BENEFITS OF BILINGUALISM
Today, thanks to technology and other opportunities, more of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual than monolingual. At least, most of the people from foreign countries know the universal language -English- and the number of those people is a great part of bilingualism. In addition to facilitating cross-cultural communication, being bilingual also positively affects cognitive abilities.
Researchers have shown that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at the same time. For example, a Russian-English bilingual person asked to "pick up a marker" from a set of objects would look more at a stamp than someone who doesn't know Russian. It's because the Russian word for "stamp" (marka in Russian) sounds like the English word he or she heard "marker". In cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could map onto words in either language. Because both of a bilingual person's language sytems are always active and competing, that person uses these control mechanisms every time she or he speaks or listens. This constant practice strengthens the control mechanisms and changes the associated brain regions.
Furthermore, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. To illustrate, we all know the classic Stroop test, in which the word itself (i.e red) and its font color (i.e blue) conflict. In this test, people see a word and are asked to name the color of the word's font. Bilingual people who can ignore one language when using the other one are better at practicing this test than monolingual people. This is because this test requires ignoring the word itself and concentrating on the font color.
Bilingual people are also better than monolingual people at switching between two tasks. For instance, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by color (red or green) to categorizing them by shape (circle or triangle), they do so more quickly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when changing strategies.
Moreover, being bilingual can have tangible practical benefits. The improvements in cognitive and sensory processing driven by bilingual experience may help a bilingual person to better process information in the environment, leading to a clearer signal for learning. This kind of improved attention to detail shows that bilingual adults learn a third language better than monolingual adults learn a second language.
These are some main benefits of being bilingual. I chose this topic because we all are learning English and also other languages and I want to show you how lucky we are. I believe everyone should know at least one foreign language. :)
There is a funny video about the benefits of bilingualism. In this video, there is a fish in a glass bell and a cat which is about to eat the fish. The cat is licking its lips and stalking to the fish. The fish sees the cat and is afraid but it has a plan. When the cat comes and makes a move to eat the fish, the fish barks. The cat is scared and runs away. Thus, the fish can survive thanks to its second language. We can conclude from this video that knowing more than one language is very important. There is a Turkish proverb saying that knowing one language makes you one man but knowing two makes you two men. When we know more than one language, it means we can improve ourselves. I mean we know not only a language, but the culture of that language and the way of living of people speaking that language as their mother tongue as well. Hence, it helps us broaden our viewpoint to life. Also, we can easily make friends from different countries when we know the languages of those people. For example, the fish in the video can easily communicate with a dog because the fish knows the language of the dogs. :) To sum up, being bilingual has many advantages. We can say based on the video that bilingualism can even save life. :)
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