Learn a Foreign Language and Unlock a New World!
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein.
I only realized the importance of learning a foreign language when I moved to the US to finish my university studies. At 22, I arrived at the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, took my first English course, and started administrative work to get credits from my studies in Venezuela.
All that mattered then was to pass the English test (TOEFL) required at LSU. LATAM students were willing to help. Still, I decided to try an immersion experience with English-speaking professors and students to pass the test in three months to minimize the cost to my parents. I did succeed in doing so, and after my first semester, I obtained a scholarship from an oil corporation and started working part-time for a Seven-Eleven store near the university.
I also engaged with an American student on a one-on-one English and Spanish interchange. That was my first experience with a local. It was then that I sensed that learning a foreign language could lead to much more than a degree at LSU, to enter a new world that is considered the best-known model of how a liberal democracy could work in the real world.
After graduating from LSU, I went to work for an international corporation in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was the only foreigner out of one hundred employees plant. I went through a training program and worked in shifts in operations under the supervision of three managers: in the lab, technical department, and operations VP. I cannot explain in words the gratitude I still feel for the quality and warmth of the professional and human support I received then.
The lessons I learned from studying, working, and living in the US would shape my thinking and actions for the rest of my life. It opened a new world for the first time in my life.
A second life experience lesson came later in another foreign language and country. My approach this time differed: without the benefit of studying, working, and living in France. Instead, my wife and I have spent holidays for the last 24 years (except for 2020 during the pandemic) in the south of France, outside Toulouse.
I learned the hard way by taking a couple of courses at the Alliance Francaise, talking to family and locals, listening to TV, videos, and podcasts, and taking every opportunity to practice while traveling in France. My conversational proficiency in French is below that in English: I can talk, write, and deliver presentations at work. But I can communicate with locals, watch TV, and follow radio and podcasts. One gets to a level of proficiency in a foreign language when one even thinks and dreams occasionally in that language. It is enough to tap that new world.
While learning French, I read papers of the great French thinkers of the Illustration. I have enjoyed French television panel discussions on political and social issues with references and comparisons to the US and UK. There is a difference between the pragmatic approach of the Americans and the empiric one of the British. It is shown in their attitude toward social issues such as racism and human rights in France, where the French show a higher degree of understanding and solidarity.
Then there is the French cuisine and the quality of life. Toulouse is the capital of the Occitanie region in France, where one feels a cosmopolitan atmosphere, with streets named in their original language (lenga d’òc).
My wife’s relatives moved to the South of France during the Spanish Civil War. We have spent time with them, their relatives, friends and neighbors. French in the Occitanie are very respectful and amicable. You will meet people from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Occitanie offers a variety of places along the Mediterranean Sea, its rivers, and the Pyrenees, where you will enjoy nature and the kindness of local people.
The main lessons I have learned while visiting France are to balance our opinions on social issues and to interpret the verb reflechir beyond its literal translation: to reflect, think, and consider, as an opportunity to slow down and take breaks to allow maturing our thoughts.
Finally, I am taking a third learning experience in a foreign language: German. With a different approach than English, when the essence was of the time, or French when, together with my wife, I spent more than twenty years vacationing in France. At 73, I aim to read Kant, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Nitzsche, and Wittgenstein in their native language.
