Why Learn a Second Language?
by Tamim Ansary
If you speak English, why bother learning a second language? After all, English is spoken in most countries now, and it’s spreading. You don’t need French to order a sandwich in Paris, not anymore.
But learning a second language isn’t merely about ordering a meal in a foreign country. It’s about perspective. Every language is a lens. If you were born wearing pink glasses and could never take them off or exchange them for another shade, you would assume the world is pink without even being aware of pinkness as a quality–pink as compared to what? In the same way, if you know only one language, it’s hard to be aware that you are looking through a lens: You think you are simply seeing the world as it is. Fluency in a second tongue gives you a chance to see through a different lens. That can help you realize that some part of what you are seeing is not the world, but the lens–even when you go back to your original language.
Inside two languages
I’ve been fluent in two tongues for as long as I can remember. My father was a Farsi-speaking Afghan, my mother an English-speaking American. In my family, we borrowed words back and forth between the languages, but I always knew they could not be combined. Each was a world. When I switched languages I switched worlds.
I’ve been fluent in two tongues for as long as I can remember. My father was a Farsi-speaking Afghan, my mother an English-speaking American. In my family, we borrowed words back and forth between the languages, but I always knew they could not be combined. Each was a world. When I switched languages I switched worlds.
Shortly after arriving in America, I remember, I hit on a "foolproof" scheme for selling fiction to Esquire Magazine: I would, I thought, take a story already published in the magazine and replace each word with an exact synonym. It didn’t work. You probably guessed that. Looking back, I laugh at the harebrained folly of my scheme. Yet no one laughs at the translator, who proposes essentially the same project–to replace each word in a written text with its exact synonym in another language.
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