The importance of foreign languages

I'm not going to defend the importance of having a good level in English (I haven't, but I will!), for example, because it's obvious that it will improve drastically your social abilities, referring to your chances to interact with people from all around the world.

I'm going to expose a theory which focuses on languages in a very different way, its called Whorf-Sapir hypothesys. It says that the language configures your percepcion drastically.

When you are a child, and you begin to interact with your environment, you inmediately start to create mental categories where you classify your perceptions. Simultaneously, you begin to speak/understand a language, so your abstract mental images became concrete words, and the grammar structures, the vocabulary particularities, became a key part of your mental conceptions. And it will have a big influence in your further learning processes. The interaction between enviroment and language is mutual. It means that your language determines the way you asimilate your perceptions, and it means that the evolution of a language is determined for the enviroment where it developes too.

I can give you some examples. The Eskimos can name more than 20 kinds of snow, so they can distinguish between them. You can hardly name 2 or 3 (if you can), and, even if you try hard to study and distinguish dozens of them as Eskimos do, it's extremely probable that you will not achieve it. The snow plays a very important role in Eskimos environment, so they have all those categories for it in their language, and in their minds. When a child is born, and he begins the learning process, the snow is always present in his everyday life. So, he begin to create mental structures to undertand and classify it, while he is learning the verbal equivalent in Eskimos's language. In your case, that mental structures about snow have not been created, so if you begin a proccess in your own language, it will be very much harder, if not impossible.

Another example could be the impossibility to translate some words from one language to other, even if you know the meaning of them, your language has not created any precise word for that, because your language doesn't posess that concept. For instance, morriña (Galician) is not the same as nostalgia (Spanish), or zeitgeist (German) hasn't any particular translation in any language that I know. What its more, I understand the concept of Zeitgeist, but when I try to explain somebody his meaning, I never find the wright way of doing it. I am sure that everybody knows some example of this (a word in a foreign language that has no translation to your own language).

To translate means to twist. There is no comparison between reading a book, or watching a film in his original language, you lose the original meaning if you don't, and you take a new one given by the translators. Sometimes it is very accurate, but sometimes it's awful. Not to mention the actors work, which is 50%, or even more in my opinion, his vocal interpretation. How the hell can everybody say that Robert the Niro is a great actor, if they have never heard his voice. So, acting is only to make faces?. It gets me mad.

In short, the more languages you know, the more you develope your general understanding of the the things happening, or surrounding you. Also this theory supports the relation between language and cultural identity, so I recommend all "Galicia bilingüe" people to think a bit about it.