Why you need to learn another language
Learning a new language is something that I believe can offer you a unique and different perspective on the world and alter the way you think. It provides a framework to critically think about the way you comprehend and perceive the world around you. Learning a new language has altered my view of the world for the better, and it can do the same for you.
I’ve discovered over quarantine that one of my passions is language. I’ve always had a passive interest in linguistics but never delved into it much. This past year I’ve picked up learning French while stuck at home; initially, it was mostly about feeling like I had something productive to do while I sat on my phone for hours while stuck at home. But it has since morphed into a genuine passion.
Why should you care?
I’m sure you’ve heard this many times before, both in school and in life: “learn another language”. We as Americans are slacking when it comes to speaking a second language[1]. The question for most people is, why does it matter? Some responses you’ve likely said or thought:
- English is the lingua franca (common language) for most of the world, and I already speak it
- I am never in a situation where I need to speak another language with someone
- If people come to America, they should learn to speak English
I could refute each one of those points; “It’s a sign of respect to others”, “it could allow you to travel more easily”, “the US has no official language”, but at the end of the day, arguing with someone rationally on these points will never motivate them to learn a new language. It’s important to understand that learning another language is a large undertaking, and as many adults have learned if you’re not forced to learn something like piano or Spanish as a kid, it’s not going to happen as an adult.
How to cross the mental hurdle that “it’s hard”
Something I’ve learned and really taken to heart in my short professional career is that the key to getting people to do something that you want is all about incentives (hoping to write about this soon). People have to think that they will gain something by doing the thing you’re asking of them. To get a large number of people to do what you want, just give them a selfish reason to do so.
Learning a language is a large amount of work, and for an American that is a native English speaker, I can’t refute that there’s almost no immediate payoff. The things I mentioned above have no intrinsic value to someone learning a language; so, I will attempt to convince you that there is knowledge out there waiting to be gained.
Expanding your world
The way you grew up and learned things affects the way that you perceive the world. You react and perceive things a certain way, without ever intending to. For example, you call the sky blue because we have a word for blue, while we could just as easily have a color for a light blue as we do for pink (light red). The language you grew up speaking contributes to the way you perceive and interact with the world around you.
- Implicit bias affects the way you see the world
- Implicit bias is caused by your learned experiences
- Your native language contributes to your learned experiences
- Therefore, the language you speak affects the way you see the world
I think the best way to explain this fact is by way of a few examples. In the end, you may say great, none of this is true of English. However I ask this, how can we understand these biases and differences without understanding the alternatives? If no one ever learned another language, we would never know that anyone else sees the world differently.
We can see from these examples how growing up a speaker of another language could affect someone, but what do you, having never learned another language, not know about how being an English speaker affects the way you think? The simple act of learning a new language unlocks this. There is much knowledge to be gained simply by comparison.
Gendered Nouns
There have been multiple studies on the way that gendered nouns affect the way you perceive the world. In German, “bridge” is a feminine noun; in Spanish, it is masculine. In a 2003 study[2], native German and Spanish speakers were asked to categorize a list of nouns. The catch was, all participants were fluent in English, and the study was conducted in English.
“German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering”3 all while speaking English. The fact that these participants described the words as such while speaking an un-gendered language shows the way that the genders subtly affect the way we think about things around us. Even the way you perceive inanimate objects.
Past, Present, and Future tense
Unlike English, Indonesian does not have verb endings that indicate tense (this is a hard concept to grasp for an English speaker). In a 2002 study[4], participants who spoke English and Indonesian were shown pictures of a man who had either just kicked a ball, was in the process of kicking a ball, or who was about to start kicking a ball. They were then asked to later recall what was happening in the photo. The English speakers were able to recall which of the three they were shown with much greater accuracy. The language you speak and think in subconsciously influences even the way you remember your experiences.
Number of words
What if I told you that the way you view color is highly based on the language you speak. As English speakers, we have 11 main colors. In order to describe another color, we typically list one of those colors and modify it with light, dark, or something else. When you see something and are asked to describe the color, you will almost always describe it as one of those basic colors, even if it doesn’t exactly match.
There are languages around the world with different numbers of basic colors. Some languages have just two colors (light and dark). Would they call something that is dark-blue light-black? As an English speaker, you would say that’s just wrong; but to them, it would be correct! If you were to tell a Russian or Greek speaker what color English speakers say the sky is, they may have the same reaction! We call it blue, or light blue to be more specific. But Russian and Greek have their own basic color terms for light and dark blue, in the same way, we have red and pink while some cultures would just call pink light red. In some languages, green is a shade of yellow, or blue and green shades of the same color.
It’s often said that the more words a language or culture has for something, the more deeply they understand it. You’ve likely heard the common saying that many Eskimo-Aleut languages have 50+ words for snow, while we just have one. They may have words for sleet, powdery snow, wet snow, etc. We just have to describe it, but they intuitively know it by the language. When you learn another language, the differences between it and English may not be this extreme, but you have a new framework to think about the world when you start thinking from another perspective.
Takeaways
If you’re anything like me, these conclusions are mind-boggling. Something as simple as language has the ability to influence how we perceive the world, and how we remember our experiences. The question is, what do you not know about how your experience is being shaped because you are an English speaker? You have the power to unlearn what you’ve learned since birth, and unlock new perspectives, simply by spending a few minutes a day learning a new language.
References
[1]: Over half of the world can speak two or more languages, and only 20% of Americans can. And let’s be honest, most of that 20% likely comes from immigrants to America
[2]: Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition, ed. D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow, pp. 61- 80. Cambridge University Press.
[4]: Boroditsky, L., Ham, W., & Ramscar, M. (2002). What is universal in event perception? Comparing English & Indonesian speakers. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 24. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jd5w5c8