In the growing world of education, both at the high school and collegiate levels, there are many things that you can pursue to make your learning experience even more enjoyable and fine-tuned. There is one under-appreciated part of education that I think belongs on or at least near the top of things that you should experience that can help you very much in your time in high school and college.
This experience that I am referring to is learning a foreign language.
My high school offered Spanish, French and German. I challenged myself with taking German for all four years that I was in high school and one year in college.
Learning a new language is one of the most beneficial ways to increase your intelligence.
There are a four main reasons why I think that learning a foreign language would be helpful to your overall education.
The first reason you should learn a new language is because it helps with your grasp of new literary and spoken concepts. Learning a new language introduces you to different nouns, verbs, adjectives and language patterns.
Learning a new language also helps you grow your understanding of cross-cultural sentence structure and it invites you to look at sentences in a different way. There is also the concept of the grammatical gender of words. For example, those familiar with German understand there are masculine, feminine and neutral genders for nouns.
Mastering this can help show you how different people think and label nouns in a way that is not really seen in American English.
The second reason you should learn a new language is that it provides you with a new way of dreaming. Once you immerse yourself in a new language and a new culture, your brain will start to learn the different customs of those countries that speak the language you are learning.
From personal experience, I can say that dreaming in a foreign language is one of the most rewarding parts of learning the new language. Dreaming in a foreign language also exhibits a different forum of understanding the speech patterns and dialects that you are learning, along with developing creativity within the language.
The third reason you should learn a new language is because how marketable your skills become. Having a vocabulary that is larger than just your native tongue is very important to the job market. There are many different times where knowing a different language can help you promote your knowledge of basic concepts.
The fourth and final reason you should learn a new language is because you can broaden your horizons beyond what you learn within normal American social spheres, learning about different people and customs.
Learning German opened a world of interesting conversations and taught me many things that I only learned thanks to picking up a book about a different language.
Learning to express myself in a different language made me feel more intelligent and diverse in my thought patterns, and I really enjoyed getting to understand a different culture than my own.
I urge you to at least consider learning a new language to see the benefits it may bring to your academic and personal life.
