Language is one of the most valuable tools that we are fortunate enough to be gifted to have. Anything you possibly wish to have, a place you want to go to; any kind of dream, possession or feeling – all of that you can acquire with the appropriate use of your own language.
Just like doing activities that involve using both hemispheres of your brain, learning new languages not only provokes a physical brain expansion, but also stimulates the construction of new travel paths for the neurons, creating new connections, further developing your brain. With more languages you can create more, you can say more, you practically become smarter, you can understand more and become more critical, by viewing the world, people and different situations, preceding and new ones from a novel perspective. You suddenly can read more, comprehend quicker and get exposed to combinations that tickle your mind. Language is a natural phenomenon that had been created, developed and gradually enhanced by the human kind, unintentionally. It is a product of a human action, yet not an intention or a deliberate design.
With more languages, you can create more, you can say more and become more knowledgeable. You can understand more and become more critical, by viewing the world, people and different situations, preceding and new ones from a novel perspective. You suddenly can read more, comprehend quicker and get exposed to combinations that tickle your mind. Language is a natural phenomenon that had been created, developed and gradually enhanced by the human kind, unintentionally. It is a product of a human action, yet not an intention or a deliberate design.
Language has two useful properties – (1) to read the people – get to know what the person is actually all about and (2) to write the people – influence them and motivate towards certain actions. Learning new languages, you revolutionise the way you think and speak, both of which are crucially important to you and people around you. “The more languages you know the more of a person you are”. A very powerful, thought-provoking aphorism.
How does language influence the way one thinks?
Words have a magical ability to attach the projections that we image in our minds to both tangible and intangible, abstract and physical things we sense and feel around ourselves. Language creates a new trail for the listeners to follow, if they don’t like it, they may use their language, here the battle comes in, and the one with a stronger language wins and persuades the opponent, thereby influencing him or her to act upon a certain matter, in a certain way. Therefore it is crucially important to strengthen your own language every day. Listen to people and you will understand them better, by reading them through their discourse, their language.
Discourse is the spoken or written form of social interactions between the people. Language is a reflection of one’s own personality and inner traits, beliefs and intentions, sometimes tangled to be disguised from the listeners. Language reveals the inner character of a person who speaks it; it is a tool to look inside an individual and to influence him or her in some way. Discourse power is the interconnection between the language and the human behaviour. You can literary influence the behaviour of your interlocutor through your own words, hence the power of your discourse.
Language reveals one’s thought process and thinking. Henceforth, the more languages one learns, the broader one’s way of thinking becomes. The more one thinks, the more creative and unique becomes one’s reasoning and meaning after a thorough thinking. With frequent practice, one essentially learns the ways of expressing own thoughts and intentions in an increasingly unique, precise and beautifully unusual manner. This is as useful as it could possibly be. For instance, learning a new language enables you to:
- Revolutionise the way you express yourself by broadening your thinking capabilities
- Expand the scope of your thinking process and discover new interests and hobbies
- Travel more easily, meeting new people and getting exposed to fascinating cultures
- Communicate and chat to increasingly larger proportion of people
- Learn quicker and efficiently, understand and influence people
- Become smarter and wittier, innovative and creative
- Discover unique and precious parts of the world
How to build up a great vocabulary?
Focus on enhancing your vocabulary. Accumulation of words leads to a more sophisticated discourse. With new languages, you have more sources of inspiration and ideas, and therefore you can create and share more ideas and products of yours with people. It takes 5 occurrences to get a word into one’s passive vocabulary, and 60 times to move that same word into an active lexicon. To memorise a number sequence or a word, repeat it 60 times, then twice as less the next day, then half that and repeat the next day, then skip a day and repeat for an eighth of the initial 60, 7 more times. Then repeat it next week a few times, then the week after, and that is it. The process of memorising is done just like that. Try it out, persevere. This process is the core of the benefit brought by reading books. Read every day. Read books every day, learn new a language, this will expand the scope of your thinking process, adding more paths of creative thinking, enabling you to express yourself in new astonishing and influential way. That is the Discourse Power. People start to love, respect and follow you.
Every language is “romantic” in its own way. However, romance languages are those that have evolved as regional dialects from the language spoken by the Romans and those who were occupied by them – Latin. In particular, the Vulgar Latin is the common ancestor to 5 main, and exceptionally interesting languages, including Español, Français, Italiano, Português, and Română. That being said, there’s no doubt left that learning one of those languages significantly contributes to a higher progress of learning another. There is a notion of lexical similarity, represented as a percentage of words that are lexically similar (or same) in two particular languages. For instance, lexical similarity between French and Italian is 89%, just as between Spanish and Portuguese. It is 82% and 75% for Spanish vs. Italian, and French vs. Spanish, respectively. This means that 75% of French words have cognates in Spanish.
This, however, does not necessarily contribute to a high phonetic or other grammatical similarities. Nevertheless, there is an unsurprisingly positive correlation between those different types of similarities and henceforth most often the lexical similarity of 80% or higher entail a mutual intelligibility between the two languages. Meaning that people could talk to each other, one in Spanish, the other – in Italian and understand each other most of the time, considering they have no particular knowledge of the language spoken by their opponent. Therefore it is always useful to learn a romance language also because it enables you to expose yourself to numerous other popular and fascinating European languages with a certain degree of comprehension already.
Your thoughts are unique; your ideas are special – every single one of them, so share them with other people, engage with them every day. This is done by language, and actions: the word and the act of creation. Word-to-word translations from one language to another are never absolutely accurate. In a way, they carry only a partial meaning of that specific original word. Learn new languages to explore more of those unique ideas that could not have been translated into any other language keeping its magic and meaning. Speak better – live better.
By Maxim A, private tutor in London.
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