Often, I get asked a lot of questions about my interest in languages; why I love them, why I learn them and how. I decided to write about this subject in hope that it can probably answer to those inquiries.
Language is a method of communication. Let that sink in for a while.
It’s insane how a language can connect you with people around the world, whether it’s making new friends in a famous diverse park, preaching the gospel to a nation or just helping an unknown at the airport. Language has a very unique way to unite people. I love the fact that we can travel somewhere far far away from home in the world and be able to communicate with the people in their mother tongue, it’s just unexplainable.
Frequently, the ability of speaking one’s language gets underrated, people get to make fun of others because of their accent or even relate their linguistic knowledge to a lack of education. Trust me, I know what I’m saying. I live in a bilingual country where if you can’t speak the native language of our settlers, French, they label you as “uneducated”, not that I will remain quiet about this issue, it is not the subject today.
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” – Nelson Mandela
Recently, I was in the United States, I spent most of my time in the beautiful, sunshine state, Florida. I’m sure that we are all aware of how diverse this breathtaking state is. My amazing host (mom #2, as she likes to be referred, who currently works at Disney.) and her phenomenal family goes to the Disney parks quite often, which resulted my frequent visit to the parks during this fantastic summer as well. Being able to explore the parks was fascinating to me, they are filled with enjoyment in all of its kind. Walking around the parks, I tended to be observant of the words I could hear near me just to find out what language was being spoken close to me.
Most times I would hear English (obviously), Spanish, Portuguese, French and even my mother tongue; Haitian Creole (etc..). But there’s something special to me when it comes to the language of Portuguese, yeah you guessed it right, the Brazilians. Gosh, they were everywhere in the parks! And my soul was just rejoicing every time I spotted one or two. I spoke to them for the sake of any privilege I had. It was just beautiful how their faces would light up, I mean you could literally read happiness on their faces because of someone who is not even from a Portuguese-speaking country cared enough to learn about their language and culture, we would keep up conversations for a quite long time and still to this day, I remain connected to some of them. I got to speak to some of the foreign workers at the parks as well and it was magical. It doesn’t end here, there’s more.
I spent a week in Nashville,TN at a program and part of it was to visit and spend time with some gracious people. It happens to be that one of those people was half French. While we were at one of our must-visit towers, I stumbled upon a nice lady, her name was Jasmine. I saw her across the room in her beautiful green dress with her bright red lipstick sitting on the table with the others doing their thing (coloring, eating snacks etc..). Something was pushing me to just go talk to her, so I did.
I asked her her name, by her accent, I became aware that she was foreign, I then asked her where is she from and with a french accent she replied “My mom French, my dad from Egypt”. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Egyptian Arabic or generally Arabic but that’s when my French came to the rescue. We began to speak in French, and when she asked me my name, I handed her my name tag to read it, she read it in the most possible french way. She was so happy, and I wish everyone could’ve seen that glow on her face and her delighted smile. We kept the conversation going for quite a while. I love the joy I felt during this brief period of time, I wish I could explain it.
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Fundamentally, what I am trying to make you perceive above is that; languages connect you globally.
When you learn and speak another language you shouldn’t do it just to connect with people on a linguistic level, to some extent you should experience a cultural connection and enjoyment, how splendid would that be? If you are not experiencing any of those facts, you’re doing it wrong.
There are some other deeper reasons to consider learning a language, probably more than I am aware of but one thing that has recently caught my attention is the neurological benefits it associates with. Yes, you read that right, it does stuff to your noodles. It’s not just about switching your personality as you switch languages, *cough*, It improves your memory, you earn different perceptions, build multi-tasking skills, you stave off Alzheimer’s and dementia, and so much more. Basically, you become smarter.
… but how did you learn them?
This is always a complicated question for me to answer. First of all thanks to God, my dad, teacher Maxime, people who have helped/are helping me to practice, Google Translate, Duolingo, books, movies or any other FREE resources found on the web.(sounds like an award winning speech…).
Learning a language doesn’t require any super power, it’s hard work, it’s consistently pushing yourself, but people only see the outcome. Of course it can be hard to maintain them, specially when you reach the point to also maintain your native one, yes, sadly it happens and this why you should prevent that. Guard it; it’s just like any other foreign language.
“Surprisingly, learning languages is the easy part. You learn one. And then another. And another. And it gets easier as you go.”- Luca Lampariello
Growing up, I was taught Haitian Creole and French as a main language, but my father would always “sneak” other languages into our brain, he started teaching us how to count, the alphabet in Spanish and in English, later on I was taught the Greek and Hebrew alphabet but decided to solitary learn the Cyrillic one as well. Speaking French, a Latin-derived language, built an automatic bridge to the other ones. If you have any knowledge of Latin-derived languages, you know for sure that they are like cousins so the rest is history. (to make it clear, I do not speak all Latin-derived languages, or maybe not yet.)
“The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.” ― Munia Khan
I have been shuffling my learning of languages quite much recently, It’s exciting! But I have decided to remain them mysterious to the public eye.
Go ahead, learn as much as language as you ever want, learn a different type of writing system, (it’s fun, no one can find out what you wrote), travel to a country where it is spoken (if you earn enough $$$$), learn the Lord’s prayer in a new language, watch your favorite [Disney] movie in it if available, just go for it if you really want to, it’s pleasant and beneficial, you’ll thank me later.
There are a lot of reasons why I ceaselessly fall in love with languages and I fear that I may never write about them all.
