The old joke goes: what do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American.

It lands because it describes something real. The assumption that English is sufficient — that learning another language is a nice extra rather than a genuine part of education — has left generations of Americans less equipped than their counterparts elsewhere. Veritas takes a different view.

Five Reasons to Learn a Modern Language

The case for modern foreign language study is broader than most people articulate. Students and families come to it for different reasons, and most of them are good ones.

Some learn a modern language for practical immersion — missionaries learning Swahili before moving to Tanzania, families stationed abroad wanting to participate in the community around them. Language, in these cases, is the price of genuine belonging.

Others learn to build relationships across cultural lines. America is home to speakers of hundreds of languages. Picking up a few phrases in someone's native tongue is one of the most direct ways to communicate respect. It signals something that no amount of goodwill expressed in English can quite replace.

Some pursue modern languages for the cognitive workout. Learning a new language demands attention, memorization, pattern recognition, and the willingness to think in unfamiliar structures. Research consistently shows that bilingual individuals develop stronger executive function and mental flexibility (Ellen Bialystok, Bilingualism in Development, 2001). Languages with sounds, scripts, or grammatical structures very different from English — Mandarin being the obvious example — demand especially rigorous mental effort.

Others come to modern languages for intellectual access. Cervantes in Spanish, Pascal in French, Einstein's original German papers — some ideas are most fully encountered in the language in which they were first expressed. Translations are powerful, but something is always carried across imperfectly.

And practically: most college admissions offices expect at least two years of the same modern foreign language on a transcript.

All of these reasons are valid. None requires the others to be persuasive.

Why Latin Comes First

Veritas recommends that students study modern foreign languages after Latin and, ideally, after some Greek as well. For most Veritas students, that means modern languages arrive in the high school years.

The sequencing is intentional. Latin builds the grammatical intuition — an understanding of inflection, word order, and sentence structure — that makes learning any subsequent language significantly more efficient. Students who arrive at Spanish or French already understanding how languages are organized at a structural level absorb new vocabulary and grammar patterns far more readily than students starting without that foundation. Latin is not a detour from modern language study. It's preparation for it.

Four Languages, Each with a Purpose

The world holds roughly 7,000 languages. Any curriculum has to be selective. Veritas currently offers four: Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin.

Spanish, French, and German are founding languages of the modern West — deeply embedded in the history, literature, philosophy, and theology that Veritas students encounter throughout their education. Spanish opens Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. French connects students to a vast tradition of philosophy, literature, and diplomacy. German is the language of Reformation theology, modern philosophy, and foundational scientific literature.

Mandarin stands apart in kind. With roughly a billion native speakers, it is the most widely spoken first language in the world. Its writing system, tonal structure, and grammatical logic are unlike anything in the Indo-European family — which makes it both challenging and uniquely formative. Its relevance to the century ahead is difficult to overstate.

Language as Bridge

Learning a language is learning something about the people who speak it. The vocabulary a language reaches for, the structures it uses to express relationship and time, the things it has words for that others don't — all of these are windows into a culture and a way of seeing the world.

When students can meet someone in their own language, they've removed a barrier that no amount of translation fully bridges. That capacity — to cross toward another person linguistically — is one of the more humanizing things an education can produce. And that aim, as the joke eventually concedes, is nothing to laugh at.