For the Love of Languages

I feel lucky to have grown up in multilingual environments. In and around my house I grew up learning and speaking my mother tongue. In my community and among friends, I interacted using the national language, which was also used as the lingua franca. I was instructed at school in an international language. I learnt to read and write both the national language and the international language at school as well. I learnt the dominant regional language watching and listening and reading on television and print and watching movies in the language.

A different language is a different vision of life.

— Federico Fellini

The knowledge of these different languages provided me with a perspective into the lives of the different peoples and the different cultures that used these different languages. I got the opportunity to understand the different points of view of those who spoke languages other than my mother tongue. I realized that learning a language meant learning to know another culture from the inside. The understanding of these languages has helped me gain a lot of knowledge and helped me have more diverse social experiences, which wouldn’t have been possible if I had been familiar with only one language.

The knowledge and the experiences I gained helped fuel my fascination in languages. I have always been interested in experiencing and understanding the different cultures of the world, and it felt like I had found the keys to open the doors to those experiences. I began picking up different sounds and words in the different languages from what I heard and read in the media. The internet took my language game to a different level. Now I had the resources to advance my knowledge even further. I could slowly discern between the different accents used by different people in the different regions where the same language was spoken. I had slowly begun to grasp the nuances of the languages that I spoke.

Learn a language, it might help you find a way to change your perspective on life...

— Dave Haslam (@Mr_Dave_Haslam) September 19, 2018

I slowly began to grow confident of my abilities in the languages I already knew, so I decided to venture further and learn a new language. After some research, I settled on a European language and began studying it. With the resources on the internet and the media my work was even easier. But this journey also taught me another important lesson. Even though I was picking up the new language, I was also forgetting what I had learnt in the beginning. This brought up thoughts of frustration in my mind. I then realized that, like the other languages I spoke, I had nobody to converse with, in the new language I was learning, and thus I wasn’t succesful in retaining it in my memory. If I had taken a language class in some language school, I might have been able to converse with the other classmates. But since I was learning it myself, I had to find another way. After some googling, I found that I could use different online services to converse with native speakers of different languages to improve my skills in the language I’m learning. So with renewed hope and enthusiasm, I have restarted my learning once again.

One of the most rewarding aspects of our experience is our ability to connect with others. Learning a new language is like learning a new sport or a new instrument. Being able to communicate with someone in their own language is an incredible gift. With the knowledge of another language we’ll have the unique opportunity to communicate with a wider range of people in our lives. Knowing the language makes us a local no matter where we are. It opens up our world literally and figuratively. We will be shaped in a new way by the people, their culture and the communities who speak the language. A new language may even help us build lifelong relationships. Whatever language we choose to learn, we will be going on an adventure that changes how we see the world. For these reasons alone, I believe that learning languages is one reward everyone of us should strive to give ourselves.