A liberal arts educational is a beneficial program to incorporate and learn new skills and information that may be outside your normal realm of education. The study of foreign languages and cultures is essential in a liberal arts education because it expands your knowledge outside of your major and the typical subjects studied, gives you a skill that is applicable in countries outside of your own, and promotes your ability to build relationships at an international level.

Studying foreign language lets you implement and learn about subjects outside of your major. This is important because many practices pull from outside disciplines. It is important to study language because it is foundation of culture is built on. These days in such a competitive market, employees knowledgeable of many cultures are highly valued. It is practical to learn about customs and languages outside of your own because in a typical work space you work with other people in various disciplines and parts of the world, which means that we need to be able to understand and collaborate with diverse groups in order to work effectively.

As the world develops, international communication becomes more accessible due to the advancement in technology. It is common for a job to call for a partnership with other fields outside of your current country. To advance a specific field, it is vital to collaborate and work with others within and outside of the field, which includes other countries. In order to work well with others, we must learn about their language and culture. Even if you are not interacting with those native to the particular country of your studies, you still have acquired skills that help you better understand ideas and customs that may be foreign to you. Understanding foreign cultures and customs aids in the development of creating relationships. It is important to be informed on cultures throughout the world and about how there is not one set way of living and that there are advantages to the way each culture functions. You could learn from these cultures and introduce these values that are found in foreign cultures within your own life and business to advance and better yourself and others.

It also helps advance your own communication skills by learning about new ways that another culture communicates to others casually to build global relationships. Studying a foreign language is a key in the modern world because it shows a high degree of education and worldliness. In recent times more and more political leaders are bilingual or multi-lingual. This is because learning a foreign language shows the student’s respect towards the language and culture they are studying. Language and culture are interwoven very tightly, so that the first steps in understanding a foreign culture is to learn their language and view on life with their lens and words. Language itself is often politicized, just as displayed in the recent xenophobic fear of rising Spanish speakers in America, the forced removal of Tibetan language, and subsequent ‘re-education’ of Chinese in present day Sichuan, China. The flame of nationalism is often fanned by pride behind a single language and therefore an identity. Trying to emphasize and put enough context into language can be difficult. But language itself is so powerful, since it is the single thing that makes us different than any other organism on earth.

Exploring Japanese restaurants with my family