Groans and grumbles stumble down the hallway, griping about how hard or dumb Spanish class was today, French not making sense, and the question that almost every students ponders: what’s the point of trying to learn a new language?
Students seem to only see foreign language classes as a nuisance fit into their schedules, having to at least suffer through two years of it in order to graduate high school, and up to four years to get into certain colleges. Most students don’t see the benefits that come from taking a foreign language since they’re solely focused on taking the class for credit, not to necessarily learn it.
Many students don’t see how they could ever use a foreign language in their career, which is mainly why so many see it as being pointless. However, according to GreatSchools.org, whose mission is to give reviews about public and private schools around the country, to learn about another language (not simply memorizing how to conjugate some verbs ten minutes before the test) greatly benefits communication skills. Therefore, police officers, teachers, nurses, business owners and other career paths can greatly benefit from learning a new language since it teaches people how to speak well and clearly to and in front of peers. And to be able to write on a resume that you can speak a different language, even for different jobs, can make you more likely to be hired rather than someone who only knows one language.
Besides communication skills, learning a new language makes people more creative thinkers because learning a foreign language challenges and opens your brain up to many more possibilities. For example, problem solving in English can be hard enough as it is, so when you’re required to analyze a poem in Spanish or solve made-up problems in German, it makes your brain work over time. And that’s a positive thing, since working out your brain makes it stronger and able to think more creatively.
However, there are even better benefits: in a 2012 study at the University of California, San Francisco, scientists found that bilingual people had a later onset of Alzheimer’s disease compared to their monolingual counterparts. Working out your brain with a foreign language can protect it, which is always a wonderful benefit.
However, the key factor to all these perks is actually learning the language. And learning it means having an interest in studying, speaking, and writing about it. Therefore, if a student doesn’t like the language they’re taking or is just taking a language because they think it’s easier, then they aren’t going to benefit from just raking in credits.
An even greater benefit is that if you learn one language, it’s so much easier to learn a new language. Even if you don’t plan on going into a career that could use a different language, it’s a good safety net to have in case your plans change.
If students stop seeing going to Latin or French as a chore and more as an opportunity to learn new things everyday, even if they don’t think it’ll benefit them, it will at least help them get on the path to enjoy taking a language. And if you enjoy taking the language, it makes it way easier to comprehend it.
Personally, I love taking Spanish because it’s really interesting to learn about how people in Spain, Latin America, and Mexico live. It’s also captivating to see how Spanish makes a lot more sense than English does since their grammar rules are a lot more stringent than English’s. It gives you a better appreciation for people learning English, too.
Plus, learning it is like learning math or science or even some aspects of literature. They all are foreign things to all of us. However, if everyone took the same approach we do to learn those subjects to foreign languages, it would be a lot easier to learn. Because in math we learn a new lesson every day, do homework on it, then take a quiz on it, it’s not that horrible. And foreign languages are likewise (and sometimes not as complicated as mathematical equations.)
So instead of just succumbing to everyone’s thoughts on how inconvenient it is to take another language or just sitting in class, only retaining enough to pass the class but not nearly enough to learn the language, you should try to learn a new language. It makes you more knowledgeable, a bigger asset in the job market, and (like my brother and I do) have conversations in Spanish to confuse your parents.