World Peace Through Learning And Personal Self Development

The route to world peace could be through learning a new language and becoming a different, better person.

Over the many many years of learning languages I have discovered, much to my surprise, that you don’t so much learn a language as become a totally different person.

Yes, you can learn the words and sentences, the tone and pronunciation, the expression and emphasis, that will help you to communicate in the language you are studying. But what I am talking about here goes far deeper than that.

Developing a new skin that will run deeper than skin deep. What I have found is that in spending time in the country, learning the language changes your behaviour. In fact it changes who you are. In effect you become Spanish, or French or whatever language it is you are learning.

My Spanish contacts often tell me I am more Spanish than they are ! That’s a nice compliment, of course. More than that, it means I have been accepted as one of them. It means we have a shared history, a common experience of life, certain ways of seeing things, certain ways to be. Now I have not only learnt Spanish, I have learnt to be Spanish.

So, how does it feel to be Spanish ? It feels connected, rooted even, in a culture that has a history as deep as Spain itself. It just feels different.

Do you stop being English ? No not really. You just become something of a cultural chameleon. When in Spain I am Spanish, when I am in England I become English. And now I am learning to become Japanese.

You never lose what you were to begin with, you gain in becoming something more. There is only addition, no subtraction at all. Being Spanish or Japanese does not make me any less of an English man. I cannot change, nor would I want to, who and what I am.

I like to think that in a way, learning to become somebody else, another national, you develop a degree of empathy you might not have had before. I now see far more easily, the Spanish point of view.

And now I am at the beginning of a journey along a road to seeing the Japanese point of view and eventually becoming in some small or higher degree Japanese.I am in effect developing a new skin that will run deeper than skin deep.

I have often said that one way of dealing with racism is for a person to go and experience in another country what it is like to be the outsider, to be Johnny Foreigner, to not only see, but to deeply experience how it feels to be on the receiving end.

And so, perhaps learning languages could be key to resolving a great many inter-personal and inter-national conflicts. We have to see the others point of view and empathise with them. The more we do that, the less conflict we may see and at the same time see a lot more harmony in the world.

Maybe in this way I feel more like a world envoy for peace than I do a teacher. What I do is teach people not just how to speak a language, but how to be a different and a better person.

Above all, a nice thought to leave with is that we all have a lot more in common than we do differentiating us. So let’s all strive together for a better world. To a better world through learning languages and personal self development.