I’m enrolled in a 6-week class through Community Education of the Black Hills, a program that sponsors all kinds of adult education classes, from dance to dog obedience. The class meets once a week for two hours. It’s a small group: about ten students of all ages and backgrounds, each learning ASL for a different reason. The teacher is energetic and knowledgeable. We spend the two hours learning new vocabulary and grammar and practicing simple conversations with each other. The teacher sends us home with a handout of the signs we learned that day and some historical background on the development of ASL.
I won’t learn much in 12 hours of classroom instruction—maybe enough to make some basic small talk. And though I’m practicing outside of class, in a few months, I’ll probably forget most of what I do learn. So why bother? If you haven’t attempted to learn a secondary language since you were forced to do so in high school, you might not see much point in such a small effort. But there is value in learning another language beyond the ability to converse in it fluently.
For starters, you might be amazed how much you can say and understand after only a few weeks of practice. Collins Dictionary estimates that the 25 most common English words “make up about a third of all printed text”; the 100 most common make up about half. Think of that—with just 100 words and a little bit of grammar (recognizing first, second, and third person; singular and plural; perhaps present and past tense), you can decipher quite a lot. Could you read Proust or understand a lecture on differential equations? No. But airport signs, restroom signs, travel directions, menus, and weather reports? Certainly.
Additionally, if you travel overseas or interact with a non-native English speaker in your home country, you’ll often find that even a meager attempt at using their native language will elicit a surprising amount of warmth and gratitude. Residents of countries where English is not a primary language are accustomed to dealing with monolingual English speakers at work and in public life. The rare American tourist or businessperson who makes an effort (no matter how poor) at speaking Russian or Japanese or Kikuyu is almost invariably met with praise and delight. This simple, selfless gesture is like an extended hand, an expression of fellowship made more valuable by its rarity. (Germans might be an exception—their English is better than your German, and most of them aren’t shy about letting you know it.)
A few weeks of learning a language very different in structure from your native one can also familiarize you with the spectacular diversity that is possible in human language (a source of continual delight for linguists). If you’ve only studied European languages such as Spanish or French—which are fairly closely related to English and not that different from it grammatically—then you’ve encountered only a tiny fraction of the ways a language can encode meaning. You probably don’t know, for example, that written Chinese indicates gender in pronouns (it differentiates between “he” and “she”) but spoken Chinese does not. Or that Lakota pronouns and verbs indicate not only gender, but whether the subject is animate or inanimate. Or that Korean uses different words for goodbye depending on whether the speaker is the one leaving or the one staying. Or that Tamil grammar requires the speaker to indicate whether a piece of information is hearsay or something they confirmed themselves. (This is called “evidentiality.”)
How cool is that?
Furthermore, although linguists still debate how much your native language affects how you think and view the world (called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), a little bit of exposure to a secondary language can provide a window into the culture and values of the people who use it. For example, does the language distinguish between informal and formal “you” (like Spanish “tú” and “usted” and German “du” and “Sie”)? If so, how soon after meeting do strangers switch from one to the other? This tells you something about expectations for politeness and formality. Does the language make extensive use of titles and honorifics, like Japanese? This tells you something about the importance of rank and hierarchy in the culture. And most beginner language classes will include lessons on cultural basics like food, clothing, and etiquette.
Finally, we’ve probably all overheard a conversation in a language that we didn’t understand and thought that it sounded like nothing but noise. The more the sounds of a language differ from the sounds of our native language, the more true this will be. Yet after just a couple of weeks of practice in that language and its sounds—after learning just a few of the most common words and phrases—suddenly it begins to sound like speech, not noise. And its speakers, by extension, are actually talking, not uttering gibberish.
I had an experience like this during my 6-week Chinese class two years ago. Prior to taking this class, I knew exactly nothing about Chinese grammar and not a single word in the language. After a couple of weeks, I could pick out a word or phrase here and there while listening to an NPR reporter interviewing a Chinese speaker (before the translator butted in with the English voiceover, that is). It had a humanizing effect on the Chinese speaker that startled me. He no longer sounded like an incomprehensible foreigner living in an incomprehensible part of the world; he sounded like a person speaking a language. A language that, with practice, I could learn. And indeed, research shows that exposure to other languages increases empathy (I discussed this in my 2017 post “Value (Not Profit) in Studying a Foreign Language”).
If you’re even a little curious about learning another language, there are many free and low-cost ways to do so, most of which are more flexible and more fun than the high school classes you’re familiar with. Many communities offer free and low-cost classes for adults (if you’re in western South Dakota, check out Community Education of the Black Hills). Language-learning apps like Duolingo and Babel are convenient and low-pressure; Duolingo is particularly useful for increasing your vocabulary if you already have a bare-bones understanding of the grammar. Pimsleur audio lessons are great for practicing pronunciation and learning basic phrases for travel and business; you can buy them online or download them for free via the Hoopla audiobook library app. And the website The Mixxer can connect you with native speakers of your target language with whom you can practice (and who want to practice their English with you). If you know of any other cheap or free ways to practice a language, please share them in the comments below.
Six weeks of classes, or a few months of skyping with a native speaker, or twelve audio lessons won’t make you fluent, but you might be surprised how fun, useful, and interesting language learning can be when you stop pressuring yourself and settle for doing it badly.
