My Fascination with Languages
Learning new languages opens up so many opportunities to communicate with other people, help people feel more at ease in a new environment, and also broadens up our hopes of understanding each other. It’s an intimidating venture, but always worth the time.
My iconic story with how I was blinded by my own bias was when I assumed that I would be okay travelling to a small town in Mexico knowing minimal Spanish such as “Hola”, “Gracias”, and “manzana” thanks to Duolingo. I was very wrong, obviously. It’s something that I still think about and question why I thought more people would speak English. The first week was really tough because I felt like my brain working so hard every day to try and grasp at a single word that people around me were saying. It was emotionally and physically draining, which is likely how many non-English speakers feel in English speaking countries.
Thankfully, several years of learning French accelerated my ability to understand subject-verb agreements and conjugations. Over time, I put aside my fear of sounding stupid, or not having the “right accent” (an innate fear I had and still have about speaking French). Instead, I just dove right in and tried conversing with other volunteers and my host family. By the last week of my 6 week exchange, I was able to have full on conversations with my Uber driver about why I (a Chinese-Canadian) was spending my summer in a small Mexican town; I also got good at explaining that “soy de Canada pero mis papas son de China.”
Equipped with this new language, I recall one more instance when I was on a flight from Edmonton to Toronto (pre-COVID). I happened to be seated next to a lady from Colombia who was having some troubles with the screen in front of her. In my broken Spanish, I started talking to her and realized that her home in Edmonton was literally 5 minutes away from mine. She spoke to me about her family, how she was taking English classes at night at the same building of my junior high school, and why she was travelling to Toronto.
In my perspective, the scope of language isn’t just spoken languages. Having played piano my entire life, I also think that reading, playing, and interpreting music sheets is as much a language as Spanish, French, etc. An instrument is just a different means of delivering a message with emotion; music can be written, sung, and expressed just like words.
With the same logic, I also realized I really enjoy learning new coding or programming languages. There’s a different set of vocabulary for them, but there are similar rules between them as I found with French and Spanish.
As much as English is quickly becoming a dominant language in various realms of business, there is a huge benefit and value-add to your life when you’re able to speak a different language. One of my biggest motivators in learning new languages was realizing how much my dad would struggle in the public if he were alone simply because he doesn’t speak much English. Thankfully, the places he frequents often has other Chinese speakers who can help him.
To me, learning new languages shows that someone is willing to step outside of their comfort zone to learn a new language and build rapport with others. It also opens up so many interesting conversations you otherwise might not have had like the one I had on my flight. There is so much history, culture, and personality embedded in each language, making each one more exciting to learn.
