In my opinion, one of the most fascinating things in the world is listening to people talk in a language you do not know. Scratch that, language itself is fascinating. As societies around the world developed, so did the different ways that they communicated with one another. Even with multiple groups of people creating these languages, there were still some cognates that slipped through the cracks due to historical circumstances.
But I'm going on a slight linguistics nerd tangent here.
I think I've always wanted to learn another language, but I didn't know which one to pick until I got to high school. My school only offered Spanish and German, so I went with the former since I figured it is more widely spoken in America. After I determined that I wanted to work in journalism for my career, I started planning to become fluent in Spanish to allow me to talk to more people and communities as well as open myself up to translation work on the side for extra income.
As of last September, I have officially been studying Spanish for five years. I am quite proud of this fact, but when people ask me if I'm fluent... well, that's a different story.
Learning another language is a game played in an entirely different ballpark. Not only is there a different word for almost every word in your native language, but the grammar and rules change as well. It's hard enough to comprehend what someone is saying in another language, but then you throw accents into the mix that can make one word sound completely different.
As a perfectionist, it's a horrible feeling to be sitting in a classroom wanting to learn yet having a difficult time understanding what's even going on. You wish that you could just pull up some Spanish out of the blue, but you can't without translating each word you want to say in your head and then making adjustments to the sentence to accommodate for plurality, gender and numerical agreement, conjugations of verbs (plus remembering those with irregularities), tense changes, the locations of accents over certain letters of a word and the coordinating pronunciation, etc.
That being said, I have endless admiration for those who had to learn a crazy language like English quickly in order to make their lives easier in the community they live in. Not only that, but many of them have faced ridicule for how they sound when they speak it, and it's common for the abuse to come from people who have no idea how hard it is to learn another language. I recognize that I am privileged to have English as my native language as well as the ability to learn Spanish at the slow pace I am currently taking.
Even though learning another language is stressful and I've wondered if I'm even cut out for fluency, I'm glad I've learned as much as I have and I'm eager to learn more. I'm in eternal awe of those who are multilingual, and once I've learned Spanish, I hope I can follow in their footsteps.
