How Learning Languages Changed My Life

I know the opportunities that came my way as a, as a result of learning languages.

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here today, I want to talk about how language and

learning languages has changed my life.

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You know, I was thinking about this the other day, because here

I am, I'm 76 and, uh, when I was 17, I spoke English essentially.

And, uh, then I got very interested in French.

And so how did that change my life?

It changed my life because I was able to convert myself into a

fluent speaker of another language.

I realized at the age of say 18 that that was possible.

And then I ended up going to France.

And so I experienced living in France getting to know French culture.

Uh, and sort of with that, I was able to travel into Spain and get a

sense of Spanish, Spanish culture, Spanish people, the country.

And then I went to China and learned, or at least to Hong Kong,

and learned Mandarin Chinese, and that's a whole other world.

And then I lived in Japan and having learned the Chinese characters I was

able to learn Japanese and lived there for nine years and got into the culture,

particularly as it applies to wood because I was in the wood business.

And all of these things...

and then I could go on and on and on of course, most recently, um, first of all,

learning Russian, uh, at the age of 60 and then moving from there into other

Slavic languages, discovering so much about those cultures and those people.

And more recently, my Persian and Arabic again, which brings those people to life.

And because I learn the language, I get interested in the culture.

I just finished reading a book about an Iranian lady who won

the Nobel peace prize in 2003.

I think her name is, uh, Edabi and so, you know, how has

language learning changed my life?

So, you know, maybe I've missed out on certain things.

If I hadn't learned those languages, maybe I would have learned something else

that would have brought me great joy.

So you never know about the opportunities that you missed, but I know the

opportunities that came my way as a, as a result of learning language.

Yeah.

First of all, opportunities say professionally, I was able to, I got

my job initially with the government because I was fluent in French.

Um, I was assigned to Hong Kong to learn Mandarin Chinese by the, uh, trade

commissioner service and, um, so that was connected with my, with my work.

And then I, I worked in Japan.

I got a job in Japan and I built my business based on

understanding the Japanese market.

So there's all of that, but it's much, much more than that.

It's a perspective on different cultures, as different as say, Korean,

Chinese, Russian uh, Brazilian, uh, you know, Greek, Romanian and, and having

touched, you know, in, you know, very superficially or in greater depth, each

of these cultures that make up the 20 languages that I have either learned or

dabbled in, it brings me so much, uh, perspective, um, you know, uh, a sense

of participating in so many different ways of, of looking at our world.

So learning languages and one leads to another has fundamentally changed

my life, whether that was the best possible course that I could have

followed in my life who knows.

You lead the life that you lead.

But, uh, certainly for me, languages has been an enormous part of my life and the

opportunity to, uh, you know, start LingQ, to work on LingQ with my son and develop

a platform where people learn languages.

We have 42 languages there now for people to learn and as a platform, which I use to

learn and to continue learning languages.

And you know, here I am, it's my third career at age 76, I can't wait every

day to be able to get, you know, my Arabic or my, uh, Persian and, uh, even

to get to know a little bit about, you know, Egyptian Arabic versus Levantine

Arabic versus Modern Standard Arabic, which were just terms for me before.

But now that I get into those languages, I see what's, what's behind

those terms and the cultures that are behind those terms and so forth.

So I just thought I'd go through that because you know, a lot of people learn

languages for very practical reasons um, English is the most popular language.

At least the one that has learned by or studied by the greatest number of people,

because it's the most important sort of international language of communication.

But, uh, if you follow my channel, you know that I always encourage people

to learn more than one language.

And the benefit is not only the enjoyment of, of the learning process

itself, but also what you come up with.

Even if you end up forgetting some of the languages that you have learned,

but at least for the time that you were learning those languages and discovering

those languages, you were entering, entering into a, another world, uh, a

rich world that up to that point was relatively unknown, at least to me.

So just a brief ramble.

I was just thinking about how lucky I was that back some, you know, 50...60,

60 years ago, I got totally wrapped up in learning French, which then led to

another and yet another and yet another, and I'm very happy that I did that.

So just thought I would share those thoughts with you.

Thank you for listening.