OPINIONS Learn a language other than yours Understanding languages means understanding multiple cultures

to my host mom’s stories.

When she told me about her life, she talked about her family and the other students that had stayed with her while studying abroad. When she asked me about my day, she asked me about my friends.

Abi Grimminger Contributing Writer abigail.grimminger@drake.edu @AbiGrimminger

My Spanish is choppy. I look up words often. I use phone apps to practice, listen to Spanish music and keep a few Spanish books on my shelf.

Learning another language isn’t like riding a bike at all—if you don’t practice often, you’ll forget how to do it.

When I was first learning my second language, I found that pretty discouraging.

I stuck with Spanish because “fluent in Spanish” sounded like a pretty great bullet point on a résumé.

It wasn’t until I went abroad that I learned how valuable a second language can be.

Being able to understand another person’s language is a valuable means to connect.

You can understand a culture from the inside out by talking to native speakers and hearing their stories in their own words.

You can appreciate music and literature that would’ve been inaccessible to you otherwise. And you can get around in a foreign country where people don’t know you and don’t speak your first language.

Being able to communicate with people makes it easier to help them. If we don’t understand an immigrant’s language, it’ll be more difficult to teach them English.

For instance, I’ve tutored native Spanish speakers who leave out nouns in their sentences.

I not only know that they do this, I understand why they do it: Spanish verbs change for different nouns, eliminating the need to always use a noun in a sentence.

Just as I struggle to conjugate

Spanish verbs, Spanish-speakers struggle to remember to include a subject in every sentence. When we’re thinking about what we want to communicate, we construct our sentences differently. When we learn another language, we start being able to hear what other people, other cultures, have to say. We realize that we’re more similar than we thought.

The students I worked with abroad had many of the same insecurities as I did.

They couldn’t pronounce certain words, and they liked to switch into Spanish during lessons just like I switch into English when I get confused or excited about what I want to say. We both wanted someone else to listen to our stories and understand them.

Understanding another language helps us understand other people’s viewpoints. One of the experiences I remember most from studying abroad is listening

I realized that in the U.S., I tended to define my days by the tasks I’d completed. When someone asked me how my day was going, I’d tell them about the assignments I was working on and the errands I had to run.

I didn’t list off the friends I’d seen or the conversations we had. I realized that my host mother was people-oriented and I was time-oriented.

Just like we formed sentences differently (thinking about the noun vs. thinking about the verb) we saw our days differently, emphasizing different moments and downplaying others.

Learning another language helped me leave my comfort zone and travel to another country. It helped me explain myself and my culture to other people.

Because I spoke Spanish, I could help people and connect with them in ways I otherwise couldn’t.

By far, the best skill I gained from Spanish was being able to see the world from another’s perspective.

By listening to someone from another culture speak in their own language, I could get to know them and learn from their experiences.