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NEW! Winners of the WHY LEARN MORE LANGUAGES? blog entry competition announced!
The reason there has been such a delay is because it has been SO very difficult to choose the winners. The judges had a shortlist of 8 or 9 entries and agonised over them. We all looked at them and discussed them many times. Everyone enjoyed reading your posts and so many of you had so many interesting and valuable things to say as well as having made a great effort to enrich your posts with media to make them more interesting and accessible.
Unfortunately there can only be three winners in the competition but you are all winners if you keep up your study and enthusiasm for foreign language learning. We are really grateful for all the entries and are looking forward to using them to help convince other students of the value of learning foreign languages. So WELL DONE! To ALL of you!
These are the winners:
1st prize went to Meg of St Joseph of Cluny, primarily for the content and clarity of her argument as well as her care in choosing relevant illustrations. You can read her blog entry below (You Live A New Life For Every New Language You Speak).
2nd prize went to Simon of Villier’s School in Limerick, primarily for the simple yet powerful video he made as well as for his useful research. You can view his entry here (also see the video further down this page - just one part of Simon's prizewinning entry).
3rd prize went to Alba Fernandez of St Peter’s College Dunboyne for the originality and imagination of his entry which you can see here.
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You Live A New Life For Every New Language You Speak
“You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once.”
- Czech proverb.
The world is a big place, inhabited by over 7 billion people who use more than 6,000 languages to communicate. The more languages you can understand, the more people you can communicate with, and the further you can go. You limit yourself unnecessarily when you only speak one language. There’s an exciting world out there just waiting to be explored, full of people and cultures you’ve never even heard of – but they don’t come with English subtitles.
Language learning is much more than learning off vocab lists and verb conjugations in every tense under the sun. It’s an insight into another way of thinking. Every language has its own quirks; other languages have words for things or concepts which English doesn’t:
So I believe Ezra Pound hit the nail on the head when he said
‘”The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.”
As Irish people, we should appreciate bilingualism more than we do!
To learn more languages means to recognise that our way of doing things isn’t the only one out there; as the world becomes a smaller place, through ever-improving communications technology, it’s now more important than ever for us to be as educated, open-minded and accepting of other peoples and cultures. The way I see it, the first step in doing that is learning another language – and it’s really not as hard as we think. The internet is full of great resources – like Genki Japan for Japanese – you just have to look!
Simon's presentation on Why Learn More Languages:
Saturday LC classes
Anyone attending Saturday classes MUST be registered here first!
The registration period is normally limited to September, however, in certain circumstances exceptions may be made.
2 simple steps:
