Nelson Mandela said,
If you talk to [someone] in a language [they] understand, that goes to [their] head. If you talk to [them] in [their] language, that goes to [their] heart.
You’ve probably heard this before, maybe in a less gender-neutral sense, but it’s common nonetheless.
Nelson Mandela had excellent public speaking abilities. Let’s imagine he practiced in the mirror to soothe our imposter syndrome. What Mandela has offered us is a lesson on negotiation, and more broadly, on communication.
He learned Afrikaans in prison to get warders to join his movement to dismantle apartheid, institutionalized racism, and advance national reconciliation in South Africa for a multicultural democracy.
This is one of the most powerful examples of how language can be an essential tool for change.
And one that has always motivated me to push through when grammar becomes frustrating and vocabulary seems endless.
If Nelson Mandela can change the world, I can stop confusing ser and estar.
Most of us won’t become political leaders, but we all communicate through language—and our language influences the way we think, behave, and live.
Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native one?
The answer is no, because of something called the Foreign Language Effect, where using a foreign language makes you more open to taking risks and less fearful of loss when making a decision that can bring positive value, since you are more cognitively and emotionally distant from that decision.
I was looking to enroll in a Spanish class, because I needed to ‘finally become fluent,’ but all of the spots were full of seniors who needed to fulfill their language requirement—they got to choose first because of seniority. So I enrolled in French on a whim. I didn’t expect to love French so much, but it made a difference in shaping how I connected with people and how I connected with myself.
Fast forward to four years later. I’m fluent in French and sitting in a café in the 14th arrondissement (my favorite arrondissement) of Paris in August, eating quiche Lorraine (my favorite type of quiche), and thinking about how much work I had to put in to get to this point—and how chance prompting me to learn a third language changed my life. I booked a flight to return to the U.S., so I thought it would be a good idea to chill and read a book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates that a friend recommended to me. It included anecdotes about how society shaped his social, political and economic identity. Then, I came across a chapter about how he and his family were traveling through France, and how often miscommunication happened between them and strangers because they were so accustomed to the American context. I empathized.
Then I googled him on my phone and found that he had been trying to understand inequality through a francophone lens by learning French and doing talks with French people who were also in search of understanding. And I thought, this is what I was thinking about on the métro (subway) on my way to this café from the 42 school (a new programming institution that serves to make tech education more meritocratic).
I’m also guilty of misinterpreting other people’s words and actions, even more so when removed from my American context. Since I wanted to have a worthwhile experience, I had to learn how to adapt to French culture, and that meant seeing myself differently than how I saw myself in America—especially since people weren’t seeing me how I was seen in America. The Foreign Language Effect was at work. I began making better judgements as I got better at French, and I was distancing myself from my own perspective and allowing myself to become less partial and more objective.
It was not an easy process. I learned how to translate quickly when French people were speaking too fast. An important part of that was looking for implicit meaning in other forms of communication, such as body language and facial expressions, that I would usually overlook while speaking English.
Upon returning to the U.S., I would exercise self-awareness more often, and become more conscious and intentional about understanding how people think, act, and feel. In other words, taking my empathetic nature to new heights, making me a better friend, sister, daughter, and entrepreneur.
I’m grateful I took the opportunity to make an impact on some little French hearts as a TEFL educator.