How many of you were eager to go away for college? If you fit the generic college freshman description, as I did, you must have been very excited to go to Houghton. However, according to student tradition, you either will or will soon discover that the excitement drains away. For me, it happened when I realized that the vague “Subway” mark on Google maps did not mean that it was a train station there, when Houghton became a desolate, frozen wasteland for approximately 8 out of 12 months of the year, and, when I learned that at some point I had to take a language credit in order to fulfill my general education requirements.
To put it in today’s cultural terms: I was shook. I thought that I had finished putting in my time during high school, but apparently, I was wrong. Sure, I thought that learning a language was cool, but I also thought that about learning how to skateboard and weave baskets. It was something that appealed to me, but I didn’t have the “time” to spend learning it. I feel like this is the case with a good deal of American students and if you don’t believe me, walk around the quad and ask students how many languages they speak. Then ask them how proficiently they speak those languages. I rest my case. I took Spanish in my sophomore year, managed to make it out alive, and left with much less Spanish than I should have for the amount of time that I spent on classwork. But even though I didn’t thoroughly learn Spanish, I instead learned that there was more to learning a language than memorizing a stack of flashcards. What actually impacted me in that class was not the course itself, but rather my professor and the compassion that he had for the Spanish speaking nations of the world. To know a language is to love a people and vice versa.
The act of learning a language, in itself, is an act of love. Now as I explained before, I wasn’t taking Spanish because I wanted to; it was a requirement that I was fulfilling. But that is exactly why I didn’t learn anything. I thought Spanish was cool, yet I didn’t have the mindset to learn it, because I was too focused on completing my G.E. requirement. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to turn this into an argument on whether taking a language should optional or not in a collegiate setting. That is another argument for another day. However, what I am saying is to learn a language, and retain it, you need to have a certain capacity of love involved. Sure, you can learn a language without having this as a driving factor, but what would you gain from that? You can speak the language, but if you don’t love it, you won’t understand it or the people that speak it.
Language is a gift that opens up our minds to viewing our own perspectives as well as those who speak the language being learned. When you open yourself up to loving a language, you open yourself to love the language’s people; you bring yourself to a new level of intentionality and purposeful relationship. There really is no right or wrong way to go about learning a language. Have you always had a language you wanted to learn but never did? Then why not start there? It’s not an easy journey, but it is a rewarding one. What if you want to learn a language, yet you don’t have enough “time?” To be honest, I know that people will make time for what they hold to be important. If right now you could care less about languages, then I don’t expect this article to radically change you into becoming a die-hard linguist. Yet open yourself to the possibility of fellowship that you can experience with others when you share the language of love.
Shannon is a senior majoring in English with a concentration in writing.