What Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton Have to Do With Your Need to Learn to Speak Spanish

Recently the media reported a study by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which found that Barack Obama is related to Brad Pitt and Hillary Clinton to Angelina Jolie. Distant cousins, yes, but who would have thought that? However, if we stop and think about it, we realize that despite our differences we are not as different as we think. We are truly only separated by 6 degrees as we all are members of the human race. That being said, why would any North American Anglophone want or need to learn to speak Spanish fluently. Well let us look at our geographic proximity to South America, Central America, Mexico and Latin America all of which primarily speak Spanish (with the exception of Brazil). Would you not want to be able to communicate with your neighbors if they were Spanish-speaking? We are all connected and to learn to speak fluent Spanish would be a step in the right direction.

Then there is the numbers game. You should seriously consider learning to speak Spanish fluently because over 400 million people worldwide speak Spanish and that includes countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Philippines, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco and Gibraltar. That's about half of the population in the Western Hemisphere! In addition, within the United States, Spanish is the second most widely spoken language after English. This has opened up more employment opportunities for individuals who speak both English and Spanish and the ability to speak both languages will continue to become increasingly valuable for people who live in the U.S. with each passing year putting them in the advantage.

Spanish is a romance language and hence knowing Spanish is a stepping-stone to understanding many millions of other people who speak one of the other romance languages such as Italian, Portuguese or French and also can strengthen your ties with the European continent as well. Because of the similarities in grammar structure and vocabulary, once you acquire fluency in Spanish, you can become fluent in other languages in a shorter time than it would take someone who is learning their first romance language.

Lastly, if you have been living as a desert monk in complete solitude and isolation (which, I may add, is not such a bad thing to do from time to time), thanks to technology and the information highway, our world is no longer that big. Economic globalization is the main driving force behind the increasing importance of being able to communicate with those from other countries. For obvious reasons, the modern trend now shows that more Americans are studying Spanish in record numbers due to many factors, but most importantly, education in an international setting is becoming a top mandate for the American government because people need to be economically competitive. Therefore, it would be a worthwhile and wise personal investment to learn to speak Spanish fluently and to have Spanish as your instrument of connection to re-connect with the Human Network.