"The Story of Your Life"

More interesting was the fact that Heptapod B was changing the way I thought...My internal voice normally spoke in English, but that wasn't a requirement. The summer after my senior year in high school, I attended a total immersion program for learning Russian; by the end of the summer, I was thinking and even dreaming in Russian. But it was always spoken Russian. Different language, same mode: a voice speaking silently aloud. 157
I had a friend born of Deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one's thoughts be manually coded, to reason with an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. 158
Freshman year of high school I remember my Latin teacher proudly making a comment to the class along the lines of, "I knew that I was proficient in Latin when I had my first dream entirely in the language." This idea fascinated the entire class and became the new standard in my mind for language proficiency. The idea itself was ridiculous in a practical sense, for if there was ever a language that's hard to imagine in conversation or within the context of the dreams that I have, it's this one. In class for the six years that I took part in this particular field, I spent so little time actually speaking the language out loud that when I mentioned to others that I took the class I would do so in a hush and mumbled tone that others would mistake for modesty but I and the others in my class understood to be a completely appropriate tone for discussing something you never want to be brought up again. I take Latin, but I really don't know any Latin, I would repeat to anyone who asked me which of my high school's offered languages I took. And this absolutely true. In fact, the only thing that I remember from my first year of high school Latin is (literally) this comment that my professor made about his own understanding of Latin. Suffice it to say, I have yet to have a Latin dreaming experience. 
         This is all to say that I am both fascinated with the ideas presented in this story and specifically in the above quote and at the same time I could not be more disconnected from this type of experience. The rule that one must do something for 10,000 hours to become an expert in it seems more within my grasp than the idea that at some point in the year that I spent pretending that The Aeneid was completely comprehensible to me I might have reached a level of understanding that might infect my subconscious. But this story takes this idea to a level that I can't even put in terms of my lingual experience. The idea that a mind can be transformed through language to understand the universe on a completely different standard of fundamental context and truth is like the definition of mind-boggling. And yet, Chiang presents a situation that requires nothing more than a single new experience to what already exists. His story draws upon the unique and yet plausible experiences of individuals, such as in the quotes above, and simply takes them one step further, into the unknown. 
        The narrative style of the story keeps the reader guessing to the very end, and wraps itself into the last lines of the story so that the full understanding can only come when one sees the piece as a whole. One must know the end of this piece to understand the beginning and one must understand the context of the writing to comprehend the perspective. Where have I heard that before?