Out to Eat

I think you could do worse than to learn a foreign language by spending nearly all of your time on food, drink and cooking. After all, you’ll need to eat if you visit a foreign country, and you may as well figure out how to ask for things you like or want to try. There are plenty of opportunities, too: you’ll get 2-3 chances a day to practice in that context; not counting afternoon coffee and tea, of course.

If you can ask for directions to good places to eat, make reservations and pay for a meal, you’ve actually covered a lot of ground, linguistically speaking. And if you can talk a little bit about or at least understand the preparations of various foods—kitchen tools and techniques—you’ll have even more verbs and prepositional phrases at your disposal.

Stories and food go together like peanut butter & jelly; everybody has fun and meaningful stories about food. You can learn how to tell one or two of yours in your target language, so that you have something you’ve rehearsed that you can use in conversation. People that you meet will have their own fun stories about food—you can listen to them and laugh over dinner and drinks. You can also just chat with your server or bartender and pick up new bits and pieces of the language, as well as recommendations for the next place to eat.

There’s a case to be made that human language only developed because we were able to grow big enough brains—brains which were a result of increased nutrition from learning how to cook food. If the very first language was developed as a result of food and cooking, then it only seems right to learn new languages with them.