As humans, we mainly communicate through the words we speak to each other, expressing our thoughts, desires, and emotions. In this world we live in, there are currently over seven thousand spoken languages. Taking this into consideration, the more languages an individual can speak or understand, the more connected that person can then be to the people around them and the more opportunities that person can have. In itself, multilingualism is an indispensable skill, and it can be achieved rather simply in both a voluntary and involuntary manner and is equally as advantageous in personal life as it is in professional life.

One of the most beautiful qualities of a language is the unique relationship it has with another language. For example, Spanish and Portuguese are roughly 90% similar, whereas Spanish and French are about 75% similar. This is why often times knowing one language can make learning or understanding another easier. For me, learning Italian and Portuguese while already knowing Spanish was a seamless process because, being all Romance languages, the general structure and vocabulary of the languages is mainly consistent. Considering this, I recommend to everyone to start branching off from their native tongue to its respective sister language first (i.e., learning Ukrainian while being a native Russian speaker). Since sister languages have developed from the same language and are thus mutually intelligible, taking this initiative can help to boost the learner’s confidence and can open up the door to learning languages with decreasing levels of similarity to the learner’s native language.

          My journey with languages will forever be ongoing. Starting about twelve years ago, I took my first Spanish class in elementary school. Even though I had only been exposed to English up until that point, I remember Spanish coming naturally to me while all of my classmates were frightened by it. I instantly fell in love with the language to the point where I soon became obsessed with it and obsessed with the idea of branching off from English. Once I entered high school, I was able to feed my desire to learn other languages, and that is when I began teaching myself Italian – in honor of my Sicilian roots –, and at the same time I was picking up on Portuguese due to constant exposure to it from my Brazilian friends. Now, I am about to graduate with credentials in Spanish and Italian, and I am highly fluent in Portuguese.

For as long as I live, I plan on learning as many languages as I can, because doing so makes me feel powerful and more connected to others. It stresses me out not being able to have a comprehensible conversation with someone, and not being able to understand what someone else is saying or what is written in words within my immediate environment. If it is within my control, my goal is always to remove the barriers in communication between myself and the world around me. No one language is more relevant than another, which means only knowing one’s native language when the opportunity to learn another is present is an act of ignorance. Being able to at least understand a language different from one’s own native language is helpful enough in certain situations, and this basic skill can be achieved at no cost and even built upon with a variety of free resources that exist today. For example, aside from the classic method of learning another language directly from its native speaker through first-hand experiences, there are also countless smartphone applications and websites, such as Duolingo and YouTube, both of which I have used for many years to broaden my language library.