I felt that learning French would be a daunting task as I had no background with the language, and I didn’t understand a single word. Nevertheless, when my Rosetta Stone French Level 1 arrived, I was eager to dive in. A month and a half later, with about 20 minutes of practice three times a week, I’ve completed Unit 1. By my calculations, this is 5 percent of the way through the entire course (four units per level, five levels in total). Putting my progress in this perspective definitely helps because it tempers my expectations, and I just…

The last time I was in Paris, I met a French Nobel laureate. We had a long discussion about how language influences the way we think. One question we pondered was whether English is more rational than French. The Nobel laureate said that languages are closer to animals than to physical phenomena; as animals, they are ruled in part by logic and optimization procedures and in part by history. Our conversation was long and involved. I actually did not understand some of his ideas so I will not try to summarize them. But let me tell you what happened…