Can Studying Spanish Increase Your Empathy?
We feel more empathy towards people with whom we have something in common, and what more could you have in common with someone than a shared language? Could learning a foreign language increase our empathy towards speakers of that language? It’s certainly possible. But I want to focus on a different question about language learning and empathy. Can learning to use the indirect object—an important grammar structure in Spanish—increase our sensitivity to how our actions may affect others, thereby making us more empathetic?