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Why Foreign Languages are important:
"Having grown up in a Welsh-speaking home (English was my first foreign language!), I have always appreciated the richness and variety of the world when experienced through more than one linguistic medium. And I have also come to see that you really don't know your own language until you can stand on a platform outside it, and this is something that only knowing another language can provide you with.
Obviously, knowing other languages is functionally useful too: none of us wants tea when we thought we had asked for coffee... But I have always felt that studying a foreign language at a place like Trinity College has to go beyond merely acquiring survival skills. It involves learning new ways to think and to see, and not taking our own ways of doing (and of supposing) for granted. Learning to be open, and curious, and to appreciate the whole range of human diversity. Learning about yourself through the most challenging form of dialog — one which does not automatically privilege your own values and perspectives, and which really requires you to know not only how to talk to, but also how to hear, the other.
Whatever the language you study, it represents an opening onto new intellectual and spiritual landscapes that we could never otherwise know. It gets us out of the house, and it provides us with new homes."
Curriculum Vitae | Dept of Modern Languages | Trinity College
