Picture this: you're walking through a park in Miami, or New York City, or Los Angeles. Some random city with good tourism. For the sake of this article, let's go with New York City. Your legs are aching after a long day of yelling and feeding pigeons and doing whatever else one does in New York. Finally, you spot a clean, dry bench and sit down. After a few minutes of pondering the idea of a Trump presidency, somebody else comes and sits next to you, and it doesn't take long for you to notice that this person is beautiful and you want to marry them.
This person is absolutely striking. Good style, cute face, nice hair - the whole package. With one headphone in their right ear and the other one hanging down to their chest, you can hear your favorite song playing. At the same time, you see them reading a review for that one really good movie you saw last week on their phone. So many ice breakers! You have to say something.
You stop admiring their aesthetics for a second and decide this is your one and only shot at true love. You clear your throat and then let out a small chuckle to catch their attention. You think it sounded slick when in reality it came off as a cough, but that's besides the point because now they're looking at you, their eyes locked on yours, with a smile that welcomes conversation.
"Hello," you say, your voice an octave deeper than normal. "I noticed you're listening to my favorite song. That's like, super radical or whatever." Nice. You're in. Or so you think.
Suddenly, the friendly look on their face fades. They hesitate to reply. After a small pause, they respond, but you can't quite make out what they're saying. It sounds like Spanish, but a little Frencher? Maybe it's Italian.
You can tell this is not going to work out, but you're not about to throw in the towel just yet. "What language are you speaking?" They say it's Portuguese, and you acknowledge the unusualness and peculiarity of it, but beyond that, there really isn't much else to talk about. You retreat respectfully and go back to minding your own business, and they do as well.
What follows is a long moment of silence, not due to a lack of chemistry, but because there is no alternative. In that moment, you are literally unable to communicate. You two are on completely different waves. The feeling is uncomfortable. It is alienating. Though you may have plenty of things in common, in that moment, you two are absolute strangers, and that's how things will remain.
Because of an imperceptible language barrier, you and your perpetual stranger friend will miss out on each other's stories. This person sitting next to you has knowledge and experiences you'll never hear about. They have aspirations and opinions they'll never share with you; a name that won't mean much to you after today. This is the ultimate form of FoMO. You're missing out on a whole conscious human being, and it's all because you don't speak the same language.
Maybe this scenario is a bit too dramatized or cliché, but you get the general gist of it. There's so many people living life at the same time as you are, in many places with many different cultures, and it's all happening right now.
The amount of knowledge and information that is yet to be discovered is endless, but it is limited by various factors. Language is one of them, but it's an obstacle worth overcoming. Learning a foreign language is something we often see as work. It takes time and dedication and it can be very frustrating. In high school, learning a new language often feels forced and therefore we dismiss it as a chore.
In actuality, learning a language outside of your native tongue is not a chore. Rather, it's liberating. It's a new vessel through which you can express yourself, with a brand new audience. Learning a new language gives you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with a different culture and with people different from yourself that have much to offer.
Maybe it's unlikely that you'll be approached by a Brazilian human-god hybrid in the middle of Manhattan, but in this highly interconnected world that we live in, you're bound to encounter a person or a situation for which you might want to know another language. So don't look at it as a bunch of unnecessary stress. Look at it as a way to better yourself, and go learn a new language. Learn some new expressions. Hell, learn all the languages. Aprendete todos los lenguajes.
学所有语言!! Get out there and make this life worth living!!!
