{"id":2154,"date":"2025-07-07T14:22:19","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T14:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/?p=2154"},"modified":"2025-07-12T19:21:02","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T19:21:02","slug":"the-lost-art-of-incomprehension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/the-lost-art-of-incomprehension\/","title":{"rendered":"The lost art of incomprehension"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n

Text by Danny Pottharst<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I am no stranger to incomprehension. One might even say we are close friends: I\u2019ve grown up in constant tandem with it because of my deafness, which hinges my detection of sound on the cochlear implants I was implanted with as an infant. Though the degree of detection I can accomplish with this technology approaches that of a hearing individual, it is nevertheless limited, especially in noisy environments.<\/span><\/p>\n

The weightless, alienating confusion of mishearing words or failing to hear them at all has therefore become an intimately familiar sensation to me, and I\u2019ve learned to embrace auditory incomprehension as I navigate the soundscape of my life.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
New to French, the author often struggles to decipher unfamiliar words like the ones in this crossword puzzle on his host family’s kitchen table. Photo by Danny Pottharst.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As I prepared to leave home and travel abroad alone for the first time to study abroad in Arles, I thought often about how my relationship with incomprehension might be complicated by learning a new language. Questions I had never confronted before nagged at me: What happens when sound waves generated by someone else\u2019s speech are received by my auditory nerve, sent to my brain and recognized by it as sound, but are not translated into intelligible meaning? What happens when incomprehension is not a result of failure to hear but a result of failure to understand?<\/span><\/p>\n

I have spent over two glorious weeks in Arles. And so far, my questions remain largely unanswered and my concerns remain non-factors\u2014thanks to English. <\/span><\/p>\n

My first conversation with the family hosting me in Arles assuaged many of my doubts. As I struggled to speak French beyond the most perfunctory greetings and half-formed sentences, it quickly became evident that my host parents are proficient English speakers. After weeks of worrying about communication difficulties with them, this revelation was a profound relief. <\/span><\/p>\n

However, even as my anxiety faded and I settled into a routine with my host family, I couldn\u2019t shake an unsettled feeling. Here I was in a foreign country that speaks a foreign language, but I was predominantly speaking my native language. English had followed me across continents, swaddling me in a cocoon of comprehension where I had been expecting the opposite.  <\/span><\/p>\n

And the more I interacted with Arlesians and explored the city, the more I realized that English hadn\u2019t followed me there\u2014it had been waiting all along.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the privilege of the English speaker: to ride the wave of the most successful linguistic imperial project of the 21st century\u2014and perhaps in human history. According to the International Center for Language Studies, roughly 1.52 billion people speak English as of 2025, the most of any language. Beyond sheer volume, English is truly ubiquitous: it\u2019s spoken in 186 out of the world\u2019s 195 countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

No wonder, then, that my host parents could converse in English with ease and that many Arlesians could address me and other students in English without missing a beat.  <\/span><\/p>\n

No wonder, too, that a similar linguistic crossover does not often occur between host families and exchange students in the United States. My family has hosted several exchange students, none of whose native languages we have spoken. When they stumbled over their English or failed to understand ours, none of us could turn to anything other than English to bridge the communication gap. Here in Arles, when French fails, English is always waiting as a backup. <\/span><\/p>\n

When I discussed this phenomenon with Shiori Usui, a former exchange student who stayed with my family, she remembered being aware that she spoke \u201cJapanese English\u201d\u2014that her English language capabilities, no matter how developed, would never transcend her native language. Despite this potential obstacle, though, people listened to her when she spoke, and that made her feel not only heard but fundamentally respected.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Japanese exchange student Shiori Usui lived with the author’s family when he was a child. From left:  Danny Pottharst, Ed Pottharst, Usui, Elizabeth Ralston, and Amy Pottharst. Photo courtesy of the Pottharst-Ralston family.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With this perspective, I realize that my nervousness about speaking a new language in a foreign environment must have been nothing compared to the anxiety that exchange students traveling to the U.S. may feel. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Arles, I\u2019ve gotten a taste of that experience when my host parents dine with friends. Incomprehension hums at the dinner table in their outdoor patio, where they converse in French in lightning-quick exchanges that a novice like me cannot begin to understand. When the vocalizations of their questions to me in French dissipate into the air too quickly to catch, incomprehension kickstarts my pulse and sends my brain into a frenzy of improvisation. It lingers, perched on my tongue, as I tentatively answer \u201cOui!\u201d and hope for the best. I am an audience member watching them and their guests, actors in a play, enthusiastically gesticulate and glide over their words as smoothly as softened butter. <\/span><\/p>\n

My homestay has by no means been a plunge into the deep end of French, however. That plunge \u2014 forsaking one\u2019s native language and learning a foreign one\u2014 is an option for me, whereas it is often a necessity for exchange students traveling to the U.S. Incomprehension is scary for anyone, but it is a luxury to experience from the safe zone that English provides. In the rare moments I find to sit in my incomprehension, like those at the dinner table, I understand a different kind of meaning communicated in people\u2019s body language and vocal inflections\u2014a meaning that clues me into some deeper, primal element flavoring their words. <\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, I can\u2019t feasibly achieve French fluency before I leave Arles. I can, however, embrace the difficulty of learning a new language as Shiori did and exchange students everywhere do. I can remain critically aware of English\u2019s global hegemony. And I can, as Shiori said, listen. In the end, that\u2019s all any of us can do in situations of language difference: listen to one another without judgment in a shared humanity that transcends those differences. That is how we rediscover the lost art of incomprehension.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Text by Danny Pottharst I am no stranger to incomprehension. One might even say we are close friends:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":2156,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123,20],"tags":[132,124,125,126],"class_list":["post-2154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-language","category-postcards","tag-editors-pick","tag-french","tag-language","tag-study-abroad"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/danny_post_1B-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2154"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2336,"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions\/2336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.ieimedia.com\/2025arles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}