What are the benefits of being multilingual? — by Thea Enache
It may like a pretty straightforward question — Why should we learn languages? Many people might not find it useful since the vast majority of the content we consume is in the lingua franca and translated content is reliable and continuously growing.
Even if you have this viewpoint, down below are listed a few reasons why adding a couple more languages to your repertoire would be a good idea!
1. Deeper cultural understanding. It’s always interesting to break down the cultural division that separates you from fully comprehending the culture of a language. There are so many words, sayings and expressions that are rooted in the culture of a region and have very interesting stories behind how they came to be.
For example, the Romanian expression ‘Umblă câinii cu covrigi (sau colaci) în coadă’, which would be directly translated as ‘The dogs are walking around with covrigi (image inserted) on their tails’ — essentially means that it’s a rich region. The expression alludes to reaching a point where food is so abundant that even dogs can walk around using it as decoration.
2. A hobby for both extroverts and introverts. Do you feel comfortable surrounded by large crowds and thrive in social environments? If so, then language learning should be very fun for you! You get to interact with a lot of like-minded people while also studying what you love. The best part is applying your skills as soon as you learn them! Conversations become experiments where you can try out different combinations until you get it right.
On the other hand, if what you enjoy most is having time for yourself and honing a skill in the comfort of your home, learning languages can also be a great hobby for you! For example, you can use many types of media to immerse yourself in your target languages, such as social media, Netflix and YouTube. The internet is your oyster: find whatever is fun for you and use it to learn (no direct human contact needed).
3. Become smarter in other subjects. What a statement indeed, becoming smarter by learning a language. It isn’t like studying “just another subject”.
Learning a new language teaches your brain a whole new subset of rules and a different type of logic it can follow. That will allow you to gain mental gymnastics from it. Because of this, other systems will be easier and faster to study.
4. More benefits than you can imagine! It does boost our self-esteem when people acknowledge our efforts, so why not embrace that and make it part of your daily life? There’s no need to tell everyone what languages you speak, but oftentimes it can give you an advantage others don’t have.
For example, when job hunting, if two people are applying for the same position with similar credentials, speaking an extra foreign language is a very useful skill to have, and consequently, has weight in the outcome of this said selection.
So what now?
Let rip and feel free to treat the comments section as a community journal by connecting with fellow language learners down below.
Let us know which tip was your favourite along with any other thoughts you might have on this topic!
[This article was written by Thea Enache and first published on the former Polyglot Mag website. It has been re-posted to Medium with the author’s permission. To see more of Thea Enache’s content you can visit her Instagram page: @sheloveslanguages.]
