Have you ever tried to write a five-page essay in a language you weren’t fluent in? It’s an onerous task that some students do regularly, but it’s also something I often took for granted. For a long stretch of my schooling, I never had to worry about a conceptual gap between the ideas in my head and the words I wrote. That is, until I was assigned to write about Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos.” Suddenly, my vocabulary was cut in half, and the complex sentence structures I was so used to no longer worked. Yet I soon came to enjoy the task, learning how to communicate my thoughts in a simpler, more direct style.

Due to this, I was at first excited to see that the English major at UChicago had a language requirement. While I wasn’t exactly sure what major I planned to pursue, I found it heartening that the requirement existed. Learning Spanish had been a big part of my high school education and greatly influenced my perception of the English language and literature. So, I was saddened to see that in place of a second-year level of language, one could also take courses in translated literature or even computer science.

When I inquired with the English department about when and why computer science was added as an option, there wasn’t a clear answer. Trevor McCulloch, the department’s student affairs administrator, responded that while he wasn’t certain of the exact date, archived College catalogs show computer science listed as an option as early as the 2014–15 academic year. I also learned that starting in the 2025–26 school year, the language requirement for an English major would be eliminated completely, something I was even more shocked to hear. McCulloch cited that students and advisers found the language requirement confusing and it deterred students from declaring the major. But the best course of action is not to eliminate the language requirement altogether but rather to narrow it exclusively to foreign languages.

On its page, the department states  that “students in the Department of English Language and Literature learn how to ask probing questions about a large body of material; how to formulate, analyze, and judge questions and their answers; and how to write in clear, cogent prose.” These educational goals are not limited to the English language; students don’t suddenly lose the ability to reason when switching languages or dialects. I would argue that learning a foreign language is not only enriching to one’s studies but integral to fully understanding the English language and literature. Such studies cannot be substituted with computer science or translated literature.

I’ve always been a proponent of learning programming languages, as technology becomes more and more integral to our everyday lives. Some studies suggest a correlation between learning computer science and improved skills in math, quantitative reasoning, and so on. Still, I don’t think that learning programming languages should act as a replacement for reading and learning a foreign language. They are fundamentally different from spoken and written languages; their purpose is to communicate with computers rather than other humans. Learning to program has helped my critical thinking, but it hasn’t helped my writing and reading skills more than learning a foreign language has.

In terms of learning how to formulate and analyze, I truly learned the most about these topics not from English, but from Spanish. If you’ve never had to write something in another language, I recommend it solely to understand what your peers, particularly those for whom English is not their first language, might be going through when they write their weekly discussion posts (and I assume you enjoy this sort of mental challenge, given you’re here at UChicago). Yes, I definitely didn’t have the same flow or diverse word choice when writing in Spanish. The structures were simple, and the grammar plain. Yet without the guise of esoteric words and long, rambling sentences, I learned how to write a true argument. I learned how to scour texts for small details and evidence and make the logical assumptions necessary to connect evidence to reasoning. Under the restrictions of a second language, I better learned the basics of argumentation and writing.

Sometimes, the specifics of a text in another language simply can’t be properly understood unless it’s in its native language. If I were to paint the image of perfumed sperm flowing from the green scales of one’s swollen blister, you might direct me to health and wellness services. Yet reading Rosario Ferré’s short stories filled with imagery of female sexuality, it somehow makes perfect sense why “[de la vejiga] manaba una esperma perfumada por la punta de sus escamas verdes.” This deeply evocative imagery intertwines beauty, grotesqueness, and sensuality in a way that translation would almost inevitably diminish. Engaging directly with the original language allowed for a more profound, unfiltered connection to Ferré’s intention, and made me appreciate the precise emotional resonance of her words.

Language learning is also a critical part of crafting a narrative and understanding a story, which I came to know through reading Miguel de Unamuno’s Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo. In the prologue of this anthology, Unamuno describes how the struggle between one’s “most  or internal desires, and material reality is the core of writing real characters. Even the hyperbola, striving to touch its asymptote, is a tragedy, as it cannot attain that which it “desires.” After reading this, I was certainly surprised to see Hua Hsu write about “the possibility of the asymptote’s line one day meeting the curve” in his book Stay True. But having read Unamuno’s conception of intimate reality, understanding it in the native Spanish, I felt all the more prepared to analyze Hsu’s writing, even though it was in a different language. I better understood the pain Hsu felt from losing a close friend, because I had the emotional framework conceived in another language.

Without learning and reading Spanish literature, I would not have the same grasp on the English language that I do. Granted, these two examples are specific, and both relate to my subjective experience of learning a foreign language. Yet they demonstrate the potential benefit of language learning to someone who is studying English. By engaging deeply with another language, one can gain new insight into nuances and subtleties of meaning that otherwise might be hidden. Ultimately, the study of language enriches not just our understanding of literature but our capacity for clarity of thought in all forms of communication.

I want to end this by repeating an old mantra: fish don’t know that they are in water. No matter how much one might study the English language, if they never approach it through the lens of another language, there is a component missing. Studying only in English limits the depth of understanding one can achieve about language itself. Engaging with other languages challenges assumptions, broadens one’s intellectual horizons, and fosters a deeper, more comparative view of literature and communication. Placing undue emphasis on literature in English comes at the expense of other linguistic traditions. This is a limitation we should strive to overcome, not reinforce.