I've been trying to learn French recently. Well, more accurately, I've been trying to cram French recently - I have a trip to Paris coming up, which I've known about since March, and in fact even had the French-learning software since March, but being a writer it was absolutely necessary to procrastinate until weeks before I'm due to leave, despite my promise to myself that the next time I went to France I'd make sure I could speak the language. And even, oddly enough, despite the fact that I actually enjoy learning languages. Writer's logic.

I'm using Rosatte stone, which is great for learning nouns and verbs and adjectives like colour and number, but absolutely terrible for the more subtle nuances of language like pronouns, abstract verbs (or abstract anything), grammar, possessives, and anything other than vocab, really. You're shown a picture of a girl holding a pen, and given a phrase. You repeat the phrase. You can even match the phrase to the picture later on,or similar pictures, based on your ability to recognise the word 'girl' and 'pen', but you have no way of knowing what it was that phrase actually says. A girl and a pen? The girl's pen? A girl with a pen? A girl has a pen? The girl likes her pen? No idea. It's down to how you've interpreted the image. They then try to build on this complete absence of understanding, and you end up with an extremely superficial grasp of the language. I spent an entire chapter lesson thinking they were trying to teach me present and past tense, when in fact they were teaching negative nouns.

I've taken to having Google Translate open on the other screen. New phrases are typed in, I see what they're trying to teach me, and we go from there. This pretty much violates their notion of "natural language learning", where you learn by being immersed in the language - it's never translated back to your native tongue, you work purely in the learned language. But static images really can't convey abstract concepts like possession vs use vs proximity, and these concepts are crucial to language.

I don't know if I really have a point here, other than that I think it's fascinating just how complex our communication has become. We have concepts that cannot be reliably expressed in any other form. And yet, there still exist languages that have no number words, or no pronouns, or no measurement of time, distance or count - because the people using that language have never needed it. There's a school of thought that language controls our thinking, because thoughts need to be expressed in words. I find that a flimsy argument in some respects - it certainly is possible to think without words, and the connections between ideas are far faster and more efficient when you don't slow them down to force them into language. But there is the notion that as a culture, there are entire notions that are left behind if they're not catered for by your language.

I've run into the issue once or twice. At times, when I've been utterly exhausted or running a dangerous fever, I've had episodes where I have woken and my brain's reality check had gone for lunch. My theory is that some sections of my brain were still "alseep", and I had no idea what was real, what was out of memory or imagination. I couldn't remember my name, my life, or even that it was impossible for there to be a spaceship outside my bedroom door and the toasters to be having a revolution and siding with the vampires. The notion of 'me' was entirely gone, I was just a floating experience, scrambling to make sense of things with absolutely no compass for what was possible and what wasn't.

It is extroadinarily difficult to communicate this notion of depersonalisation using a tool that assumes the speaker has some form of identity. I say "I felt" but there was no 'me'. There was a focus of experience, but no personality inside. I couldn't remember what it felt like to be me - I couldn't even remember that I was supposed to be able to feel that way. Like a blank slate, but a slate that still cares for its own existence, and is resolute that no damn toaster is going to feed it to a vampire, spaceship or none. We can't rationally discuss entities that experience this. Just like those Amazon tribes can't discuss how many animals they hunted, or how old they are, or where they were last winter.

Perhaps that's one of the points of science fiction - to find the concepts that we haven't needed to talk about yet, so we can stretch our language to fit them.