Why one has to take 12 hours of a foreign language at the University of Louisville

"Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own." Goethe

I just got this quote from the Facebook profile of a friend of mine, André, whom I met through my Spanish classes at the University. It is amazing how such a little sentence can speak to such a great portion of my heart. This is my mantra for anyone who wonders why s/he has to take "stupid 12 hours of a foreign language." Language is an amazing gift to humankind. It has the power to build civilizations--and to tear them apart. Language is the fundamental unit of our humanity; it is unique to our kind of all living things on earth. (Certainly, there is communication among all living things; and within specific groups--bees or dolphins or redwoods--there is a more specific kind of communication. But this must not be mistaken for language, for a formal system of finite rules and infinite possibilites, a generative quality than can only be understood and replicated and used by human beings.) It is part of this gift that we, as children, can load many different languages into our heads without the need of formal training. Learning to use language is as natural to (most of) us as learning to walk or to feed ourselves.

But this extraordinary miracle has a drawback: since we learn our first language(s) intuitively, we never have need of formally (abstractly, left-brainedly) understanding the system we are using. It only becomes necessary to understand language as a formal system when we must learn a second language. By the time we reach a mere 6 years of age, our brains have already rewired to the point that intuitive language learning has been severely diminished, and so we must learn language a different way. Instead of just hearing, repeating, and understanding, we must also read and write, memorize, diagram and list. These are all helpful in becoming comfortable navigating within the foreign language.

Because our brains have rewired and because we read and write, we can also use these tools to re-examine our own lengua materna. It is in dissecting a second language that we can see how to do it to our own language; and when we do this, we become better speakers, better writers, better communicators in our first language. As well, we can come to understand, in a larger sense, that since there are many languages--many systems--there are furthermore many ways of expressing a thought, each unique and essentially untranslatable. We can also, most importantly, understand that language is a SYMBOLIC SYSTEM, and understanding its structure can extend to our understanding not only of other languages but also of other symbolic systems such as music or mathematics. Through initiating and then deepening our understanding of a foreign language (or multiple foreign languages) we have the ability to tame our first language as well as to open the door in our minds to greater understanding of the intangible systems that compose our universe.