Why Learn a Foreign Language?

As Numenius mentioned in his blog post yesterday, we’ve both been actively learning new languages. In my case this deep dive into German has now moved into its fifth year. But why? I don’t live in Germany, nor do I intend ever to move there; I haven’t even been there. Most people in Germany speak good English (at least in the cities) and will reportedly answer in English the second they get the sense your native language is English. No: my reason for learning German is to get a massive monkey off my back.

When I went to boarding school from Madrid at age 13, I was compelled to choose three of the four following subjects: history, Latin, geography and German. Latin and history were obvious choices to me; geography seemed like it would be a lot easier than German plus I still had a residual antipathy to German (it was the early 1970s and English war comics featuring hollering Nazi officers were a staple in our house.) In the event I got invited to leave my geography class only three weeks in because I kept correcting the teacher’s pronunciation of Spanish place names like a brat. I should have joined the German class but thought I’d never catch up. (I would have, of course: three weeks is nothing at beginner level.) The monkey? It settled in and looked forward to a lifetime of mischief.

I’ve started other languages in the interim (having taken Spanish and French at University): Italian A Level in Cambridge in 1982 because a friend had, Irish at Harvard so I could calligraph 18th century Irish poetry (this was too hard and I never made it very far), Hebrew so I could calligraph a ketubah for some friends (and read prayer book Hebrew, later), Catalan because our Catalan neighbors gave me a good excuse in 2024; Ukrainian because fuck Putin. (Keep your armchair neurodivergent diagnoses to yourselves, please.) But German? I am determined to reach a C1 level sometime and am finding Lingoda classes to be well-suited to my learning style. I practice daily (I find myself writing more postcards in German than in English through Postcrossing) and am now running the Advanced German Conversation sessions for International House on Zoom. (I also delved into writing Chinese script so I could write addresses in Chinese on postcards, though it turns out I send most of my postcards to Germany, the Germans are avid postcard writers.) Languages keep my brain a) active; b) distracted from the cacophony of political turmoil. But mostly: it’s stimulating and incredibly fun to do this.