UK students suggest learning a new language requires open-mindedness

Learning a new language not only requires ambition, but an open-mindedness to different cultures and ideas, according to some bilingual and multilingual University of Kentucky students.

UK senior Camila Pimentel said she’s heard a lot of people ask, “Why is English like this?” or “Why is French like this? Why do they count numbers the way they count?”

Pimentel is a political science and international studies major and knows Portuguese, English, Spanish and French.

“I think you need to be open to actually not ask ‘why,’” Pimentel said.

Morgan Shown is another UK student, majoring in nursing, who said something similar.

“You have to be patient, and it doesn’t come, you know, in a few days. It definitely takes a long time, like I’ve been learning Spanish since I was in kindergarten, and I’m still learning every day,” Shown said.

Shown said people have to be open-minded and adaptable to learn a new language.

“You have to be more open-minded about the language and the concepts for each language,” Carolina Zuniga, UK sophomore and business management major, said.

These UK students mentioned words and fundamental structures of sentences are different in different languages.

“For Portuguese, my native language, we have the word ‘saudades’ that is really famous for not having a meaning in another language. That is just the feeling of missing someone or something,” Pimentel said.

Pimentel also said that instead of saying something like “little coffee shop” in English, Brazilians say “cafezito,” combining the words together.

“As a way of making the phrase smoother or just not that impactful, so I think that also shapes the way Brazilians speak Portuguese of kind of playing around with words,” Pimentel said.

Every language has its own cultural identity, so the actual structure of the language is built upon the personality of the culture.

“Instead of saying ‘yeah, that’s good’, they say ‘that’s not bad,’” Pimentel said. “I heard about that as a way of like French is more pessimistic.”

UK sophomore and journalism major Sofia Carroz said there are two different words for “love” in Spanish.

“Te amo” means “I love you” like a boyfriend or girlfriend, and “te quiero” means love for a friend or family member, Carroz said.

She also said you have to be very open-minded because there’s a lot of meanings for a lot of different things.

“When you’re like ‘Oh, it’s life.’ We don’t have that in Spanish,” Carroz said.

Irin Rangsinithitorn is a UK sophomore and business economics major and is an international student from Thailand.

Rangsinithitorn said there are some words in English that don’t have a direct translation to Thai, so she has to say something close to the meaning.

“My parents, they don’t know English at all, so when my friends want to talk to them, I have to translate stuff, and it’s not exactly what my friends say that I translate to my parents because I don’t know how to say it in Thai too, so I have to make it up sometimes,” Rangsinithitorn said.

She said in Thai, they structure sentences by saying “you” before everything, so they would say “You eat what today?” instead of “What did you eat today?”

“When I started learning in English, it’s kind of hard for me to understand it because, obviously, we don’t have the same structure,” Rangsinithitorn said.

Pimentel said it’s easier to learn languages once you have already learned more than one.

“When I was learning French, there were a couple of words that I would recall from my Portuguese background, couple of words that I would recall from my Spanish background and a couple of words that I would recall from my English background,” Pimentel said.

According to these students, a big theme in learning a new language is that it’s hard to understand jokes.

“The way we laugh, the way we make jokes, it’s highly connected to the language,” Pimentel said. “I remember when I first came to the U.S., it took me a while to actually understand the jokes because it was not my language.”

Pimentel said she is way funnier in her native language.

“There are a lot of jokes in Portuguese that even my friends who speak Portuguese, they don’t get because they are not Brazilians,” Pimentel said. “So that’s definitely a huge difference there in terms of like personality.”

She also said she’s able to make more jokes in her native language, and people who speak that language are able to get her jokes better.

“Sometimes I even joke my personality in English is different than my personality in Portuguese which is different than my personality in Spanish,” Pimentel said.

Carroz also said she’s funnier in her native language because some words she uses in Spanish do not exist in English at all.

“When I talk in Spanish, I’m more funny because I can express myself completely,” Carroz said. “I have a big personality, so in Spanish, you get to see the whole thing.”

Pimentel said part of learning a language is learning the culture.

She listens to music, TV shows and podcasts to help her learn a new language.

“You kind of learn more about the songs, about the singers, about the culture, and the best way to learn a language is actually going to the country,” Pimentel said. “If you wanted to learn from another country, you need to be open to actually take out your own culture or your own vision and learn how to see the world kind of differently,” Pimentel said.

Shown said when people are learning a new language to definitely not go into it biased.

“You want to put yourself into their culture and their shoes and not be judgmental,” Shown said.

She also said that words in Spanish hold more significance than English because of the culture.

“I think how people say it in Spanish, it means more than in English. I feel like ‘yo te amo’ has a deeper significance than just saying ‘I love you’. It’s more beautiful in Spanish than in English,” Shown said.

She said, in their culture, they say it with more significance like they actually mean it. 

“I feel like here, it’s just thrown around more, but with Spanish speaking people, they actually really care,” Shown said.

Some students also talked about the different ways to talk to different people in other languages, and there is a presence of respect that is not in English culture.

“When you talk in Spanish, there’s a proper way to speak to different individuals,” UK junior Aaliyah Melendez said. “We learned in middle school, there’s a different way that you talk to your friends, and there’s a different way you talk to older people.”

Rangsinithitorn said you can’t say casual words to adults in Thai, and there is different vocabulary to use.

She said in school in Thailand, they have to respect the teachers more than here, and they have to say “thank you, teacher” after every class.

“When I first came here, I was like ‘Oh my god, why are you all saying that to teachers,’” Rangsinithitorn said.

She said she sometimes forgets to talk formally when she talks to her parents now.

“Sometimes I forgot that I have to be like ‘that’ in Thailand, and I have to be like ‘this’ here,” Rangsinithitorn said.

Students also mentioned they have to constantly switch between languages when they are talking and thinking.

Both Carroz and Melendez speak “Spanglish” with their family members, which involves alternating between English and Spanish within a conversation. 

Pimentel said when she is taking notes and doesn’t know the word in English, she will write the word in Portuguese and then start thinking in both languages.

“I feel that is the way you know where you’re advancing in a language. You’re not translating things. You’re actually thinking in that language to actually be able to speak,” Pimentel said.

Pimentel even goes so far as to dream in multiple languages, she said.

“When you’re learning a new language, you kind of have this new set of views, kind of new way to express yourself, new way to think, and that allows you to live another life,” Pimentel said. “Like my life in English is different than my life in Portuguese for sure.”

“There’s a quote, I don’t remember exactly, that was like ‘you live a new life for every language you learn. If you only know one language, you only live once,’” Pimentel said.