and neither of you will remember the other’s name but both of you will remember that moment because it was real and human.
It costs the slow, cumulative, irreplaceable process of your brain rewiring itself to think in patterns that are not your own. That’s what language learning actually is. It’s not vocabulary and grammar. It’s the act of stepping outside your own cognitive framework and trying on someone else’s. It’s learning that Vietnamese has six tones and each one changes the meaning of a word and suddenly you understand something about precision and music and attention that you could never have understood from inside English alone. It’s learning that there’s no direct equivalent for “I” in Vietnamese because the pronoun changes depending on your age, gender, and relationship to the person you’re speaking to, and suddenly you understand something about Vietnamese social structure that no Wikipedia article could teach you. Tôi ~ neutral, formal, safe for strangers. Mình ~ casual, warm, among friends. Em ~ when speaking to someone older, shows respect Anh ~ used by an older male speaking to someone younger. Chị ~ used by an older female speaking to someone younger.
That’s what gets lost when the app does it for you. Not the words. The understanding.
I’m an ESL teacher watching the ground shift under my profession. I see a future where my students’ children don’t learn English because their earbuds translate in real time. I see a future where a CELTA certification means as much as a telegraph operator’s license. I see a future where the phrase “Do you speak English?” is replaced by the gesture of holding up a phone, which is not a question at all, but a statement: I don’t need to speak your language and you don’t need to speak mine and we can both pretend this is progress.
Maybe it is progress. Maybe the time people spent learning languages can now be spent curing diseases or writing poetry or solving climate change. Maybe freeing humanity from the burden of multilingualism is a net good. Maybe efficiency was always the goal and I’m just a woman on a plastic stool in Saigon who doesn’t want to accept that the world moved on.
But I don’t think so.
I think language is the last handmade thing. In a world of automation and algorithms and AI (and yes, I see the irony, I’m a creator of an ever-evolving book series about AI in education), language remains the one skill that requires you to be fully present, fully vulnerable, fully human in front of another fully human person. You cannot automate vulnerability. You cannot outsource the courage it takes to open your mouth and say something badly in someone else’s language and wait to see if they understand.
The apps give us the words. They don’t give us the trying.
And the trying was always the part that mattered.
I sat in a cafe in Saigon last week and felt the presence of a young woman hovering at my table for thirty seconds composing a sentence on her phone before showing me the screen. She never spoke. I never spoke. The transaction was completed. The receipt was returned. Nothing was lost except everything that makes two strangers in a room more than just two strangers in a room.
She didn’t learn the English for “May I take your receipt?” She’ll never need to. The app said it for her. And I’ll never really understand why she needed it back, LOL. And next week it’ll say something else. And the week after that. And eventually the idea that you would spend years building another language inside your brain, storing it in your mouth and your muscle memory and your dreams, will seem as quaint as writing letters by hand. I’m still a postcard writer, though. I will keep resisting for as long as possible.
I teach people to speak. That’s my life’s work. Not to communicate. To speak. There’s a difference, and the difference is the sound of your own voice doing something brave in a language that doesn’t belong to you, and the face of the person across from you softening when they realize you tried.
No app has ever made a face soften.
No screen has ever laughed at a mispronunciation and then poured you more coffee because the effort was enough. Or, given you a sweet potato for nothing, just that their eyes smiled when I attempted Vietnamese. Or so much free tea. “Sit here all day,” their eyes smile…because you respect me enough to attempt my language. My DIFFICULT language.
Learn the language. Any language. Even badly. Especially badly. The mistakes are where the magic lives, and the magic is disappearing one translated screen at a time.
25May26