My Language Journey

I’ve lived most of my life as a monolingual, which, if your frame of reference is in the right way, can be a really good thing. However, my life took a vastly different path once I started studying foreign languages. From an early age, I enjoyed the pressure of challenging myself to try the next big thing. Eventually, I felt that I outgrew my surroundings and wanted to try something completely out of my wheelhouse, but what? I was about 10 at the time, and in the 7th grade, it is expected that you start learning a foreign language. I didn’t really know what to expect out of this, but I followed the pack and took Spanish because it was what everyone else was taking and it seemed useful in today’s America. On the very first day of class, I saw Spanish for what it was, not simply a rudimentary challenge to check off some made-up list, but something much, much more. It seemed to come easily to me, I excelled with high marks without applying myself very hard, then I took a step back: imagine what I could accomplish if I wholeheartedly applied myself. It was then and there that my entire worldview changed and I caught a glimpse of the world I had been missing prior. I eventually found myself immersed in the Spanish language, enthralled by all that it has to offer. Looking back on my transformation, I can say with certainty that learning a foreign language changes you profoundly. I would say that I’m a bit of a language fanatic because, after I felt like I had reached a high level of fluency in Spanish, I found myself pushing forward into the next language and the next. There’s just some inexplicable magnetic attraction that foreign languages and cultures have to offer.

I have read a number of “self-improvement novels” that basically keep running back to the same thing: you must find a process that works for you in order to succeed. I see no difference when learning new languages. I found myself drowning in all the different “100% guaranteed language learning processes” but they all felt extremely laborious and time demanding, but most importantly, I was losing the spark that first made me want to learn the language. Once I got to university, I realized what I was missing before: people to talk to. All the time you see these ultra-polyglots on YouTube who is somehow fluent in a hundred different languages, and I started to realize a common factor in all of them: they all managed to find someone to converse within that language. Purdue University is an extremely diverse campus full of students from all corners of the globe, meaning that there has got to be at least one person who I can talk to, right? I would say this has revolutionized my language learning mentality, as it is no longer some sort of isolating hobby, but a gateway to a realm of possibilities.

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