Will those of us who still insist on typing with our own hands end up like those who once insisted on writing by hand — relics of a vanishing era? Perhaps. And yet, I still prefer the act of typing myself. Handwriting, by contrast, has always felt strangely heavy and exhausting to me.

As voice input grows ever more efficient, and AI-powered polishing becomes widely accessible, almost anyone can now produce a well-written article with ease. This has led me to ask a deeper question: is language, in fact, the foundational layer beneath all logic?

I have tried thinking in German, in English, in Cantonese. Each time I switched, I could feel my logic narrowing — the boundaries of what I could express and perceive contracting into a smaller and smaller space. This cognitive constraint, born from insufficient fluency, made me realize something important: language is not merely a tool for expression. It is the very boundary of thought.

Language is not the same as wisdom, yet it is wisdom’s most direct extension. Diagrams, numbers, code — these logical carriers that transcend natural language form the scaffolding of human thought. Without them as support, pure consciousness alone would struggle to carry out any complex act of reasoning.

Does this mean we must keep learning and using these tools? I believe so. To abandon language and writing is, in some meaningful sense, to abandon the capacity for reasoned thought. In the age of AI, the importance of learning and reading has not diminished — if anything, it has grown. They are your inner tools: the things AI cannot replace.

The pattern holds across every domain:

• Without having studied music, even with AI assistance you might generate a melody — but you cannot truly understand its structure, its depth, its internal logic.
• Without having studied mathematics, even with AI assistance you might solve an equation — but you cannot truly understand what the math means, how it fits together, or why it works.
• Without having studied programming, even with AI assistance you might produce working code — but you cannot truly understand the architecture, the trade-offs, or the thinking behind it.

In the post-AI era, I believe the learning of language and writing remains profoundly important. Books and reading are still among the most powerful means available to us for enriching and deepening our inner intelligence. Mastering a language is also one of the ways humans can forge a genuine connection with AI — because you need real inner depth to hold a meaningful conversation with it.

One last personal note. I will keep working on German, English, Japanese, and Cantonese, and I plan to begin exploring Hebrew. My goal is to be able to truly think in German and English — not in the translated sense, but to actually operate inside the logical framework of the language itself.

For someone who, at thirty, is still fundamentally a single-language thinker, this will be a long and fascinating journey of the mind. I am looking forward to it.