Why I learn: putting a face to a language
Going abroad is a much better experience with language at your back, and this story proves it.
Our Why I Learn series features stories from real people about why they decided to learn a new language and how language learning has impacted their lives for the better. Are you learning a language? We’d love to hear your story! Submit it here.
By Chelsea Kidd
I was an exchange student in Portugal, so I learned Portuguese there just by living it. It was amazing, and I’ve been keeping it up. Part of that is through speaking it with my son, since he’s bilingual now.
It just felt so right to teach him, because it was a language I knew, and I wanted him to have that. I also wanted him to have a connection to my host family. And when we went back last summer, he was able to speak to my host family in Portuguese, and it was so exciting to see that.
I had been kind of window shopping for trips for years, and I was finally able to make it happen last year. It was so great to see my family and get to spend time with my host sister again, go to the Portuguese beaches, walk the streets that I had walked before, and take my son to the monastery that I passed every day on my way to school.
There was this one guy who used to stand outside of this restaurant, and he would always try to drive people in off the street. And because I have red hair and freckles, he would always speak English to me. I would always speak back to him in Portuguese, but he would still speak English to me whenever he saw me. And he was still there when I went back! The one person outside of my host family who I recognized was this guy outside the restaurant. That was kind of crazy.
Learning a language is so much easier when there’s a human connection.
We went to some beaches, and we went to explore some of the other cities in the area. And it was just so exciting to go to some of the places I hadn’t been before. I hadn’t been to Porto, and my host sister went with us to explore some of the touristy things there.
I’m hosting a Swedish exchange student now. I had asked her words here and there: “how do you say this,” “how do you say that.” And then I decided, why not try to learn it myself? So I started learning Swedish online, and I’ve really come to like that as well.
Learning a language is so much easier when there’s a human connection. It makes it more relevant and more interesting, too. But it also just makes it easier to make all the knowledge stick.
It’s been great. She’s the greatest kid, and learning about her culture and everything has been amazing. There were things I knew about Swedish culture, but learning more about the culture and how they see things—some of it makes a lot of sense to me. And it’s just nice to learn it from a person.
Since she’s been here, she’s fallen in love with acting. She got the lead in the high school play, but there was an announcement recently that they’re casting for a TV show not far from her in Sweden, and she made sure that they would take an audition tape. And so, she was working on that and she needed someone to read lines with her. My Swedish is still very rudimentary, but I was able to at least pronounce the words and make it sound like human language for her to do her lines on camera.
I also just really love that learning a language makes you more open to thinking in different ways.
I’ve heard that learning a given language can help you learn others too. There are certain things that are similar in Swedish and in Portuguese. And especially because there’s a lot of French influence on Swedish, which I had also studied previously. Portuguese gave me a foundation for learning more. And then you see these little similarities here and there.
I also really love that learning a language makes you more open to thinking in different ways. It can be anything from how people think about time, or the prepositions — that’s a big one. Prepositional phrases are so basic and so crucial to our learning. It’s so ingrained that you go to this thing, or this phrase is in and that phrase is on, and it’s difficult to deal with relearning these assumptions. But having already experienced this in Portuguese, it makes it a little bit easier to accept that Swedish people might say that you go on something, where we would say you go to it or in it.
I’m actually going back again this week to Portugal, because I told myself when I was on exchange that if Portugal ever won the Eurovision Song Contest I was going to go to the contest when it was held there. And so I’m going back now for the first semi-final. And it’s also exciting in a language sense, because everyone else tends to sing in English, and Portugal is seen as a stick in the mud because they sing in Portuguese. But they won with a song in Portuguese, and I was proud of them for that, and I love that the winner and his sister who wrote the song were both AFS exchange students in the US. So it just felt right to go back.
I love that these exchange programs can expose these painfully un-diverse, homogenous Maine communities to different cultures. It’s so nice for them, for these kids who might never have the chance to travel, to just see that there’s a reason we learn languages in school. These are real people who have real, full lives in different countries. That relevance for them, I think, is really important.
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