There’s a Valentine’s Day tech story by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times today about two retirement age people in need of a gift, and the gift is to have someone throw their phones into the ocean for them.

I’m not going to use these people’s names even though the Times does, because I like them and don’t want to be mean to them. They’re a book store owner who speaks English, and his wife, a Mandarin speaker, and they’ve done what people have been doing for millennia, to everyone’s benefit: fallen in love and gotten married across the bounds of their own socio-linguistic groups. Unfortunately, the story says, despite having been married for years, it appears they are too addicted to their phones to learn to speak to one another.

As documented in the story, they use the app Microsoft Translator all day every day. Their phones are so critical for everyday communication that they have eight external battery packs on hand to keep them going, the Times’ Hill writes.

Translator is an absolutely brilliant app. While many companies, including Apple, have been trying for years to make spoken, in-ear live translation work, it’s still too clunky to be reliable. In the story, it looks like the husband and wife are using “Auto” mode in Translator, which came along in 2020. It’s a robust and elegantly designed translation interface for two-person conversations.

In Auto mode, you select two languages. One person speaks one language; a written translation pops up in the other seconds later. Without tapping anything, the other person speaks the other language; a translation comes up in the first. It’s not dazzling, but it’s unfussy, and it works. Apparently all day long, unfortunately.

Increasingly, studies of English as a second language back up the idea that immersion programs give students an edge when it comes to testable improvements in English, such as TOEFL scores. There are also small signs that tandem language learners—participants in a mutual exchange system acting as learner-teachers—are receiving more effective language instruction than those in classrooms.

But here are a couple anecdotes: I’ve taught many classes to English beginners whose first languages I didn’t know. There’s nothing in the world like a few months of shaky, painful early conversations to build students up from “I have memorized a couple hundred flashcards” to “I speak English, but I’m still learning.”

I’ve become at least somewhat conversational in the couple of languages I’ve been fully immersed in for long stretches of time—Spanish and Korean—but I’m unable to communicate at all in Japanese, despite studying it for decades with apps and books. My conclusion is that I learn to speak languages by watching and hearing them coming out of the mouths of people who are looking at me, and speaking those languages back to them. This, I’ve concluded, is why gamified language apps are not bringing most people to fluency in their target languages.

And assuming you don’t live somewhere with a single, isolated language, you’ve probably noticed that people in romantic relationships with people who speak their target language are experiencing second language acquisition on steroids—such a squandered opportunity for the book store owner and his wife.

Don’t get me wrong: the New York Times couple come across as the nicest people in the world, and I wish them all the best, but that’s why I watch in horror as they stare at that phone instead of each other.

The man in the New York Times story says in an embedded video that he’ll never learn to read Chinese, which is a shame. But another video paints a more hopeful picture. The couple is shopping in what looks like a Costco, and we see the husband struggle to get Translator to bring across the phrase mixed greens, a corporate neologism. We see his wife’s expression all scrunched up and confused, until he says “shālā”—salad in Mandarin—and recognition suddenly brightens her face. I gather she knows what kind of salad he means because they’re married. The phone, in this particular video, is clearly an obstacle instead of a tool.

According to a story a few months ago from the Economist, one issue might be that retirement aged people are addicted to their phones with shocking intensity. People in this age group rack up more total screen time per day than young adults, and “are increasingly living their lives through their phones, the way teenagers or adolescents sometimes do,” Ipsit Vahia, who runs Harvard’s McLean Hospital Technology and Aging Laboratory, told the Economist.

There’s an especially sweet passage in the story in which the couple is revealed to have been looking at one another a bit to much, causing them to get glitchy results from Microsoft Translator. For best results, they’re supposed to look at their words propagating on the phone, not their conversation partner, or else it might produce a transcription error or unexpectedly stop receiving inputs.

They should take this as a sign that their intuition is correct: they need to just look at each other’s loving faces and put down the phone completely.