For those of us who acquire it rather than inherit it, language is never simply spoken. To me, learning English felt like earning passage across land that was never mine to begin with. Every sentence was a toll I had to pay in advance, to prove I deserved to keep walking. AI does not ask for that toll. It opens the gate before I have said a word. But an open gate is not the same as solid ground, and now the work is deciding which parts of what lies beyond it will actually hold my weight. The proving did not disappear. It moved from my mouth to my judgment.
Wittgenstein’s claim that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” reads differently depending on who is doing the building. For a native speaker, the limit can feel like the elusive line of the horizon, never quite touched but beautiful to look at in the morning from my back porch as I watch the sun explode into color along the crests of Pikes Peak, one of Colorado’s fourteeners I plan to summit before I die. But the limit of an acquired language rarely feels like a horizon. It feels like a fence, deliberately installed by someone else, and mended by someone else too, long before you ever learned where the gate was.
I grew up speaking Romanian, learning English as the language that would carry me into my American life, and absorbing Farsi, the mother tongue of my child’s father. Each language holds me differently. Romanian represents the house I was born into. I never have to knock at the door to enter it. In Farsi I am a guest who has learned the customs but will always ask before opening a cupboard. In English I did the building myself, plank by plank, and I still remember the smell of sawdust.
When I was learning English, the language arrived through structures I did not design. Teachers corrected my verb tenses in red ink. Textbooks offered model sentences and asked me to approximate them until the approximation became fluency. I fondly remember my fourth grade English teacher, Mrs. Weltman, who asked us to memorize passages from a textbook called Discovery. How could I possibly pronounce the word “cheetah” without a smirk crossing my face? But because of that practice, ridiculous as it felt at eleven years old, I learned how to build a sentence in English the way you learn to build anything: by copying a form until your hands know it without being told. Fluency arrives through submission to an external standard before it can ever be earned through instinct. I could not yet judge whether a sentence was elegant. I could only judge whether it matched what I had been told was correct, because the instrument that tells the difference between elegant and merely correct had not been built in me yet.
AI produces language differently, and the difference runs deeper than it first appears. When I generate a draft with AI to support a training module, the authority does not transfer the way it did through a teacher’s red pen. I bring the research. I bring the sequencing, the sense of what a learner needs at minute three versus minute thirty, and years of watching how adults actually absorb new material, which depends far more on trust and pacing than on correct grammar. AI can hand me twelve versions of a paragraph in the time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee, but it cannot decide which of those twelve respects the people who will eventually sit through the material. That decision requires the instrument I did not yet possess as a child memorizing textbook passages about cheetahs. That instrument has a name. It is called critical thinking.
For thirty years, the only instrument I trusted with English was permission. I waited to be corrected before I trusted a sentence. I waited to be told a word was right before I let myself believe it. Critical thinking asks something different of me. It does not wait to be granted. It is what I apply, deliberately, to every line the AI hands back to me, deciding not whether I am allowed to say something, but whether it is true.
In practice, this means I set my own standards before I ever open a prompt window: what register the material needs, what a Romanian, American, or Iranian reader might hear differently in a given phrase than I intend, where a metaphor will clarify and where it will only fog the glass. Then I read everything that comes back the way a person reads a mountain slope before deciding whether it is safe to cross that morning. Snow that looks packed and stable from a distance can be hollow underneath, waiting. A paragraph can be hollow the same way, smooth on the screen and empty underneath it. Using AI does not remove me from the process. It puts me at the front of the line, deciding which parts of the terrain will hold.
Some things do not survive the crossing between languages, and I no longer count that as a failure. There is a tenderness in Farsi, braided with grief, that English flattens no matter how gently I try to carry it over. There is a Romanian bluntness that lands as harsh in English, though at home it carries its own kind of warmth, the way a hard slap on the back means something different depending on who is standing behind you. I used to read this as proof that my English fell short. Now I read it as proof about language itself. Each one I carry gives me a different angle on the same reality. The full shape only comes into view when I hold all at once.
I want to close with a reference to Wendell Berry, who recently passed away, and whose restraint has shaped how I pay attention. Berry spent his life writing about a single stretch of Kentucky farmland, and in doing so proved that looking closely at one place can open a wider view than travel ever could. One of his poems describes walking into the woods to rest among wild things that do not tax themselves with forethought of grief. I return to that poem when a workflow gets loud, when the draft in front of me is fluent but hollow at the center. The peace Berry describes represents discipline of attending to what is actually there instead of settling for what is merely available, and that discipline decides whether the language I put into the world deserves to stand.
The limits of my language no longer feel fixed the way they did when I was eleven years old, mouthing the word cheetah into a mirror until it stopped sounding foreign. They shift now, depending on which language I am standing in and which tool I am using to think with. But the limit that has always mattered most was never linguistic. It is the limit of my own attention. And that one has always been mine to set.
Author bio
Roxana Cazan is a writer, scholar, and learning and organizational development professional who lives across languages. Born into Romanian, she speaks English at home, is fluent in Spanish, and reads French better than she speaks it. Arabic and Hindi have welcomed her in, though she can't yet claim much ownership of either. This layered linguistic life shapes everything she does, from teaching literature to designing learning experiences for organizations. She has taught at Saint Francis University and the University of Oklahoma, published poetry, co-edited an award-winning anthology, and co-organized international conferences. Today she leads learning and development work while continuing to write about language, migration, and belonging. At home, she is adding Farsi and Kurdish to her family's vocabulary, one dinner-table phrase at a time.
