“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” – by Ludwig Wittgenstein, found on a wordreference.com forum post.

One realization I have had during my year studying abroad has been the beauty of language. Never before would I have imagined how powerful words can be. Beyond providing a method of communication within and among communities, it has the capacity to cause a multitude of feelings that confuse, frustrate, pacify, and thrill. It can make you smile when you least expect it and make you cry from frustration or delight.

But perhaps what fascinates me the most is how individual words are so uniquely meaningful. Synonyms can help diversify the rhetoric in your essays, but one word can never perfectly take the place of another, that is, when it comes to its social context. While Webster’s may say that two words have the same definition, in reality, those words have different connotations, giving them each their own space in the world of linguistics.

In the same sense, although wordreference.com is more or less my Castellano bible, there is often no clear translation between languages. One language compacts a whole phrase from another language into one single word, while adding even more layers of meaning (case in point: aprovechar). In Chinese, one character can have almost an endless number of meanings depending on what other characters it is used with. This is what is so beautiful to me—the idea that the very thing that we use thoughtlessly on a daily basis has so much power and if we only took the time and thought to harness it, our communication could become incredibly more thoughtful and dynamic.

While I may not have attained the level of Spanish I could have during my time here in Buenos Aires, I at least have improved significantly and I am certainly not going to stop working. As for Chinese, I’m looking forward to starting (nearly) from scratch come this fall. And in the English realm, I have made it my lifetime goal to choose my words more wisely in writing and conversation. Wish me luck.