Talking in a foreign language is fantastic. It feels so gratifying to order food at a market in Italy or to ask how much something costs in Hungarian, rather than defaulting to Google Translate or playing charades with the confused-looking storeperson.
Perhaps the most significant benefit to me, however, is not the saving of embarrassment; instead, when I talk in a foreign language, my mind slows down in a way it hasn’t done when speaking English for a very long time. Life moves at a breakneck pace these days, with work, social media notifications and messages and cramming lots of hobbies into the span of a week, I’m not the only one who feels like life is infinitely fuller now than it was 10 years ago.
Yet when I’m in Italy and ordering my cappuccino (have your cappuccino any time of the day you want, by the way), my mind has to take an extra second to think deliberately about the words I am going to use, ‘Un cappuccino per favore’, compared to the automated rapid fire of the same request in English. My Italian is conversational; having studied the language through high school, I can get by and engage in some chit-chat the way locals do. It’s within this extended conversation that I really feel the benefit of going deep in another language. A whole conversation with the barista about whether a glass of water provided with your espresso should be drunk before or after the coffee, depending on the region of Italy you are in, really requires sustained focus for more than a few seconds. Within this time, my mind switches from translating English into Italian to thinking solely in Italian, and then to speaking Italian. From there, I have one focus – speak the language.
This sustained focus on the task is different to how I would focus back home. Once my mind is in Italian mode, I don’t think about all the other tasks I have to do when I return from my holiday, as is the case most of the rest of the time. Within it, I feel that I have become a different person, no rushing around, no desire to check my phone notifications, just an awareness that I am now existing within the Italian language.
Psychologically, there are proven effects: speaking a foreign language slows people down. Researchers found that talking in a foreign language creates greater cognitive and emotional distance from a problem compared to dealing with it in your native tongue¹. This distance can help the audience feel more secure and less emotionally overwhelmed when facing complex issues.
The benefits go beyond my mind slowing down to the pace of a stroll around a piazza; when I speak Italian, I become a different person. No, not because I’m waving my hands around – but because for those moments my memories I have made in the English language cease to exist, and instead I only have memories I have made in the Italian language; on my first visit to Italy on a school trip 10 years ago, ordering my gelato independently in Florence, speaking to a group of similar aged Italian girls in Pisa and feeling like the suavest guy on the trip, navigating a country with relative low English proficiency and mastering it, all successful memories associated with the romance language.
Perhaps if I were to live in Italy, my relationship with the language would deepen, and I could experience both the challenges and joys of daily life in ‘La Dolce Vita’. I have every confidence that embracing the language would help me shed the baggage of decades of English memories, allowing me to slow my mind and adopt a new identity, one shaped by the language and culture I am immersing myself in and the memories made within this language.
Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S. L., & An, S. G. (2012). The foreign-language effect: Thinking in a foreign tongue reduces decision biases. Psychological Science, 23(6), 661–668. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611432178