You Are Learning Spanish for the Wrong Reasons

Language learning has long been a way of advancement in life: to speak with family, to trade, to travel into unfamiliar terrain, to do exciting academic research inaccessible to others in your field, to become a professional translator or interpreter, to adventurously free the mind by becoming another person as Comenius wrote.

Comenius, considered for the first presidency of Harvard, observed that the number of languages one knows, is the number of times one is a human. While some may disregard that as humanist drivel — a reasonable complaint — polyglots reading this probably know what Comenius meant. What seems like a different “personality,” develops in a person speaking another language — different than one’s normal way of speaking, thinking, joking, conveying information, tonality, or even focus.

With that personality can come an entirely different and refreshing way of understanding the world. That is liberating. It is almost impossible to emphasize the tremendous benefit to the individual of simply going through life with access to another language — any natural human language. The Bible, Simplified:... Windahl, Zach Check Amazon for Pricing.

Some Exceptions To What I Mean

I’m not making arguments for the artificial “language” of Esperanto, of which George Soros is said to be one of the few native speakers, raised in a social experiment by his parents. This is only one strange detail from a strange early life, an early life that feels more like one raised as a science experiment rather than out of love and devotion. No, I am not making an argument for learning a “language” like that.

I am, also, not making arguments for learning a sci-fi “language” like Klingon. Nor am I making arguments for learning a programming “language” like Python.

Language is a borrowed and misappropriated term in these cases, for the examples of Esperanto, Klingon, and Python do not begin to approximate the beautiful, largely decentralized process by which a group of people come together and turn grunts and intonations into mutually comprehensible speech.

They are far-less impressive, top-down imitations of the actual thing called language. With that matter addressed, I will put this digression aside.

The Standard Stated Reason For Learning Spanish

There was a time when I thought it made sense to study Spanish because there are a lot of Mexicans in the US. That is a reasonable perspective, since there are, in fact, a lot of Mexicans in the US. Also, the Mexican tendency to live in enclaves beyond the first generation and their reticence to learn English as a statement of ethnic pride, are increasingly becoming impactful on American society.

The nature of that migration, though, is part of the ill of seeing language learning, it is part of the ill of the entire American immigration system at present. I began this piece of writing with one focus: “What was good for you dear reader?” “What is good for you as you learn a language in your life?” Or alternately, “What is good for the language learning loved one in your life?” such as your sibling, spouse, child, or grandchild.

That was the perspective I began this writing with.

I didn’t begin with the perspective, “What is EASY for the lazy neighbor across the street who has lived in the US fourteen years and can barely string an English sentence together.”

No, that was not where I started, nor is it my aim.

Do you see that difference in perspective? I was concerned with what was good for the person doing the language learning, rather than the perspective of what was EASY for some already demonstrably lazy outsider.

We live in an era of supreme retardation if I am sitting here and telling you to spend time, sweat, and money to learn a language so that life can be easier for the demonstrably lazy person across the street, or the demonstrably lazy person who you may one day encounter while walking through life in the United States.

And yet, that is exactly what the American educational system says to basically every American: learn a language so you can one day do a solid for some demonstrably lazy outsider.

Can it be any wonder that so few Americans have any interest in foreign languages? There is no useful logic to the work put in front of them. We are the people who conquered the Great Plains, and who won the West, taming this land from sea to shining sea and beyond, yet I am to believe that Americans can’t learn the simple and highly comparable Latinate language of Spanish? I say sucks to that reasoning.

After a certain age, most people will not learn a single thing that doesn’t come with clear personal benefit. And the most common reason given fits that category of non-benefit pretty well. Plus it’s woke, which sets off some people’s BS detectors from a mile away, which means that anyone fitting that category will just avoid such stupidity, even if they don’t exactly know why. Kudos to them!

I Love Spanish, And Most People Really Shouldn’t Study Spanish

I won’t even get into my personal language ability, well-developed in so many languages that most people would not even believe me. I love speaking Spanish. I believe Spanish is a beautiful and powerful language, the language of the first novelist.

However, I simply cannot reasonably encourage almost anyone in the United States at this time to study Spanish. But I should still mention some advantages.

Some Real Advantages To Studying Spanish

I will omit the previously mentions advantages to studying any human language. A Grief Observed C. S. Lewis Check Amazon for Pricing.

There remain additional reasons to study Spanish:

1.) To have a romance language base to study another language with.
2.) If you want to travel in the Third World of Latin America.
3.) If you want to read the international media of the Third World.
4.) If you want to work in the Third World of Latin America.

Beyond that, there are many more impressive and significant languages to study, and that is coming from someone who knows Spanish fairly well and loves the language. No one brings up these reasons though.

Instead, they say nonsense like “To communicate with non-English speakers better.” But why would anyone want that? The truth is, that is largely a non-benefit to the learner.

How Spanish Learning Might Be Bad For You And Draw All The Wrong People Around You Stateside

You are the average of the five people you surround yourself with most. So why would you want to surround yourself with people too lazy to learn the language that they are surrounded by every day?

There is almost nothing easier than surrendering enough to the situation to be able to speak a language that you hear every day. In fact, it takes effort to not learn a language you are immersed in daily. It takes willfulness and stubbornness to not learn a language you are immersed in daily. It takes a desire to not grow. It takes a desire to not be better.

And yes, I have been in those situations in life, where I have committed myself to not learning a local language. So, I know that willfulness. I know that self-implemented mental block.

When you learn Spanish for this goofy reason — almost the only reason ever given for learning Spanish as an American — you are learning it to surround yourself with all the least impressive people. They might be able to hold down a job just fine, but that is not enough to make one impressive.

The Habitual Deferring Of Moral Ambition

I want to be among people who do not habitually defer moral ambition. There is immoral ambition that it is good to defer. He who habitually defers moral ambition, however, should be among the very least people anyone wants to be around, no matter what other virtues that person has. Habitual deferral of moral ambition is so toxic to all else in life.

It is most toxic to the things that make an individual’s life unique. So, that makes it pretty bad in my book. It strikes at the heart of something special about Christian America — the widely accepted realization that man is made in the likeness of God, and that we owe it to our Maker to live a life that stewards and exemplifies the individual gifts that we were given.

Be the man who habitually dodges out on moral ambition, and you are on the wrong path in doing that work. Culturally, that diligent pursuit of moral ambition is in the bones of many Americans. Where video games have not sucked the moral ambition out of two generations, the ambitious ones and the trusting ones are still being fed the pablum “Learn a language to make life even easier for a demonstrably lazy outsider.” Though most people fed this line do not realize it, this type of thinking strikes against the nature of American culture.

America’s Debt To The Third World — The Woke Core Of Our Crappy Language Learning Fatigue And Immigration Fatigue

Why should you learn a foreign language? Why should your loved one, your pride and joy, learn a foreign language? The established answer is so they can pay an imaginary debt to some third worlder who they will one day encounter and who will compete for local resources.

That’s the same crap reason that fuels our immigration policy. Americans owe some imaginary debt to the Third World and must be replaced by the morally superior third world.

If that is your way of seeing the world, I’d far prefer that you come up with a way of teaching English to third worlders so that they can improve their minds, rather than wasting your time learning Spanish — which to me is unquestionably a waste of time for the reason commonly provided.

The Real Way To Be Kind To Someone In The Third World Or From The Third World

The student-centric reasons that I list at the beginning of the essay are good reasons for this. The commonly provided reasons are a total waste of time. If you want to be kind to a third worlder, teach him English, teach him the Bible, teach him Shakespeare, and show him how these thought processes involved point to the US Declaration of Independence, to the Constitution as a document or enumerated powers, and to the Bill of Rights as a listing of some pre-existing natural rights.

While I am not much for social engineering, I appreciate the value of a good education in the Liberal Arts (studies that liberate the mind) and the Western Cannon. Hundreds of years of this might be one of the only styles of “regime change” that works if you want to give another country a stable and more American existence. God Will Use This for ... Lucado, Max Check Amazon for Pricing.

If you care about a third worlder, teach him some of the most beautiful things about America, things that will likely help him, his family, and his country.

Or you can do something that achieves the opposite: You can enable one of the most lazy and self-destructive behaviors in a person’s life: Moving to a foreign country while not taking the daily opportunities for self-improvement that can be had by learning the local language one day at a time.

To move to a foreign country is almost always harmful for the first generation of a family that does that. Of course there may be upsides, but It generally comes with tremendous downside — especially in the first generation. But to exacerbate that known harm is preposterous. To exacerbate that already known harm to the first generation by not encouraging every newcomer to America to learn English is downright hateful. In fact, when you think it through, learning a foreign language to make life easier on some demonstrably lazy outsider is downright hateful behavior that increases the likelihood that the rest of his life will be far worse off than it needed to be.

There Are Better Languages To Learn Than Spanish

You know the most important global language — English.  Why not learn another important global language? Learn German, the language of extra long sentences, extra long compound words, and the most important philosophy of the past thousand years. Learn Russian, the pan-Slavic language, that stretches across the civilized world. Learn Japanese, Latin, Greek, Korean, or Chinese. The doors that these may open are powerful doors.

We live in a world of limitless potential. The idea that you are to learn a language so that you can make life easier for the lazy neighbor is insane.

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