Description: In this article, Private tutor Aimen, shares her views on why learning a new language can be fun and how it can benefit your future.
Why Language is Important
Language is essential to our daily life.
We all use it – including animals – in so many different ways and for numerous reasons.
We use language to do trivial everyday things like sharing a joke with friends and writing a shopping list.
On the contrary, we use it for less trivial things too, like writing an essay or having a discussion with colleagues.
There are about 7000 languages spoken by people around the world. Isn’t that incredible?
In addition, according to some statistics, about half of the global population is bilingual.
In this article, I will briefly outline and explain some of the advantages of learning another language and how you can get started with your learning.
Cognitive Advantages
What does ‘cognitive’ mean?
Simply put, it means ‘related to brain functioning’.
Particularly those functions that humans can do, but animals cannot, for example, complex decision-making and our complex use of language (verbal and non-verbal) to communicate with each other.
What’s more, it is never too late to receive the benefits of learning an additional language.
Essentially, it’s just that the younger you are, the more ‘plastic’ (flexible) your brain is, and the easier it is to absorb new experiences like meanings of words that you’re exposed to. Now, here are a few benefits.
Learning Another Language Can:
Increase our short-term memory
Improve our ability to pay attention
Delay cognitive decline (a reduction in brain functioning) as we get older
Enhance our decision-making skills
Facilitate increased creative thinking
Employment Advantages
The main point? Employers want multilingual people in their teams.
Why? Well, this links back to what I said in the introduction about there being about 7000 languages used across the world.
If you can speak more languages, you can communicate and build lots of interesting and powerful rapport with others.
These connections in turn facilitate the growth and success of a business for example.
I’m not suggesting you should aim to learn 7000 languages.
Being able to fluently (or even just to a high-quality conversational level) speak one additional mainstream language can become an attractive asset.
Top grades are great of course, as academic achievement shows hard work and dedication, but so does learning a new language.
Socio-Emotional Development
Features of socio-emotional (social & emotional) development in adolescents/young people include:
Formation of self-identity
Building on the ability to empathise with others
Gaining increased exposure to and understanding of relationship dynamics (e.g friendship circles at school)
Emotional regulation
So, how does this link to learning a language? How can the process of learning another language promote your child’s socio-emotional development?
Here are a few ways:
Learning a language that is spoken in your home country, if you were born outside the UK. This can promote the development of self-identity and interest in one’s culture.
Creation of a hobby (something you voluntarily do on a regular basis in your spare time, out of enjoyment) increases feelings of personal achievement and pride, which feeds into feeling more confident in oneself.
Having something in common with people of different backgrounds and being able to speak others’ language adds to self-confidence, teaches them about other cultures and helps them to develop social skills.
How Can We Learn a Language?
Here are some useful, simple and cheap/free methods!
Search what the top 100 most commonly used words in your target language are, and create a specific and realistic goal to learn these, e.g. if i wanted to learn German, I might set a goal to learn 3 words (and their meanings in English) every morning after breakfast.
You could additionally, or alternatively, do the same thing (set specific, realistic daily learning goals) but instead search what the top 500 or 1000 most commonly used words in your target language are.
Use a language learning app like Duolingo (which has a free version that gives you full access) to do daily lessons.
To Wrap Up
I hope that I’ve convinced you to consider learning another language, or that you have at least learnt something new from reading this article. In any case, please go ahead and do your own research on this fascinating topic!
Thank you for reading.
By tutor Aimen. Contact Us