Why learn Spanish?
Though it’s true a second language can help us find jobs, let’s also focus on the other reasons for learning a language. We spend so much of our lives having to serve the interests of an economy that doesn’t care about people or the world. It’s high time we were able to put the interests of each other ahead of those of CEOs and tax havens. Learning a language, in a variety of ways, can help us do this.
Society often funnels us down a career-path. Before we’ve had the chance to discover where our passions reside, we find ourselves scrambling from paycheck to paycheck on low or minimum wages. Worse still, the labour we provide either leaves us starved of inspiration, or in some cases even robs us of time to pursue our interests - all of which has damaging implications for our mental and physical health.
Learning a language can provide some relief, and even an escape, from these pressures. It can’t stop us worrying about bills or rent, but it can help us find other lines of work. Aside from potential career benefits, the process itself is rewarding, and a lot more fun than traditional methods have led us to believe. Far from being an unwelcome burden on our daily routines, learning a language can become an enjoyable distraction from life’s pressures. As well as helping our immediate mental health, it is also thought to aid cognitive function, and could delay the symptoms of dementia.
Learning a language may even help us tackle the problems facing the world. If we can communicate with and learn from each other, we stand a better chance of organising against issues as global as climate breakdown.
With almost 483 million speakers, Spanish is the second most widely spoken mother tongue in the world, after Mandarin Chinese. When second language speakers and learners are included, it is still the third most widely spoken, with 580 million hispanohablantes (Spanish speakers), or 7.6% of the global population. Though these figures are for 2019, it is estimated that by 2050, the 580 million will have risen to 756 million, and that by 2060, one in three estadounidenses (United Statesians) will speak Spanish. If you were to travel from Tijuana in Mexico to Ushuaia at the southern tip of Argentina, you could cover its entire distance, 11,000 kilometres - or the equivalent of Lisbon to Tokyo - speaking only Spanish.
Although speaking a new language does not revolutionise how we see the world, the people and cultures it takes us to will. It’s almost like discovering the world again as a child, just in a different tongue. It refreshes the mind and can fill us with the impetus to experience different cultures and meet new people. This could be as conveniently as watching telenovelas or reading an Isobel Allende novel in the evening. It could be an experience as spontaneous as chatting with people at a bar in Seville, or before a football match in Buenos Aires. It could even be a whole new life in Mexico or Chile.
After learning any language, the prospect of learning others suddenly feels much more feasible, and with Spanish being a Latin language, other languages from the same family become especially easier to learn, such as Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, French, Occitan, Corsican, Italian, and Romanian. There’s also the indigenous languages of Latin America, whose learning resources are often in Spanish. Therefore, by learning Spanish, we’ll be able to learn more about Taíno, Nahuatl, Mixtec, Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, and Mayan languages like Kaqchikel.
If you're interested in learning Spanish, there's a How to Learn Languages guide :