Reasons to Learn Foreign Language

Language is undoubtedly the most important thing human as a species have. By using language human share their knowledge and expertise, enabling humanity as a species to build our culture and technology. Without language we would have no way to learn about our environment, our society and even ourself.

However, on our journey for knowledge we often find ourselves with literature written in language we are not fluent with. Sometimes it is because the literature is not yet translated. Some other time, it is because translating the literature to other language is entirely impossible. This article is going to focus on reasons for why sometimes translating the literature is impossible and we have to learn the language.

Cultural Barrier

Several month ago, one of my friend who happen to speak Japanese better than I am explained why most of the time meanings are lost between translation. He explained that languages and cultures who speak those languages are deeply related. Language is an expression deeply related to culture, which in turn related to the way people who submit to that culture think. Moreover, it also have something to do with how people within those culture structure their thought.

Different culture usually found in region with different value of environmental variables and societal variables. This will greatly affect their culture in a lot of ways. There are concepts in one culture that never exist at all in other culture, either because they never need such concept before or they haven’t realize the need of such concept before.

Difference in Way of Abstraction

Different culture have different way to conceptualize and structure their thought process. In the global scale, Europeans tend to be more straightforward in conversation while Asian tends to observe a lot before saying a thing. In smaller scale different Asian are different. Japanese and Korean have more rules and tradition to observe than Chinese.

Cultures with more rules and tradition to observe tend to have a lot of cultural specific vocabularies in their language. These cultural specific vocabularies can’t be translated word-to-word to other languages spoken by people with different culture. In such cases, people simply put the words in their language without bothering with any kind of translation.

Untranslatable Humor

One thing I can tell you for sure about learning foreign languages is the fact that the more languages you learn, the more reasons to laugh you will have. Most languages have homophones and ambiguous words in their vocabularies. Sometimes the language have ambiguous-able sentence structure as a result of their semantic rule.

This open a lot of way for people to mistakenly hear a sentence outside its speaker’s intended meaning. This often result in both speaker and listener find themselves in a humorous situation. Most of the time, such kind of humor can’t be told to person incapable of speaking said language without decreasing the hilarity factor.

Deepening our Knowledge and Understanding

Just like different people may see different things from the same object, different culture also have different way of seeing a fact. The way the Japanese and German view World War 2 for example, will be entirely different from the way American, Chinese and Indonesian view it. Although most people would agree that wars are horrible, different culture have different reasons to say why wars are horrible.

By learning more about a language we will learn more about a culture. This will enable us to communicate with more people and look at things from more point of views. It is never uninteresting to learn how different people from different cultures are somehow similar to us and learn that there are different reasons for why we are so similar later.

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