Over the past few weeks I have attempted to construct an overarching, persuasive reason for why one should learn a foreign language. I have been a linguaphile for over a decade. The addiction started at a young age with French, which turned out to be the “gateway drug” that led me into Spanish and Chinese. While interests in politics and economics, culture and food, or travel and leisure can all be motivational forces behind language learning, the all-encompassing benefit is more extensive, and the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
No one will deny, in this day and age, the power of a network. It is the web through which you find jobs, meet significant others, or just find a new hairdresser or doctor. This web is the result of the innate, social curiosity that Myspace, Flickr, and most notably Facebook harnessed for profit. People like to be a part of something. Language makes you a part of so much more.
I suppose this is the area of my soliloquy in which most academics would ramble about Language opening a “new world”, which is tried, true, and trite. However, in a more practical sense, I can say that I have expanded my network through language. That web of connections （关系网）is all the stronger because my sphere includes not just the United States but also China. It includes the individual people that I befriended here, both Chinese and international. It also includes all of my experiences.
One of the first questions Americans ask upon meeting someone is, “where are you from?” Place of origin tells us something about the stranger we face, and it helps us to discover possible connections with people to find common ground. Bonding over certain foods, familiar places, or cultural anomalies gives us a sense of comfort and interpersonal understanding. Now, having spent extensive time in China, my network is bigger and stronger. I can relate to a broader group of people, having pushed the boundaries beyond my native identifiers. Recently I met a friend of a friend who had studied in Nanjing several years ago. An Australian by nationality, I may not have had an immediate connection with this person (except for his talkative, easy-going personality), but since we are both part of this “China World”, we promptly found common ground.
Of course, people can share a bond over any interest, be it music, movies, or politics to name a few popular conversation drivers. However, when you adopt a language, you almost always adopt large sections of that language’s culture as well. This means that instead of bonding over just movies or just music, language gives you the whole cultural package wrapped up neatly with a bow. And having learned the language, you can talk about these cultural and political topics in that native tongue. Try studying history, politics, culture, and geography all at once through any other single subject matter. It seems as though language has the monopoly.