Want to improve your spelling? Study word formation cause: the roots of many long words were born in other languages. This is also a great way to build mental hooks for often-misspelled words like apology, relevant, elevator and definitely.
Want to improve your writing? Study English, sure. But also study other languages. Study German, Middle English, French.
The vast, vast bulk of history's great writers could converse in a hell of a lot more than one language. If you were out and about in the 16th century in, say, France, you spoke probably at least French and Latin, possibly Italian and probably German, and you could use some English if you needed to. Spanish also wasn't out of the question, nor was Portuguese.
Where am I going? Below the fold ...
I wrote this diary back when Barack Obama had just raised the spectre of socialized everythingness and World War II and nogoodniks by asserting that Americans should learn a second language.
Now that the multilingualism cries are silent, since no politician is currently talking about it (guarantee you'll hear something about it at least twice more before November), the spin of the RNC (ain't nothin' grand about it) has died down, and I can actually educate you on this subject without first having to undress Republican lies.
We think we know so much more than our ancestors did. We talk about our breakthroughs in technology, our access to information compiled by people we'll never meet.
Mais probablement, tu ne peux pas comprendre ce que j'ai ecrit ici. C'est comme si j'ai ecrit sfhjldshkjlsdjkl klsdhkljghk. La difference n'est pas si grand, non?
Geoffrey Chaucer's father, if he couldn't read the above, would at least have known exactly what it meant by having it read to him. (But probably, you cannot understand what I wrote here. It's like if I wrote sdjghdjlghjlk sfhljkdh. The difference isn't that big, is it?)
The elder Chaucer was a wine merchant, and his wife's family was heavy into textiles. He had to be able to speak various languages because his customers were from all over the place. And if Chaucer Sr. didn't have to speak English (as official business was rarely conducted in it), the relatively gallivanting Geoffrey, with his early-life penchant for hanging out with dock workers and his later-in-life love of the drink (as is the case with basically anyone from that time), would doubtless have gotten more'n a taste of various dialects of Middle English — and which we know academically he did hear, based on how he spelled what he'd heard. (For a fascinating look at this, consult The Stories of English, which is practically pornography for linguists.)
By writing in Middle English, incidentally, Geoffrey Chaucer was, as my linguistics professor put it to the class about two years ago, effectively writing a book in rap. That's the respect English had back in the day. If you were conducting business with the crown or the court, you used French or Latin in England. If you wanted to speak to a nobody, you used Middle English, which was still hefty chunks of French and Latin, not to mention full of French pronunciations we lost in the Great Vowel Shift. As Ebonics is respected today by the average American, so was Middle English respected in Chaucer's day.
So if you want a hand understanding Chaucer's English without consulting a Middle English dictionary every five seconds (a noble feat considering I know of no such definitive work, which'd be hard to realize given the lack of standardized spelling), learn French. Some German won't hurt either. And if you want to read it aloud authentically, take your English phonics and throw it away. Wyfe is pronounced weef or sometimes wif, depending on the rhyme scheme. (Other words are spelled and thus pronounced differently depending on where the speakers are from.)
Want to read some Old English? Great. Learn German. Throw your phonics out the door (should I have told you to keep it discarded for purposes of this entry? Oops). You might see an English root or two, but most of what you're reading has either been lost or so significantly changed that you have to really know what you're looking for to find it.
Want to read ex-slave narratives? So do I.
I did. If you can only handle Upper Midlands (the dialect our beloved KO speaks), you'll be so lost you won't even know you're lost. See, one of the things happens when you talk to an 80-year-old ex-slave woman born and raised in Smalltown, Ark., is that you hear a lot of pronunciations specific sometimes to her neighborhood. If you're isolated from much of the world and never given a formal education, never sent to meet new people, your dialect becomes specific to your surroundings. (This is part of the basis for the utter myth that the Inuit people have 100 or however many names for snow. They do not. They have a polysynthetic language. That basically means their word affixes are on steroids.) You don't develop new words for regular things like water, eggs and pants, but if you hear "paints" for pants, as one of my maternal grandmother's neighbors did, "paints" it is, and ever more staunchly so, such that the word becomes something of a caricature of itself. (This is how we get people think something cuts not the muster but the mustard.)
And Lordy do some of those narratives read beautiful. Sacred Og in a beat-down shack in February of 1940 talking to an English graduate student from Iowa who's totally mystified by this new dialect. It's gorgeous. And it's phonetic in many places because the grad student has no Earthly idea what words are being spoken. I can understand most everything writ after about 1375 in English or something close, and some of that stuff took me four or five tries to parse.
(Those narratives, by the way, are also fascinating because they look at the very real shithole we put former slaves in. Yes, after 1865, they were free, but most were also essentially destitute. And with no formal education, and with a massive influx of immigrant workers (see the Chinese Exclusion Act for more on that), your former slaves became your current dirt farmers. Many of the narratives state a profound dislike for life after Lincoln and for Lincoln himself because sure, they were free, but without means to get around, they were still fucking stuck.)
But without the phonetic fluidity that comes with being familiar with multiple languages (and even more dialects), I'd be as stuck as those humanities students enlisted by FDR to capture the stories of octogenarian ex-slaves.
I said above that some of those slaves' figures of speech and pronunciations were specific to where they lived.
The natural extension of that is that in 1830, slaves were speaking differently. An ex-slave in 1890s South Carolina can understand a slave in 1830s South Carolina (assuming both are from the mainland and neither had a significant relative with a facial injury), but the farther back you go, the less certain that understanding becomes.
Some of it is pronunciation. And some of it is word meaning. This is why many people assume the worst about, for example, The Rape of Lucrece.
Girl ain't getting assaulted. She's getting carried away. Rape comes from rapio, rapire, to snatch, carry away, that sort of thing. (Interestingly, back in Lucrece's day, the person taking Lucrece's rapist to court if she is unlawfully penetrated is Lucrece's father. He's the one who's lost money because his daughter is now damaged goods. The girl herself has, if memory serves, exactly zero recourse. She's best off taking something valuable and easily broken with her and getting her father compensated for that item.)
And you won't think the same about Frankenstein knowing that one translation of the two German words in there, franken and stein, is truthful mirror.
Laugh every time you hear members of our democracy railing against European thought given the extent to which our Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment, the extent to which our long words are based in Latin, and the extent to which our system of government comes straight out of Compton Greece and Rome. Even the standard formal greeting is born of days when you'd come at someone with your right hand bearing a sword. A handshake once signified that you came in peace. (And I know that because my father, who majored in English and history, told me.)
Today I'll go to work at a newspaper on the Texas-Mexico border. Many of my co-workers are bilingual. I am bilingual as well, but not in Spanish.
Being fluent in Spanish and English is kind of required for the paper's editor. Many of the people she talks to speak no English. Two of our news reporters have better Spanish than English, though you wouldn't know it.
Any of these people would have a massively better shot at landing a better job at any other Texas paper, or at a Florida paper, or at a New Mexico paper, or something similar, because of their Spanish.
Because of my French background, I could probably get a job at least translating (in a pinch) French into English.
And anyone who is bilingual to any significant extent will have an easier time learning a third language than will someone who relies on only one language.
In Chad, children are fluent in six languages before puberty is more than a distant thought.
Want to improve test scores in English? Teach your kids a second language. Teach them a third language. Ever notice how many of history's scholars spoke at least three languages? Think that's a coincidence?
There are lots of arguments for being multilingual. The one you'll hear most often, because it's the easiest to argue, is that we are quickly (relatively speaking) approaching a global economy situation.
Most people don't know, or don't realize they know, that the more languages you know, the easier learning another language, or more of one, is. Because of my French background, I could probably master the phonemes and structure of Spanish faster than someone half my age (though someone younger than about 4 would pick it up faster). I already sound like I can speak it. I can pronounce the words. I just don't know what I'm saying all the time, though I can pick out words here and there.
(Also because of my French background, translating Liebniz's French was pretty easy.)
Learn a second language because, yeah, it'll make you a more attractive job prospect. And yeah, there's literature available to me that is frankly out of your reach for a good six months (including one poem, whose translation gave birth to "yesteryear"). And sure, new swear words, new pickup lines and the occasional fun test phrase like "La plume de ma tante," which you will never use again.
But learn a second language because it makes language easier to learn.