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4 Perks and 1 Downside of a Bilingual Brain
Being fluent in multiple languages can be miserable and magical at the same time
I think in one solid language maybe 5% of the time. The rest of the time, my brain is split between Romanian, my mother tongue, and English, my language of residence. I’ve been bilingual for about ten years and living in England for the past seven. Big parts of my life belong to one culture or the other.
For example, my work life is entirely English. I often don’t have the vocabulary to fully articulate what my job is in Romanian. I’m a Senior Corporate Communications Officer in a British University. Even though I can translate it in Romanian, the word ‘officer’ is mostly seen as a police or military term, which confuses matters. To this day, my family is still somewhat puzzled about what I do, because my job doesn’t exactly exist back home.
That being said, speaking foreign languages (I also speak French) has been one of the most beneficial abilities of my life, opening many doors, making travelling and moving abroad relatively seamless and offering me a wide and rich perspective of the world.
Bilingualism, the ability to speak two or more languages fluently, has long been associated with a range of cognitive benefits. Beyond the obvious communication…
