There are plenty of great reasons why one might want to learn a foreign language. If one enjoys learning about research, knowing another language is a great way to help one get material that is published mainly in a foreign language and will help one communicate with other people in the field.

Knowing a foreign language can be helpful when traveling. In my personal experiences with travel and language, knowing a little bit about Spanish has helped me. It helped me understand what I was ordering when a menu was completely in Spanish at restaurants and helped me understand what people were saying when I heard them speak in Spanish.

Learning another language can help one understand culture, other people, and is a great way to broaden one’s perspective. It can help one find recipe books that are available only in a foreign language. It can be a way to challenge oneself and one may also like the way a particular language is spoken or sung. One might find the written language to be attractive or one might like to learn songs in another language. Having a better understanding of a song’s meaning in the foreign language may deepen one’s appreciation for the song.   

Learning a foreign language is a great way to help one better understand our thought processes. For example, unlike English, many languages assign gender to objects. Thinking of objects as having a gender is certainly a different way of viewing the world than seeing things as being gender neutral.  

Another benefit of learning a foreign language is to keep the mind healthy. It has been shown that learning a second language can delay the onset of dementia, something that we cannot predict for certain and, currently, have no cure for.

Some other languages that I enjoy learning about and listening to include Japanese, Latin, and Spanish. I know some Spanish and Japanese, but hope to learn more about all three languages in the future.