President Obama recently quoted the Koran and mentioned Allah in reaching out to the Muslim community. One person in the audience commented that when he hears the word “Allah,” his heart opens.

Lera Boroditsky and colleagues at Stanford University studied grammatical gender systems by asking German-English and Spanish-English bilinguals to describe “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. The German-English bilinguals used words such as “elegant,” “slender,” “pretty,” all feminine-leaning adjectives. The Spanish-English bilinguals used words like “strong,” “towering,” “heavy,” “dangerous,” considered masculine in the English language. The gender of “bridge” in the native language seemed to have an impact on each bilingual’s view of the object.

In a recent Brain Science podcast episode, Alice Gaby said, “…when we write, the word that’s written to the left corresponds to what would have been spoken earlier than the word that’s written to its right. Now this is the way we do it in English but of course Hebrew or Arabic go from right to left, [in] Chinese, the writing system goes from top to bottom. Lera Boroditsky’s work actually looked at people’s non-linguistic cognition about time and particularly their gestures – how people move their hands when thinking and talking about time– and found a strong correlation between temporal sequence moving left to right for English speakers and right to left for, say, Hebrew speakers and top to bottom for Chinese Mandarin speakers.”

Each of these examples show the importance of communicating with people in their own language, if you wish to reach them. Many people repeatedly bang their heads against the wall trying to get a message across to people who are not like them. If some of that time was used to learn about and try to understand the people you are trying to reach, not only would your head feel better, but you might actually open a line of communication.

I have seen ‘professionals’ talk to seniors like they are children. Making assumptions that they don’t understand normal language. It’s belittling. And I know for a fact a senior will walk away rolling their eyes and give up trying to communicate. In senior facilities, this makes for a miserable life. Not all seniors are alike. Yes, some may have comprehension difficulties. Some may clearly understand what’s being said to them, but have trouble responding. It’s so important to get to know the senior you are speaking to and reach them at their own level, instead of expecting them to respond at the level you’re assuming. I guarantee, anyone who is continually talked down to will slowly regress.

Some parents yell at or order their children. Sometimes out of frustration, or lack of time. Maybe they’re just plain irritated. A child will only learn to ‘obey’ or act out even more. Scientists believe that language is acquired most easily during the first ten years of life. And how do they really learn their language? By how they are spoken to and the language they hear around them. Children want to learn. We can even think back and remember what it’s like to be a child who is confused because something was just stated without any explanation. Once a situation is explained to them, they are much less likely to rail against it. And hey…they’ll even learn! I know there are things I never truly learned in school because they were presented to me in the form of information to memorize. I was not given a context in which to place it, which would have worked it into my life and understanding.

There are as many ways of communicating as there are types of people. Open your mind and listen to whom you’re speaking. They don’t think like you do. Because everyone has a slightly different mind. It’s what makes the world so interesting.