Learning a new language as an adult is an incredibly valuable experience. It’s something that I’d recommend to everyone for the following reasons:
- Learning a new language helps you gain perspective on your own language and culture. When you only know your own language and you learned as a kid, you don’t have a perspective on what makes it unique and special.
- It helps you connect with people that you’d never be able to connect with. Billions of people around the world don’t speak English. We have great tech tools to make it easier, but nothing compares to connecting face-to-face with something through their language.
- You understand how long it really takes to learn any skill at a high level. A language is an interesting skill to learn because we are very aware of how good we are at it. You can spend a few months hacking together the ability to communicate, but if you really want to learn to a deep level, it is a project that takes years.
- It helps you understand how pointless most traditional education is. The way they try to teach you a language in school or college is completely disconnected from what is actually required to learn a language. Once you make that connection, it helps you understand how this is true for almost everything taught in an academic setting.
- It helps you understand how much identity is involved in learning any skills. To truly master a skill, you need to embrace an identity change. This is especially true of learning a language, where you need to get comfortable speaking in what feels like a very weird way to master it.
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