When I first came to St. Teresa’s after spending nine years at a school where I learned French all day, having class in English was foreign to me. Spanish class seemed like a great opportunity to continue on with language learning in a new school. I was thrilled to begin learning Spanish, but after a few weeks in the class, I soon realized that the majority of girls  were only in the room to fulfill one of the three foreign language credits they needed to graduate. I understand that not everyone is going to find languages as interesting as I do, but it seemed to me that at least a handful of the girls in my class were purposely closing themselves off from absorbing the language in the slightest.

People who struggle with appreciating foreign languages should understand that learning languages is key to so many other aspects of our lives. Learning any new language, even just a few words, opens up doors that won’t be opened if we just grumble in class about how “conjugations are hard” or how “we’re never going to use this.”

I’m not saying every student needs to become fluent in a foreign language in four years. Students should realize the importance of languages in our daily lives now, while we still have the means to learn them easily. According to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, 18% of Americans report speaking a language other than English, while 53% of Europeans (and increasing numbers in other parts of the world) can converse in a second language. Don’t become like so many adults who will casually pull out a couple words in Spanish or French, saying they learned them in high school, but that’s all they can remember from a four year study.

In the U.S. alone, there are around 41 million Spanish speakers, a number that is only rising, according to the Guardian. By opening oneself up to learning Spanish,  it would mean 41 million new conversation possibilities, with far greater possibilities of making a new friend. With that new friend come even more chances of exposure to a new food they like, music they enjoy or current event important to them– all aspects of  culture that would go unexplored otherwise.

Learning that new language would also open up job options — many businesses now even look for employees to be bilingual, or at least proficient in another language. Beyond career options, the actual act of learning a foreign language can be so beneficial for your brain that it can actually lower your odds of suffering dementia later in life, according to The New York Times.

Although improving your employment prospects and lowering your odds of brain disease later in life are both important aspects of learning a new language, perhaps the most important aspect of learning a new language is simply expanding your horizons and doing what you can to bridge cultures. By just opening yourself up to a few new words, you could actually be working to eliminate prejudices and walls that exist between our Anglo-American culture and the rest of the world.