I first realized how inadequate I was at Spanish when one of my close friends hosted a foreign exchange student from Spain, named Sara. I was in the tenth grade, and had been learning Spanish regularly for two years. I thought I was doing pretty well. I had been placed into the advanced Spanish class, which combined Spanish I and Spanish II into one school year. I knew how to say the important things, like, “My name is Marly,” and, “Where is the bathroom?” I was under the impression that I was ahead of the game, bound for success and fluency. Life was good when I was a high school sophomore.

Then I met Sara from Spain. She wasn’t perfect at speaking, I’ll admit. But she was so much better at English than I was in Spanish. It wasn’t just that my Spanish was so far behind Sara’s English, but that her school system in Spain had required learning a foreign language so much earlier than it was required in my school (and in most public school systems in America). One of my other friends hosted a foreign exchange student from Germany, and she spoke not only German fluently, but French and English proficiently as well. My two years of learning Spanish suddenly didn’t seem like an accomplishment, but a way in which I was behind in schooling.

In an article written by Kat Devlin, a research analyst for the Pew Research Center, which is a “nonpartisan fact tank” that writes about relevant global issues, the differences between foreign language education in Europe and foreign language education in the United States are clearly highlighted. Foreign language learning in Europe begins from a very young age, usually before age ten but often before. Truth be told, I began learning Spanish in my elementary school; sort of. That is, I learned colors and the months. I didn’t learn verb conjugations or tense or anything required to actually speak the language. My knowledge was minimal at best, and I only spent one day a week actually learning. In middle school I took a break, and started up again when I started high school. My early Spanish education was inconsistent. Most of my friends first began learning a foreign language in high school, with no prior second-language education.

One of the reasons for this is that there is no nationally mandated law that requires learning a second language in school in the United States. Some schools may have certain graduation or curriculum requirements that encourage students to take a foreign language. For example, in my high school, at least two years of foreign language education is required to graduate. According to research done by Devlin however, in some schools in the US, either language learning or an art class are required. One or the other. Not both. Which means that some students in their years and years of primary and secondary education never even begin learning another language.

By making it mandatory for learning a second language to be required, and to begin at a younger age, American students will benefit not only from a better chance at achieving proficiency through years of practice but also from the preservation of languages and cultures that are different. In an increasingly globalized world, preserving the culture and languages of other countries and regions is becoming much more of a challenge. If schools in America were to teach foreign languages to students starting at a much younger age, and continue throughout primary and secondary school, more students would be proficient in more than their native tongue. Knowing a second language not only looks great on resumes and college applications, but can really help the open up your brain to thinking in new ways. For example, I started taking Russian courses my freshman year of college, and the Russian language requires a case system for declining words. This helped me when I took a linguistics course to map out grammar. I had a better understanding of sentence structure, and therefore could easier understand what part each word played in a sentence. My brain was used to seeing sentence structures in more than one way thanks to learning Russian.

If learning a second language were to be a requirement in American schooling systems, then this would provide a great opportunity for language revitalization programs as well. Languages that are endangered or vulnerable, such as the Ojibwe language, could be taught in schools not only to fulfill the requirement, but to help preserve and keep the culture of the Ojibwe and other languages alive. Problems with this possibility stem from the plausibility of finding multiple qualified educators of each language to teach students in both primary and secondary schools across the nation. This is not realistic under the present circumstances for many vulnerable languages, as native speakers are few and far between as it is. In my high school, the Ojibwe language was offered as a language and culture class, but only for two years. The other languages offered at my school, Spanish and German, were available for all four years of high school. One reason for this is because teachers of languages that are more widely spoken are easier to come by. My school is lucky to be able to offer the opportunity to learn the Ojibwe language, but most students won’t take it because many colleges require four years of a language to get certain scholarships or credits. For many students in my school, taking Ojibwe was not the most logical option in terms of looking at how it would affect their future. However, with the proper funding and great efforts from many schools, languages like the Ojibwe language could potentially be better preserved and be made a reasonable and unique option for students.

Language learning also opens up students’ minds to learning about customs and traditions different from the ones they know. Through learning a language, different ways of thinking and understanding the world are conveyed. It is important for students to be able to think from different perspectives and understand there is a large variety of people in the world.

Language learning in American school systems should be not only encouraged, but mandatory. American students are far behind compared to students of other countries. By making second-language learning required at a younger age, then students will be able to reach proficiency at a younger age, like my friend Sara. If I could have begun learning Spanish seriously in elementary school and continued to take classes throughout my schooling, my proficiency would have been much better by the time I met her. The benefits of enforcing second-language learning requirements at a younger age are numerous, and would have saved me the embarrassment of still being less than proficient when I hosted a foreign exchange student of my own my senior year. I could hardly hold a grammatical conversation in Spanish with her, while her English far surpassed my Spanish skills. I am grateful for the four years I took in high school and what they taught me. I only wish I could have had started sooner.