Contra Costa County is the second most diverse county in California, and that’s saying something since one person out of every three in California was not born in the United States. In Contra Costa, it’s not uncommon for most people to be either bilingual or multilingual, and the locals agree that it has immense benefits.
Being able to provide translation services for family members or being able to communicate with employees makes the days go by much smoother. Imagine if everyone in the United States had the ability to speak and translate for two or even three different languages?
Learning a Language is Like Looking through a Window
A resident of Contra Costa County, Daniel De La Rosa says that learning different languages helps people get an inside look into different cultures and really experience how they see life. De La Rosa says that it can bring people closer together and knowing Spanish and English has helped him in many different ways. Paula Carson, a resident of Discovery Bay, says that immersion is what really helps people learn a language, and living in Contra Costa is definitely a type of immersion.
New Technique
When you’re surrounded by a language often enough, you just sort of pick up on it after a while. This technique has been used in countless school across the world and has had huge success in teaching students foreign languages much more quickly than traditional methods. Being able to provide Spanish or even Chinese translation is a valuable skill, and immersion in places like Contra Costa County form unique language hot spots in the United States.
A Brentwood resident, Melanie Long, says that she would probably teach better if she knew Spanish. She recognizes the value of learning the languages, especially in a location with a high population of Hispanic students. She says that being able to communicate more efficiently with parents would make her job and the parent’s life much easier. She regrets that the classes she took in high school and college didn’t stick, but agrees that life would be much easier if the average person could be multilingual.
Chinese and Spanish Added to the County’s Spoken Languages
Besides the usually spoken languages in Contra Costa County, some residents are reaching out to different, more unknown languages such as Chinese and even Latin. Though Chinese and other Asian languages are rapidly becoming more popular throughout the United States, it is still not as popular as languages such as Spanish, German, and French.
Many people in Contra Costa County have also expressed a desire to learn Latin. Though hardly anyone speaks the languages anymore, there are still many places around the country that offer courses in Latin and Greek. Many are offered by major universities and seminaries, but some are also offered by independent language teachers as well.
German or even Portuguese translation courses might be found more easily than Latin, but that hasn’t stopped the residents of Contra Costa from seeking to learn the language.