How many skills do you have? How many sports can you play? How many dishes can you cook? Skills like these can be stored in our brain as information. This information helps our brain expand and learn new things. But let’s look at a different question:. how many languages do you speak? Phrases like “C’est une pomme,” “Perdon, no le entiendo! La señora de alli habla chino mandarin,” and “천천히 말해주세요!” are all different languages. Knowing some of these phrases and basic parts of languages can help you become multilingual. Someone who is multilingual fluently speaks more than one language. One may think, “It’s actually hard to speak one language, how can a person speak more?” But is possible! But does really knowing more than one language help you?
Nelson Mandela said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you speak to him in HIS language, that goes to his heart.” Knowing more than one language expands your boundaries and lets you communicate with many people. Many people have jobs that have to do with speaking languages. Even though you may not have a job related to languages, it is beneficial to learn languages. In cities, many people from all over the world live in apartments and houses, thus leading to different cultures and languages in one place. There is a huge diversity of languages and dialects spoken in any given American city, which can be heard anytime while shopping or walking throughout the city. But in reality, even if you don’t speak English because there are so many languages you can hear, communication will never be a problem. We can infer from Mandela’s quote that words in different languages can change someone’s thinking. If we can speak more languages it is better. You can speak with many people in English, but the words have more meaning when you speak in their native language. Speaking languages is like a using a microphone, the more you know the louder the microphone gets.
Learning languages is also important because it can help you learn more about linguistics and cultures . Once you learn a language you learn the history of it, and you see root words and words and phrases that are not heard of in other languages. For example, learning a Latin-based language and then relating it to another Latin-based language may make it easier to learn. That one language opens more doors for language learning. Learning French, for example, is good if you learn Spanish next. Although the pronunciation is different, the grammar is similar. These tips help anyone have the brain of multilingual master. Having the ultimate knowledge on a languages is amazing because not only can you be more knowledgeable about the world, but also about other languages. It’s like reading a series: you wouldn’t read books six, three and then book nine. You want to read the books in order.
Learning languages also helps both sides of the brain become adept. The left brain is used mostly for math, science and some forms of art. It can also be used for language learning based on grammar and memorization. If you use your left brain, you can also view many other things differently. Humans usually use the right brain with English and art. Those two subjects can be interpretative and usually take a lot of thinking. Using your left brain to learn languages is tough but it also helps you retain more information. Let’s look at some examples. There are four main Chinese tones. They may take a lot of work to learn but when learnt, they provide a new insight into Chinese language. Spanish has 27 letters in the alphabet, two of them being considered “digraphs” and the other one being the “ñ.” Spanish isn’t a tonal language like Chinese. The way you would read the alphabet is the way you would speak. Unlike Spanish, English has many rules and exceptions. After understanding this new concept, your brain will change the way you look at or hear languages.
Being multilingual is a very useful skill. Many see it as a party trick but it’s more than that. It’s a way to connect with the world. It’s a way to travel with ease and to gain a historical understanding of where you are going. But how many people can say they are multilingual? 56% of people say that they are bilingual and one study mentioned that only 3-4% of the world is multilingual. But now it’s time for you to think... Where do I fit into these categories? What I should do with this information? And most importantly: What language will I learn next?