This paper uses two autobiographical accounts of language learning within the context of highly significant personal relationships to argue that the functional emphasis of communicative language teaching has narrowed our understanding of the potential personal and educational meaning of what it is to learn a language. The author's learning of Hebrew and German at different periods of his life is interpreted within his close relationship (as a person raised within the conventionally anti-Semitic cultural environment of Australian Irish Catholicism) with European Jewish friends whose lives have been shaped by the Holocaust and its painful legacy. Language learning in each case has involved psychological and social exploration of the meaning of cultural boundaries and how they are policed. The narrative supports a traditional rationale for the educational benefit of language learning, one that is currently little heard: the development of the learner as a human being.