The joys of language

The world is filled with words and sounds.?This is what is known as language.?Language is defined as the principal method of human communication, consisting of words used in a structured way and conveyed by speech, writing or gesture.?Languages tend to be regionally specific, and indeed a defining feature of many countries around the world is the dominant language that is spoken by its population.?

According to Ethnologue, there are over 7,000 known languages around the world.?According to Wikipedia, the most dominant languages are:

This list highlights that the global dominance of the English language is not driven by native speakers, but rather the prevalence of English as a second language.?Mandarin, the second largest language in the world, is almost a polar opposite – its dominance is firmly cemented by its prevalence of native speakers in China.?English is actually the third largest language in the world, behind Mandarin and Spanish, when ranked according to the number of first language speakers.?English is an officially recognized language in more than 55 countries.?English is the primary spoken language in several countries around the world, but five countries in particular are recognized as part of the “Core Anglosphere”, being:

·???????United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

The United Nations recognizes six official languages, which are – Arabic, Chinese (simplified form of Mandarin), English, French, Russian, and Spanish.?Those six languages are spoken by 3.8 billion people, just under 50% of the world’s population.?

Multilingualism denotes the ability to speak more than one language.?It is estimated that around half the world’s population speaks more than one language.?Bilingualism and multilingualism can be hard to define, as there are degrees of language proficiency – for example, many people have the ability to understand the spoken word of another language, but lack the ability to converse in that language.?

The rate of multilingualism in the US is estimated to be around 20%, which falls well below the global estimate of 50%.?As a bilingual country, I expected Canada to fare better than that, but our stats are fairly similar, with Stats Canada reporting in 2016 that around 23% of Canadians are bilingual.?The rate of English-French bilingualism in Canada is around 18%, with Quebec leading the way in terms of this – almost 45% of Quebecers are English-French bilingual.?Indeed, 178 countries around the world recognize an official language, with 101 of them recognizing more than one.?India tops the list of being the most diverse linguistically, with 22 languages recognized in its constitution.?

Myself, I am monolingual.?I am a born and bred English speaking Canadian.?As a Canadian, I was required to take French in school, which I did from grades 4 through 10.??In grade 10, French became optional, and it only took me one year of taking French electively to realize that formalized French education was not for me.?I labelled myself “not a language person” and decided to be a proud monolingual.

And yet here, some 30 years later, I made the decision to start electively learning Spanish.??How does a proud monolingual decide to try her hand at another language?

The answer in one word is curiosity.?And then to use a second word – motivation.

In my personal life, I consume a lot of TED talks.?To use their own words, TED is a non-profit organization devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks of 18 minutes or less.?TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design.?One of my favorite all time TED talks is one of the first ones I ever watched, “How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals” by Stephen Dunier.??Stephen talks about the system he used to achieve successes in his professional and personal life, through making small, marginal changes to his everyday habits and practices.?Stephen’s accomplishments include becoming fluent in German, through replacing the music on his Ipod with a German language course.?As I consumed more and more TED talks and podcasts over time, the concept of language learning kept coming up as a common self-improvement goal for high achievers driven to improve themselves over time.?This motivated me to rethink my own perspective on language learning, and my conclusion made many years ago that I was “not a language person”.

Armed with this newfound interest and motivation, I decided to take on the challenge of acquiring a new language.?I chose a very modern approach to tackling this goal - non-traditional learning.?Specifically, I chose the app “Duolingo”.?Duolingo is a language learning app, designed by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Anh and his post-graduate student, Severin Hacker.?The duo believed that free vehicles for education were going to become incredibly prevalent and important in the future, and developed Duolingo with this in mind.?Duolingo is indeed free, although there is a premium version available for a monthly fee.?Duolingo strives to make language learning as fun as possible, and uses “gamification” to help increase user engagement and promote long term use of the app.?

About 100 days into Duolingo, and I realized I was not about to become a fluent Spanish speaker anytime soon.?My habit was firmly established at this point – I practice about 2-3 exercises on Duolingo each morning, first thing, right after I grab myself a cup of coffee.?I was in no rush to become fluent, as having strict timelines would take the fun out of the experience. Lydia Machovia, speaks in another fantastic TED talk about how people are able to acquire multiple languages (polygots). ?Lydia indicates that the most notable similarity amongst polygots is that they found a way to make the process of learning the language enjoyable.?Clearly, having fun during the process is a key success factor for language acquisition.?Duolingo is definitely fun, so it had that going for it.?But I decided to try to “level up” my daily Spanish language practices and supplement with some other methods.

Lydia’s talk was very helpful in that regard, as she gives a number of interesting examples of how polygots tackle the challenge of learning a language.?From Benny, whose method is to start speaking the language on Day 1, unconcerned with his rate of errors during those early days, to Lucas, who amused himself by brokering a conversation in Russian between two native speakers through a chat room, simply copying and pasting ones response to the other.?Lydia herself indicates that watching old reruns of “Friends” in her target language is a little trick she uses to keep the process fun.?Myself, I attempted a lot of these.?I started sending my husband texts each morning in Spanish.?Listened to countless hours of Spanish pop music.?Tried the Rosetta Stone app for a week, a process which ended abruptly when my free trial period was over.?Played Spanish children’s songs for my 6 month old nephew when I babysat, learning colors and days of the week along the way.?And yes, I also amused myself by watching Seinfeld and Friends episodes en espanol.

At this point, almost half a year into my Spanish experiment, I am nowhere close to fluent.?I am starting to recognize certain words as they come up in Spanish songs and television, such as quiero (want), mujer (woman), corazon (heart).?My husband, Jeff and I had a good laugh when Duolingo informed me that the Spanish word for boss is “jefe”.?

Why bother with all of this??Charlemagne, often referred to as “The Father of Europe”, has a famous quote “To have another language is to possess a second soul.”?A famous study in 1962 – “The relationship of bilingualism to intelligence”, by Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert, concluded that bilingual children performed considerably better than monolinguals on both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests.?The psychological concept of task switching is often stronger in bilinguals.?Task switching is the ability to unconsciously shift attention between one task and another.?Bilinguals routinely exercise this skill, when they are able to greet one person with a “Hello”, and then use “Hola” to greet a Spanish speaker.?

How easy or difficult is it to learn another language??The Foreign Service Institute (FSI), a branch of the US Department of State, created a list to show the approximate time one would need to learn a language, as a native English speaker.?There are 5 different categories in the FSI ranking, with estimate hours required to achieve proficiency.?These hours range from around 600 hours for Category 1, to 2200 hours for Category 5. ??Fortunately for me, Spanish falls in the first, “easiest” category, along with languages such as French, Italian and Portuguese.?The most difficult languages (Category 5) for native English speakers to acquire are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.?

And the final, most important question of all – why, of all languages, did I chose Spanish??As a family we love to travel, and warm winter vacations, often in Mexico & the Caribbean, are some of our favorite destinations.?One of the first places we travelled as a family was Jamaica, and we had a great conversation with our taxi driver, en route to our resort.?The driver educated us about the local area, including an explanation of why the vehicle in front of us had a man holding his fishing gear travelling in the trunk of the car (the answer – his taxi driver would not allow him to bring his spear and “catch” into the vehicle).?When we arrived the following year in the Dominican Republic, we were excited to gain similar insights on the local area from our taxi driver – only to learn a few minutes in that he only spoke a limited amount of English.?Even while at the resort, language was a limiting factor when trying to strike up a conversation at the bar, as many of my fellow guests at the resort were from South American countries.?I enjoy chatting with people, particularly those with very different backgrounds than mine, and language is a very large barrier to doing that.?If I can gain some cognitive benefits along the way, all the better.

So here’s hoping, the next time I am fortunate enough to travel to a beautiful, Spanish speaking country, I will be able to greet the bartender with more than my current arsenal, of “Hola.?Una cerveza, por favor.”

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