Foreign Languages

Originally published October 11, 2019

Working in an office where almost everyone speaks a second language is definitely interesting and new for me.  I don't speak a second language, but I wish I did.  One reason I'd want to speak a second language is to be able to talk freely with someone else who speaks that language and not have to worry about being overheard.  I often wonder if I hear two people talking in a foreign language near me if they are talking about me.  But more so than that, the ability to speak another language is a huge skill to have and can help you in both your professional and personal lives.  My role here may help me learn a bit about other languages as people speak those languages around me, and I also do work involving translating foreign languages to English.

As I said, most people in the office speak a second language, that language usually either being French or Spanish.  I think I may have heard some Arabic at one point.  I catch a few words here and there that I recognize such as "tres bien".  Spanish and French are about on the same level for me now; if I had to survive in a country that spoke one of those languages, I could probably figure out a way to get by.  They are much easier languages to understand than other languages you might hear on occasion such as Chinese or Japanese. 

Most of my experience with a second language is with German.  I took three years of German in high school, plus a semester in college.  Most of my ancestors came to the United States from Germany around the turn of the 20th century, which inspired me to take German.  Unfortunately, high school and even college was a while ago for me, so I'm not as sharp with the German language as I used to be.  But if I was dropped into Germany all of a sudden, I could definitely get by, and not just because most German people know a basic amount of English.  The hardest parts for me with learning German were two things: The gender of different things (Die, Das, or Der?) and conjugating verbs.  Conjugating verbs in English is tough for non-native speakers, as we often hear them say things like "They is", "She running" and "He weren't", so it is equally as tough for me in German.

What's also helping me learn a bit of other languages is translating different things on the internet, usually using Google Translate.  I have to go through certain foreign receipts and transactions and categorize them, but I cannot categorize them if I don't know what they were for.  Therefore I have to use Google Translate to determine what certain receipts and transactions were for.  Mostly the things I have to translate are in French.  It's amazing what technology can do for us.  On little devices (smart phones) that we carry around in our pockets, we can translate anything.  At my past job, I had a couple different people who didn't know English that used their smart phones to translate their speech to English, and I would speak into their phones to translate back to their native tongue so that we could communicate.  I guess it's both a good and bad thing we have the convenience of these devices, as it makes it so much easier to communicate in foreign country, but it also eliminates the need to learn another language and becoming more dependent on technology.  But I would definitely consider it more a good thing, as anything that makes life easier and makes conversing with people from other cultures is definitely a positive.

Learning another language is very tough to do.   It is even harder to do as an adult, because our brains are already fully developed and set in their ways as opposed to a child whose brain is still developing.  I don't know if I will ever fully learn a second language, but I know if I set my mind to it, I could.  There just isn't a great need in my life right now to learn a second language.  I already know enough German to get by, so if I were to learn a second language, it would probably be Spanish.  Not only is its use on the rise (at least in the US), but my girlfriend has a Hispanic background.  However, as generations go on, knowing the Spanish language has become less and less prevalent in her family.  Her grandparents are fluent in it, while her parents' generation knows some but not a ton, and her generation only knows bits and pieces.  I think this is the case in most families that have immigrated to America, as the English language becomes more commonly known and used throughout the world.  I can see some day English being extremely predominant to the extent of almost everyone in a first world country knowing basic English, and trickling down to second and third world countries.  We could some day way in the future some languages die out (some already have) and see English everywhere on Earth except for the most remote locations away from civilization.