Some people speak more than one language ....
For those for whom that is not the case and who are reading this … may I please very highly recommend and suggest DuoLingo?
It gamifies the process of learning a new language, but it does so in all the right ways. And all for the purpose of learning a new language!
There are sooooo many advantages to learning a new language, even if you think that you’d never have any practical use for it.
(And, by the way, it’s a slam dunk that there’s a language for which you would have a surprising amount of practical usage … probably the majority of Americans really should learn Spanish; everybody on the planet should know both English and Chinese; if you’re a fan of anime and / or manga, you really need to know Japanese; if you have any serious interest in modern geopolitics, you probably need to know both Russian and Arabic these days; and so on.)
Along the way — and much sooner than you might imagine — you’ll quickly realize just how really messed up English is. Take counting and numbers … we don’t think about it, but we have “one, two, three, …,” “1, 2, 3, …,” “first, second, third, …,” “I, II, III, IV, …,” “primary, secondary, tertiary, …,” “a, b, c, …,” and probably more that I’m not thinking of at the moment. And what’s up with “eleven” and “twelfth”!? All before we get to a dozen, a gross, and so on, of course. Or how you have
one apple but two
slices of apple pie and three
crumbs of apple pie crust yet pi is 3.14159….
Whatever language you learn will either be more streamlined than English, which will make our insanity obvious; or it’ll be at least as bad, in which case you’ll really appreciate how bad we have it in English.
(For what it’s worth … Spanish should be really easy for most Americans to learn; Japanese is probably the hardest. And vice-versa — Spanish speakers should be able to pick up English without much trouble, and English is brutal for native Japanese speakers who didn’t study it in school. But most Japanese students do have at least a few semesters of English, so in practice it isn’t so hard for them.)
Plus, all those words that foreigners struggle pronouncing? You’ll struggle, too, just as much.
If nothing else, it’s worth it to learn a new language just to gain proper sympathy and respect for non-native speakers.
(And the fact that it’s one of the best things you can do in middle age and later to lessen your risks of dementia doesn’t hurt, either!)
b&
