As a langauge teacher, I spend more time than most people explaining the importance of learning another language. There are certain benefits to language learning that are commonly recognized and frequently cited. Learning a language can ease travel experiences during international vacations, allowing you to order food, hail a cab, and find a bathroom with confidence. Being bilingual may result in a greater income or increase your options in the job market. Learning a language is a good brain workout. The effect that language learning has on the brain is not unlike the effect that exercise has on the muscles.
I do not intend to diminish these financial, travel, and intellectual benefits. I want my students to know that being bilingual can help them get a job, and I support brain exercise. But learning another language is so much deeper and fuller than these surface level benefits.
Why does language learning really matter?
Learning a language is vulnerably opening your heart to a culture that is not your own to embrace and be embraced by others. Learning a language is delighting in the richness of the diversity of people and lamenting the pain caused by fearing, disdaining, and demonizing differences instead of celebrating and valuing them. Learning a language is recognizing the inherent value in the people who speak it from birth. Learning a language invites you to step into the role of the host and the role of the stranger.
Learning a language invites you to be the host
I think of a host as anyone who speaks two or more languages, with their dominant language being one that grants access to power and privilege in their society. A stranger is anyone whose dominant language is not the dominant language of their geographical community. When a host's second language is a stranger's dominant language and when a host sees strangers as reflections of their Creator and therefore having inherent value, hosts and strangers become friends.
Being a host is an invitation for you to embrace strangers in an act of love that welcomes them as they are without dominating, patronizing, appropriating, coddling, or demanding assimilation. By understanding their language, you can help strangers feel heard. Being a host means seeing strangers, valuing strangers, knowing strangers, walking with strangers, and listening to strangers until they are no longer strangers, but people with names and voices and stories and dreams. There may not be a better way to welcome a stranger than to welcome them in their own language.
As a host, you do not have to wait until you have perfect langauge skills or complete cultural understanding to welcome strangers, and nor do you have to wait for the strangers to make the first move. For hosts, learning a language means recognizing that sometimes respect for differences comes before really understanding the differences and involves creating space for strangers to be themselves and not feel strange. Language learning is a constant process of unearthing and confronting blind spots and biases.
Learning a language invites you to be the stranger
It is easy sometimes to glamorize the role of host and look at them as the good guys who get to save the day, the heroes who swoop in and rescue the poor strangers. We all want to be the host because the host has all the power, though a good host seeks to share their power and uses it to empower the stranger.
But if you study a language long enough, the time comes when there is a power transfer. The host becomes the stranger. Eventually you will find yourself in an environment (sometimes across an ocean and sometimes just down the street) where you are the foreigner, your first language is the foreign language, and you are the one with the funny accent. In this place, your second language is the dominant language and you have to rely on native speakers to help fill in your gaps in linguistic and cultural knowledge. This means being dependent on people you may not even know and relinquishing your pride and desire to sound sophisticated, admiting that what you do know is vastly outweighed by what you do not know, and humbly accepting assistance from someone who knows much more than you do.
Strangers sometimes go to bed at night with their brains aching after hours of thinking many times harder than necessary when operating in their dominant langauge, and yet speaking many times slower with many more errors. Strangers may often feel frustrated that they cannot find the words for the ideas or feelings that they want to express. Learning a language is being uncomfortable.
Learning a language is a constant fluctuation from host to stranger and back. All language learners are hosts in certain environments and situations and strangers in others. Having the experience of being a stranger and feeling relieved, almost to tears, at hearing your dominant langauge spoken to you by a caring host after hours of feeling unable to keep up with the conversation around you makes you a more compassionate host when that time comes.
This is what I want to convey every time I discuss the importance of learning language. It is both a matter of loving your neighbor and humbly recieving the love of another. Yes, I want my students to get a better job because they speak Spanish, but moreover, I want them to feel the discomfort and beauty of bridging worlds, knowing people, and being known.
I do not intend to diminish these financial, travel, and intellectual benefits. I want my students to know that being bilingual can help them get a job, and I support brain exercise. But learning another language is so much deeper and fuller than these surface level benefits.
Why does language learning really matter?
Learning a language is vulnerably opening your heart to a culture that is not your own to embrace and be embraced by others. Learning a language is delighting in the richness of the diversity of people and lamenting the pain caused by fearing, disdaining, and demonizing differences instead of celebrating and valuing them. Learning a language is recognizing the inherent value in the people who speak it from birth. Learning a language invites you to step into the role of the host and the role of the stranger.
I think of a host as anyone who speaks two or more languages, with their dominant language being one that grants access to power and privilege in their society. A stranger is anyone whose dominant language is not the dominant language of their geographical community. When a host's second language is a stranger's dominant language and when a host sees strangers as reflections of their Creator and therefore having inherent value, hosts and strangers become friends.
Being a host is an invitation for you to embrace strangers in an act of love that welcomes them as they are without dominating, patronizing, appropriating, coddling, or demanding assimilation. By understanding their language, you can help strangers feel heard. Being a host means seeing strangers, valuing strangers, knowing strangers, walking with strangers, and listening to strangers until they are no longer strangers, but people with names and voices and stories and dreams. There may not be a better way to welcome a stranger than to welcome them in their own language.
As a host, you do not have to wait until you have perfect langauge skills or complete cultural understanding to welcome strangers, and nor do you have to wait for the strangers to make the first move. For hosts, learning a language means recognizing that sometimes respect for differences comes before really understanding the differences and involves creating space for strangers to be themselves and not feel strange. Language learning is a constant process of unearthing and confronting blind spots and biases.
Learning a language invites you to be the stranger
It is easy sometimes to glamorize the role of host and look at them as the good guys who get to save the day, the heroes who swoop in and rescue the poor strangers. We all want to be the host because the host has all the power, though a good host seeks to share their power and uses it to empower the stranger.
But if you study a language long enough, the time comes when there is a power transfer. The host becomes the stranger. Eventually you will find yourself in an environment (sometimes across an ocean and sometimes just down the street) where you are the foreigner, your first language is the foreign language, and you are the one with the funny accent. In this place, your second language is the dominant language and you have to rely on native speakers to help fill in your gaps in linguistic and cultural knowledge. This means being dependent on people you may not even know and relinquishing your pride and desire to sound sophisticated, admiting that what you do know is vastly outweighed by what you do not know, and humbly accepting assistance from someone who knows much more than you do.
Strangers sometimes go to bed at night with their brains aching after hours of thinking many times harder than necessary when operating in their dominant langauge, and yet speaking many times slower with many more errors. Strangers may often feel frustrated that they cannot find the words for the ideas or feelings that they want to express. Learning a language is being uncomfortable.
Learning a language is a constant fluctuation from host to stranger and back. All language learners are hosts in certain environments and situations and strangers in others. Having the experience of being a stranger and feeling relieved, almost to tears, at hearing your dominant langauge spoken to you by a caring host after hours of feeling unable to keep up with the conversation around you makes you a more compassionate host when that time comes.
This is what I want to convey every time I discuss the importance of learning language. It is both a matter of loving your neighbor and humbly recieving the love of another. Yes, I want my students to get a better job because they speak Spanish, but moreover, I want them to feel the discomfort and beauty of bridging worlds, knowing people, and being known.
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