A Majorly Unsung Perk About Being Multilingual

4 min readJan 31, 2023

I feel like whenever people start to tell you the perks of being bilingual or multilingual they start with ways to advance your career such as, “it looks great on resumes and interviews” or “you’ll be able to work in different countries”. Or the other perk that is often mentioned is that it will be “useful for travel”, even though everyone still speaks English during their vacation. While I fully agree with most of those perks and think they’re awesome, my personal favorite perk of being multilingual is the ability to experience the art of various different cultures. I currently speak English, Malayalam, and German (although my spoken German is fading a bit). I also took years of French while studying in Switzerland, and a couple of years of Arabic and Hindi (both forgotten) while living in Dubai. Knowing these languages opened up new worlds of books, movies, and music that would have never been accessible to me. As English speakers, we are spoilt for choice when it comes to media. Most high-budget movies come from Hollywood and quite often the most popular books and songs in the world are in English. However, that does not mean the best stories, acting, or writing is in English. And there is no better way to learn about different cultures and people than through their forms of art.

Despite knowing these languages, I know I have only scratched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring the movies and music of these cultures. What I’ve seen and listened to will undoubtedly be described as “basic af” by native speakers. However, my scratching the surface is unfortunately a lot farther than where a lot of people go when exploring foreign media. There is a whole new world of movies, music, and books waiting to be unlocked once that elusive language barrier is overcome.

As an adult, it’s not practical to learn a new language, especially when you don’t have a clear reason to. Other priorities such as college, finding a job, and family take precedence over that. Truthfully, I have never been motivated to learn a language purely for the joy of knowing a new language. The fact that I am multilingual is purely circumstantial. My parents taught me English and Malayalam at a young age, and I learned German as a means to survive and make friends in Switzerland. However, the ability to stay in touch with these cultures and enjoy music and movies has me more motivated than ever to do my best to practice and retain these languages.

I was inspired to write down my thoughts after driving back home from college blasting a German playlist filled with songs that I used to love listening to when I was younger. It occurred to me that the fact I was able to sing every word and understand it was quite unique. I was initially kind of bummed out because the songs in my playlist were fire, but I wouldn’t really be able to share it with my best friends and experience it together. There is no world where I would be able to blast one of those songs with any of my American friends and sing every lyric the way we do with our throwback playlists. It also got me thinking about how lucky I am to be able to experience art from other cultures to its fullest extent because I don’t have that language barrier. However, a big part of art and culture is the ability to share it with those you care about and make memories with them. I realized that in the same way I can listen to Spanish music and have a blast without understanding a single word, others can enjoy this music as well. So definitely feel free to check out my German playlist (which is filled w/ basic af songs). And if you really like one I’d be more than happy to translate it for you.

Just like music, it’s crazy to me how my friends who don’t speak certain languages will never be able to experience particular movies the way a native speaker can. However, subtitles exist and I am a huge proponent of them. Getting over the barrier of having a few words at the bottom of the screen is the best way for those who don’t speak a language to watch some incredible stories that they would’ve never seen otherwise. The only thing I love more than a good movie is recommending good movies to my friends and hearing about how much they liked them. So here is my playlist and some banger movies in languages that are not English that are so worth watching.