6/30/2026
Today marks the last day of the first half of the year—a good time to reflect on our New Year's resolutions.
Yesterday I wrote about why I hope my grandson will learn Chinese. As I worked on that piece, several stories came back to me.
A friend immigrated to the United States with her ten-year-old son. A decade later, she told me he could barely express himself in Chinese. Ten years of living entirely in English had almost erased the first ten years of his native language!
Another friend came to America with her twelve-year-old daughter. Today the daughter is forty-one with two children of her own. She still can speak Chinese, but not to her children who were never taught to. Their grandmother can no longer communicate with them in Chinese, and the grandchildren know almost nothing about the culture they inherited.
These stories remind me that language is much more than a tool for communication. It is also the bridge between generations and the key to a culture.
After reading my article, one reader asked me: How does learning another language teach intellectual humility?
I don't think the connection is automatic. Simply memorizing vocabulary or grammar does not make someone more humble. But learning another language—and the culture behind it—often does.
Psychologists define intellectual humility as recognizing the limits of our own knowledge and accepting that our beliefs may be incomplete or even mistaken.
When we grow up speaking only one language within one culture, we naturally assume that our way of describing the world is simply "normal." We rarely notice the assumptions built into our language because we have never experienced an alternative.
Learning another language changes that.
Suddenly we discover that another culture organizes ideas differently, values different things, and even expresses emotions in different ways. Many things we once assumed were universal turn out to be simply cultural choices.
That realization is the beginning of intellectual humility.
Comparison gives us a reference point. Without another language and culture, we have nothing to compare and to evaluate our own assumptions. We accept them not because we have examined them, but because we have never encountered another way of seeing the world. With second perspective, we begin asking better questions.
That is why the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
A second language expands those limits, gives us a second perspective, enabling comparison. Comparison produces intellectual humility.