Yes, you can learn a foreign language at all ages, without spending crazy amounts and without necessarily having to think about an imminent transfer of the whole family (including dogs and cats) abroad.
And if you are still hiding behind excuses, you should continue reading this article. You will discover why you should stop chasing fears and false convictions. Just start looking at things from another perspective, and maybe get started with making your dream of Spanish class Barcelona come true. Find out why you should definitely study a foreign language soon.
1. Enrich your vocabulary
Inevitably, when you learn a new language you also learn new ways of saying, new expressions, new terms that help you give voice to your feelings with greater precision or that simply enrich your thoughts.
When having learnt a foreign language, you might mix terms between languages. What really matters is that your lexical baggage will have grown, accepted new words and made them your own to such an extent that, in some cases, they seem to be the most appropriate choice for giving life to a concept in a more precise and as effective as your own mother language allows you to do.
2. Travel and experience new cultures
Of course, you can also travel without knowing languages, but knowing how to speak the local language will allow you to live richer and more stimulating travel experiences. The reason is very simple: you can talk to people in a more direct way, create more empathy with them, peek into their daily lives and learn about aspects of their culture that the tourist could not grasp without a deeper look.
A language is not only grammar, it is not only chains of sounds that follow one another, it is not only words on words, it is much more: it is the representation of a world articulated of values and traditions that only by coming into contact with people or deepening the language you can really know.
The professional aspect must also be taken into consideration. Maybe you happen to travel for work more or less frequently outside your country and, therefore, have to constantly deal with cultural and professional realities different from yours; just to mitigate these differences and prevent them from turning into aspects that limit your work and your freedom of expressive maneuver, it is highly recommended to learn the language of your customers or your working partners. You will facilitate relationships and you will establish more solid and sincere business relationships.
3. Increase your communication possibilities and improve memory
Expanding one’s communication possibilities means to be able to communicate with a greater number of people, but also to be able to access a greater number of contents, such as, for example, TV series, films and books.
Receiving only one version of the world is limiting and reductive, since it does not allow you to know the facts from another point of view, thus limiting your chances of knowing the world from outside, beyond your native language.
Even the dialogue with those who live in another cultural environment, more or less different from yours, will prove extremely stimulating for your personal growth and, why not, also professional: you will be able to know and listen to the most varied experiences and get inspiration to change a aspect of your life or simply improve yourself by increasing your knowledge.
The study of a new language, precisely because it is a study, will help you not only to nourish your spirit and your curiosity, but also to keep your memory trained and elastic the mind. In some moments, linguistics are also a mnemonic study, a mere memorization exercise, but the real cure-all for your brain is certainly what comes next, that is, the phase in which you prepare to internalize and make your own what you have just studied, for it is precisely at this moment that you really learn and enjoy the fruits of studying.
That of languages is never a study for its own sake, as you can see it is extremely stimulating precisely because it is rich in facets and hidden sides to be discovered: the more you progress with the study, the greater the number of things you will discover and which you will also be passionate about thanks to the language you are learning. It may be that by studying Spanish you found yourself interested in Goya’s painting, so much so as to organize a trip to Madrid to admire his paintings at the Prado Museum or Gaudi’s work in Barcelona.
