A World of Culture
It's no surprise that our world is a melting pot of cultures. Along with the development of culture, languages have been evolving ever since, and in today's day and age we have well over 6,500 spoken languages in the world. Despite the overwhelming amount of languages in existence we tend to only keep to one (if you're a native English speaker), namely - English. There are even jokes about Americans who only speak English and demand other to speak their language even when abroad, people in the polyglot community typically make fun of them joking that they only speak 'American'.
A quick Bing search can rapidly change our perspective of the English language. Just quickly enter the word "language" in the search bar and see what comes up. Nearly a billion native people speak Chinese Mandarin, at it's quickly becoming the language of commerce and business. In second place comes Spanish, with just over 390 million native speakers, and in third comes English, with just 365 million native speakers. Notice that I said native speakers, meaning that if we were to bump up the statistics to include L2 speakers, or second learners, we would have a vastly different statistic.
Here we see native language speakers divided into percentages of the world population. Just look how big Mandarin is! Irregardless of the number of speakers in a given language, it's beautiful to see just how colorful the world is. A language brings so much more than just different sounds to the world, but a unique way of seeing it. Anyone who has taken the time to learn a new language can attest to that. For example the word Torschlusspanik in German is a noun which is defined as, "The fear that time is running out to achieve your life goals." What a fantastic word to describe what I'm currently feeling.
Why Should I Take the Time to Learn a Language?
There are many reasons. One of the most intuitive reasons, is that you're simply interested languages. Anyone who has begun to learn a language purely out of love and interest has absolutely flirted with other languages; polyglots are a promiscuous bunch. To go over all the reasons might take some time, so I'll just list a few off the top of my head and let you make out whether it's a good enough reason to, I'll include some of the reasons I've decided to learn a language as well.
- Interest / Curiosity
- Become more cultured
- Meet new interesting people you would have never spoken to
- Extremely useful in traveling
- Move and live in another country
- Can help foreigners when they're lost
- Can read books in the original and obtain greater meaning
- A new world of songs and music opens up
- Can learn new jokes that cannot be translated, a whole comedy opens up
- Discover types of food you've never even dreamed of and love!
- Beneficial for the Brain / Neurogenesis
- As you learn other languages, your native language improves!
- Become a better communicator
- Delays onset of Dementia
- Can be passed on to your children if you teach them
- Can speak about someone to a friend without the person you're talking about realizing you're talking about them.
- Can use it as a personal secret language between you and a significant other
- Can speak with your in laws if you marry cross-culturally
- Useful when dating / More attractive
- Your dating pool opens up dramatically, why limit yourself to your country? There are 7 billion other people who do not speak your language!
- Opens up employment opportunities as interpreters and translators, or as a bonus to important professions, health practitioners, law, business and non-profit organizations.
- Discover a new version of yourself with a different personality.
There are so many reasons! Any it's not that difficult to learn a language. Many people have the misheld belief that it's impossible for them to learn a language or that they don't have the time. If you commute on a car, train, or by bike, you have time. There are plenty of apps or audio lessons you can take and start your adventure towards expanding your horizons. I'll will be making further topics on languages as it's one of my favorite things to talk about.
Things to consider when picking a language are which in your native language, how much time you would like to devote, which languages do you find more interesting and what resources are available to you! All things to be discussed in the future.
What about you guys? Have you guys begun learning languages? Are there any that you want to learn? Any experiences where languages have helped you?