Learning a foreign language is good for reasons beyond the obvious benefit of being able to communicate and share ideas with people from other parts of the world. It can also give you unexpected insights, including the etymology of words you might miss otherwise. The name China uses for itself literally means the Kingdom at the Center of the World, which seemed overly ethnocentric to me when I heard it for the first time. Of course, the Mediterranean Sea means the exact same thing, the Sea at the Center of the Earth, something I never would have picked up on if I hadn’t seen the name in kanji characters. Similarly, I’d never consciously realized the days of the week were named after the ancient gods, although it’s very clear when you write the Japanese days of the week in kanji, which correspond to Moon Day, Mars Day, Mercury Day, Jupiter Day, Venus Day, etc. (The names in English have been filtered through the Germanic/Norse pantheon, for example Thursday comes from silly-sounding Thor’s Day, although the system is the same.) Sometimes words can get lost in translation when they move from one language to another. Despite Japan being a pretty non-religious country, the name for the Statue of Liberty in Japanese is jiyu no megami, or Goddess of Freedom, and the official word for the Olympic Torch translated as the Holy Fire of the Five Rings. Sounds like a magic item from a video game.
