I definitely feel learning a language expands your understanding of the world as you’re no longer limited to just one corner of the world nor reliant on translators. It’s also fun to communicate with people you would’ve never have gotten into contact with otherwise
I learned that a lot of translation aren’t very good. Probably not because they are not capable, but because i think people like to put their own twist on things, which isn’t always great. In movies and tv shows, the hardest thing to translate is humor. Some jokes only work for the language it was written for. So if you watch a comedy, often you don’t watch jokes that was ment to be in a movie, but the joke that the translator came up with. One example would be Gunter from the simpsons. He’s from Bavaria, he wears the leather pants and everything. He’s also mainly the butt of the joke. So if you watch the german version, Gunter is from Switzerland which doesn’t make sense, but germany is not the butt of the joke, but Switzerland. Sometimes translations are just plain wrong. Like the original said: the water used to reach as much as 30 feet. Which gets translated to 30 meters.
I don’t know if that enriched my life or made it worse, because it makes me dislike dubbed movies or tv shows a lot more. I also never realised that there aren’t that many voice actors, so they obviously voice a lot of characters, wich is normal for cartoons, but in movies or tv shows it’s putting me off to hear the same 3 voices over and over.
For me, first, a lot of stuff becomes accessible, like news, which just get published in the country’s specific language(s) unless they have immediate international repercussions, jokes and memes, which can lose their meanings in translation if they even get translated, musics, which there is a surprising amount of non-English ones for genres I like, publications in social medias, etc.
And on a second point, since I often look for patterns, and in languages that is no different, I slowly become able to interpret neighboring languages to the ones I study. That I can remember, from languages I can somewhat interpret, there’s French, Italian, Latin and the Spanish dialects thanks to Spanish and Portuguese, German, Danish and Swedish thanks to English and Norwegian, and a tiny bit of Chinese thanks to Japanese. That also helps giving to me a kick-start to learning new languages.
And on a third point related to the first, if a given material exists in multiple languages, I have the freedom to choose which I want to consume. =)
