Why learn a new language
!@#$& ~ United Nations
You literally get Smarter
A Bialystok and Craik in 2003 showed that bilingual individuals tend to have better attention and cognitive control skills, as well as increased flexibility in problem-solving and decision-making compared to monolingual individuals.
Another study by Bak et al in 2012 found that individuals who are bilingual tend to have better memory recall compared to monolingual individuals. This could be due to the continuous mental exercise that bilinguals receive from switching between two languages.
Better Communication
You may realize that not all the beautiful poetry is written in your mother tongue. The Persian epics written in the Sassanid Empire are as beautiful as poems of the Tang dynasty. If Russian is your language, you may realize that not all the important battles that changed the course of human history were fought on your native land. You become more sensitive to other cultures and other perspectives
In English the British had the biggest best empire for everyone’s benefit. But in Bengali even All’s Hero Winston Churchill was a genocidal maniac. When you learn a new language whether not you like it you instantaneously join the tribe of those that speak it. You can often see defensive people almost ready to attack you suddenly become extremely friendly and bring you tea as soon as you switch to their native language as if a switch flips
You become more understanding and more empathetic
Increased Job Prospects
I don’t really see a need to explain this. The world is too globalised for this to not be obvious. Your iPhone is made in Multi Lingual India, with parts from Mandarin Speaking China planned by English Speaking Americans, brought to you by Filipino speaking Mariners on running Software from all speaking humans from 6 continents (maybe 7?). And that was just an overview
It opens your mind
A human mind can only hold about 2 seconds worth of information at once. Using better vocabulary allows us to convey denser ideas with much more precision. Since if we can think with newer words we convey better.
Consider how to us Magenta, Pink, Fuchsia and Blush are the same color. But to an Artist or a Beautician or a Designer they are as different as black and white. Consider how in old languages since Blue generally did not exist, in Japan the word for Green Vegetables or Green Traffic Light is still Ao, which earlier referred to both Green & Blue but now is just blue. The Japanese didn’t change their word. They changed the color itself. Their traffic lights are acutally blueish. The words we use have great impact on our thoughts
Across languages at different speeds and syllable densities it turns out humans convey about a similar amount of information, so denser languages like German are slower but rarer languages like Japanese are faster, with respect to lets say English. So the only way to think more is to use more high quality words. Its what language does just without us realising over long terms, consider how since they were better words with complex ideas we just stole the words from other languages like: Schadenfreude 🇩🇪, Burgois 🇫🇷, Tundra 🇷🇺, Tsunami 🇯🇵, Loot 🇮🇳 etc etc the list is endless
A study in 2015 by Treiman & Harris found that vocabulary size was positively related to verbal and nonverbal reasoning ability in young children and another by Birr, Dedrick et all in 2008, which found that vocabulary size was positively associated with intelligence, and that the relationship between vocabulary size and intelligence was mediated by working memory capacity
Go now learn a new language. And write the exam just so that you have an endpoint in mind!
