Life Lessons I Learned From Studying a Foreign Language

By Kailey Walters on April 15, 2017

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Throughout our entire academic years, mainly during high school and college, many if not all of us have taken some sort of foreign language course, either to satisfy requirements or for our own personal interests. From fifth grade until senior year of high school I took Spanish because it was required, and so after eight years of studying the same language, I decided to give Mandarin Chinese a try.

Disclaimer: I am certainly not fluent or even decently conversational in either of these languages nor am I an expert on taking foreign language classes. Yet, knowing that next semester will be my first time in 10 years not taking a foreign language class again, I got to thinking about what I’ve learned (besides vocabulary and grammar rules) along the journey.

Learning the basics is kind of easy and fun at first. When I started taking Spanish for the first time way back in fifth grade, or when I began learning Mandarin first semester freshman year, everything about the languages seemed so new, exciting, and fun. I marveled at the foreign sounds issuing from my lips whenever I pronounced new words, rolling them around in my mouth like marbles. Sure it was kind of awkward, but it was also, well, cool hearing myself say something not in English.

Writing new words, especially Chinese characters, was also intriguing and made me feel as if I were drawing rather than writing. That’s kind of how things are whenever you start to learn something new. Everything appears exciting and it’s like you’ve entered a different world.

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That is until you move past the basics and realize everything else about that language is extremely complicated. After taking two semesters of beginner Chinese and moving into intermediate, I began to realize just how … not easy learning this foreign language would be. There were so many words — thousands upon thousands I would never know — and the grammar rules were so different than those for English. This, I recognized, was when the disillusionment inevitably had to fade. If I were going to do well in my class, I needed to commit myself fully to the cause and acknowledge that not everything was going to come easy anymore.

Going out on a limb to practice your speaking skills with others is invaluable. The key to improving in any language is to speak it more often. This is something I’ve always had difficulty with because I’m fearful that other people, especially native speakers of that language, will judge me for my accent, my poor grammar, and my general, nonsensical gobbledygook.

But honestly, people can tell when you’re new at learning a language so they won’t judge you for every little mistake you make. Plus, you’ll never learn anything if you don’t open your mouth. I have learned that — and am still learning that — the hard way. Sometimes it’s quite painful and cringe-worthy to hear yourself stumbling over a sentence or struggling to hold a simple conversation, but it’s like the saying goes: you learn from your mistakes.  

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