If you are familiar with the sacred texts of Judaism or Christianity, you probably know the story of the Tower of Babel. Essentially, this narrative tells of ancient people attempting to build a really cool tower that stretched to the heavens so that other people would see it and say, "Wow. They have a tall tower. I bet that's because their god is better than ours!" This led to God being angry, as was often the case in these stories and God decided to mess them up by causing all the builders to speak in different languages.

This story illustrates a very key point -- even ancient Jewish guys knew that language barriers are the worst.

I think this is a point that we all understand, but we deal with it in some different ways. Europeans, for example, will encounter several different languages on a regular basis, due to interaction with neighboring countries with different language and close proximity.

For those of us who live in the United States, the issue is handled differently. For most Americans, English is spoken almost exclusively in our communities and the only other language that we regularly encounter in person is Spanish.

To be honest, we have it very easy in the U.S. Most of the world is bilingual, and we get very angry at people who don't speak English, even though our country was intentionally founded with no state language.

I am currently touring Bulgaria with a choir from my university, and I have learned more Bulgarian in a week than some people know of Spanish, even though they have heard it spoken their whole lives.

Now, I am not saying that everyone needs to go out and buy expensive software to learn a different language. I am just saying that maybe we could stop judging people for speaking a different language around us. We have to share the world, and compared to the billions of bilingual people in the world, we are not very good at it. Let's learn to share.