I do not endeavor to learn every foreign language that I embrace to the point of being able to give a dissertation on a complex subject or boast an immense and scholarly vocabulary. What I am interested in is communicating with other people, understanding them, making them laugh, sharing thoughts and ideas, learning from them and having them somehow benefit from their interactions with me. En bref, an exchange.

It is the ability to communicate with the world, one person at a time, that propels me to dive into the next set of sound sequences and decode them.

That is part of what makes me a freestyle language learner. I don't mind neglecting my French or Spanish (letting them get a little rusty) in order to dedicate time to becoming conversational in Chinese or Russian.

I say conversational (or conversationally fluent) because that's what I'm all about: conversations. Of course, I also love to read and research in other languages, and I will always make a concerted effort to learn their writing systems, but my main focus remains the person in front of me. Or perhaps the group with whom I am enjoying a meal or a coffee or a beer. I want to create sparks where darkness exists.

Another motivation when it comes to learning languages is stretching and expanding my mind linguistically and culturally; learning new ways to express myself and the world around me. I am at the center of my own Universe, and in learning myriad ways to ingest, digest and express where I am and what I am up to, I become more powerful inside of myself. In doing this, I become more aware by developing a "meta-understanding" of the world in which I exist.

Learning to understand and be understood in foreign languages has allowed me to explore and appreciate more things and meet and greet more people in life. As they might say in German, it has expanded my Weltenschauung.

I have often heard that "language is power". I know this to be a fact. Power, as I understand it in this context, refers both to pure information and to the ability to extend myself in a broader network. In learning to communicate in a multiplicity of tongues, I consciously place myself where most others are not; I intentionally empower my human form to give and receive a wider range of thoughts, ideas, cultural patterns, literature, art, music... You name it, and I'd love to learn to say it.