When we travel, we have an opportunity to fundamentally change the way we interact with local people and get to know their culture. How? By learning their language.
When we travel as tourists, we are simply observers, forever on the outside looking in. We typically don’t participate in day-to-day local life, and we are never mistaken for locals when the limited extent of our interaction is ordering food or visiting local attractions.
But if we learn the language of the country, suddenly that country is wide open to us. Suddenly we are able to pick up on rhythms and wonderful nuances that aren’t normally detectable.
Yes, learning a new language is hard and takes time and motivation. But how can you sink your teeth into a foreign culture otherwise? It is the cultural currency and most of us want to get ‘rich,’ right? Or at least become enriched…
Modern global tourism doesn’t connect people from country to country, culture to culture, but instead, widens pre-existing gaps. The best way to get past our limited surface perceptions of another culture is to make the effort to communicate in the language of that culture’s people. The biggest challenge for English speakers is that English is widely spoken. But that shouldn’t stop us.
You can explain (in English if you have to) that you are learning the language and would like to avoid English. How will locals respond to hearing that a native English speaker wants to learn the local language? Well, you can bet that they’ll be thrilled.
The rewards of understanding, and being understood in, a foreign language are immense. Learning a new language also opens us up in countless ways so we see the world from new and fresh angles: It enables us to realize that there is a much narrower gap between people and their cultures than often imagined and allows us to truly live in the place we’re visiting, whether our stay there is for a two-week vacation, a four-month volunteer program, or for completing the master’s degree we have been striving for.
At the end of the day, most of us want to make authentic connections with locals and feel more like global citizens. Now, more than ever, is the time for us to re-evaluate the nature of our relationships to each other across cultures. A more multilingual world will go a long way to strengthening the bonds between us.
Go deeper with a language learning vacation.
Contributed by Cam Harvey
Director, The Learning Traveller: Language Immersion Programs for Teens & 50 Plus. www.learningtraveller.com
Your GoStudy Team
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