Have you ever felt that conversations end before they really begin?

You speak.

They reply.

And yet, somehow, nothing actually happens, nothing actually changes.

We have never had so many ways to talk, through face to face conversations, through social media, through applications such as Wechat and WhatsApp, through email, and even through letters.

And yet, it has never been so hard to be understood.

I recently read (past tense) an article about the Tower of Babel from Xiaohongshu.

It is an old story.

Once, people spoke the same language.

They gathered, and said: “Come, let us build a city, and a tower that reaches the heavens so that our name may be remembered.”

For a moment, it was beautiful.

A shared language.

A shared direction.

A shared belief that if we spoke the same words, we could finally become one.

But then something shifted.

Their language was broken apart.

Words no longer meant the same things.

Voices overlapped, but meaning did not.

And the tower collapsed.

Not because they could not build, but because they could no longer understand each other.

We often think Babel was a punishment.

But what if it was something else?

What if the real fracture was not in language itself, but in the misunderstanding that language alone could hold us together?

And now we are building again.

But at this time, the tower is not made of stone.

It is made of data, the Internet, social media ........

Algorithms rebuild Babel in a quieter way.

We think we are connected.

But what you see, or what we see, has never truly been the same.

We scroll through different worlds, speak the same words, and still miss each other entirely.

We can hear each other. But we no longer understand.

Not because we speak different languages, but because we no longer understand the meanings of the same sentence.

So maybe Babel never collapsed.

It multiplied from one tower into thousands of invisible ones.

Each of us inside one, calling out, and hearing echoes that sound just like ourselves.

And yet difference was never the tragedy.

It was the gift.

Language was never only a bridge.

It was always also a boundary.

The question was never whether walls exist, but whether we are willing to walk across them.

In linguistics, there is a simple idea: every translation loses something.

From Chinese to English, it is hard to translate. Even if we translate the sentences, they seem to have large differences.

But translation is not just between languages.

Every day, we translate:

And somewhere in between, something disappears.

There are moments when you pause and think:

“I don’t know how to say this.”

“Even if I say it, you won’t get it.”

“Never mind.”

"Anyways"

Those are not just pauses.

They are losses.

Recently, I came across something that stayed with me.

People started using a word—“distill.”

They “distill” their colleagues, their exes, even themselves.

I know it comes from AI.

But hearing it applies to people—

it felt strangely unsettling.

Another moment:

someone pointed out that the word “yellowing”—

as in old paper fading with time—

is slowly disappearing.

We don’t read newspapers like before.

We don’t keep things long enough to watch them age.

We cannot even focus on something for a long time (maybe only one hour and a half).

The world moves forward too quickly.

Nothing stays. Nothing turns yellow.

We are forgetting everything quickly and quietly and easily.

Recently, I read another passage from one of the most famous organizations called Xinshixiang on the day of April 20th, which is the day of UN Chinese Language Day. The passage just made me shocked. The passage made my heart moved. The titile of the passage is: I Often Feel Fortunate That My Mother Tongue Is Chinese

As an international student, I often joke with my friends that in my next life, I hope my first language will be English. It’s an easy thing to say, almost a reflex.

But recently, I found myself thinking more seriously about it.

I love words. I really do.

And there is something in Chinese—its characters, its way of carrying meaning—that feels profoundly different. It holds emotion not just on the surface, but deep within its form. It carries a kind of weight, a quiet intensity, a layered depth that feels almost impossible to fully translate into other languages.

Perhaps I feel this way because English is not my mother language. Or perhaps every language has its own unreachable beauty. Either way, they are not the same.

By coincidence, on this year’s United Nations Chinese Language Day, I came across that article that brought all these thoughts rushing back. And in that moment, something inside me settled. It reaffirmed a feeling I had not fully dared to claim before.

I use English to communicate. To connect. To function. It is practical, efficient, necessary.

But only when I write something in Chinese, I truly feel the power of the language.

It is a power that does not merely describe emotion—it awakens it.

A force that reaches inward, presses against the soul, and lingers there.

Sometimes, a single sentence can strike the heart with such precision and force that it feels almost physical—like being pierced, like being seen, like being understood in a way no translation could ever replicate.

I am grateful that my mother tongue is Chinese.

In the passage, another concept is introduced: semantic bleaching.

And then I remembered something once said:

The easiest thing in the world to wear out is language.

Because the moment it is spoken, it is already misunderstood.

Already simplified. Always lost.

When a word is used again and again,

it slowly loses its precision.

Its sharpness.

Its weight.

We still say the same words.

But we no longer mean the same things.

We say:

But when everything becomes “too much,” what words are left for the moments that truly are?

但我仍然记得，语言本该是什么样子。

我记得，被一个词精准击中的瞬间。

我记得“落花生”这个词，

花落入土，完成生命的生长。

它不仅是一个名字，

也是一个过程，

一种静默发生的生命。

在一些方言里，

小雨叫“滴星”。

回家叫“去归”。

早餐叫“吃天光”，

晚饭叫“吃落昏”。

语言，不只是信息。

它在承载世界

So maybe the problem is not that we speak too little.

Maybe it’s that we no longer stay with what we say.

We use words to move faster, not to go deeper.

We express—but we don’t linger.

Perhaps today’s Babel is not that we speak different languages.

But that we use the same words— and no longer share the same meanings.

So today, I want to invite you to do something small.

To resist.

To resist efficiency.

To resist worn-out language.

To choose one word,

and mean it.

To say something—

and stay with it.

所以今天，我想邀请你做一件小事。

去抵抗。

抵抗效率，

抵抗被磨损的表达。

认真选一个词，

认真说一句话。

然后，停下来。

Because as Ludwig Wittgenstein once said:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

So maybe the question is not:

“Why can’t we understand each other?”

“为什么我们听不懂彼此？”

But—

what kind of language are we still willing to live in?

我们还愿意生活在什么样的语言之中？