Learning a new language is more than just getting a useful new skill. It is a true transforming process that can become nothing short of a spiritual experience.
Sure, learning languages is practical. Personally, being a native Italian speaker, I had to learn English soon, if I wanted to travel outside my home country and be understood by anyone. Later on, being fluent in English got me my first decently paid job.
But I soon realized that the practical benefits were just one aspect of the equation. Having now studied six different languages, I can say that there are at least three incredibly deep benefits to learning a new language:
- It expands the field of our consciousness;
- It helps us understand how our mind is structured, and
- It heightens our connection with the rest of the human population.
Not bad, right? Let’s have a look at each one of these amazing things that learning a language can do for us.
Expanding our field of consciousness.
By learning new languages, we can literally think about things we had never thought before. Each and every language shapes the world in a different way, and by learning a new one, we can learn to “see” the world with different eyes.
For a Portuguese speaker, the feeling of “saudade” is a distinct emotion, but English speakers have a hard time understanding it. In Italian, there is a clear difference between “blu,” “azzurro” and “celeste;” in English, they are perceived as just different shades of the same colour, blue.
One of the most beautiful examples of this is the Spanish distinction between “ser” and “estar.” In English, they both mean “to be.” But to a Spanish speaker, there is a deep difference between being something permanently (ser) and being something only temporarily (estar). Isn’t that fascinating?