“As a language learner, you’ll not only become a more conscious thinker and listener who can communicate clearly and think creatively, but you’ll also gain the most significant benefit of multilingualism: a broader, more global perspective,” writes Dan Roitman of Pimsleur in the Huffington Post.
Is there a scientific cause for this? The benefits may arise from the need for bilingual speakers to juggle two languages at once and the need to switch between them—in essence managing two separate ways of thinking—leading to better task and conflict management. Bilingual adults concentrate better, ignoring extraneous stimuli more effectively than those who only speak one language.
“Because the language centers in the brain are so flexible, learning a second language can develop new areas of your mind and strengthen your brain’s natural ability to focus, entertain multiple possibilities, and process information,” Roitman writes in another post on the site.
A study conducted by Dr. Thomas Bak, a lecturer at Edinburgh’s School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, backs up the above claim. Seeing cases for dementia in India develop later for those who knew two languages rather than just one led him to conduct his series of experiments.
In his most renowned study, Bak tested 853 participants in 1947, all of whom were 11 years of age. They were retested in 2008 and 2010, when they were in there early 70s. He found that those who became bilingual performed better than expected (the baseline score used the initial tests from childhood to predict performance—if they performed poorly at 11, they would likely perform poorly at 73). The results showed that learning a new language in adulthood still yields results, meaning there’s never a reason to feel too old to reap the cognitive benefits of learning a new language.
“Researchers found that young adults proficient in two languages performed better on attention tests and had better concentration than those who spoke only one language, irrespective of whether they had learned that second language during infancy, childhood or their teen years,” writes Christopher Wanjek of Live Science.
How about talking with your colleagues and seeing who would like to join you? Getting a private teacher for a small group makes the classes funnier, more dynamic and also affordable.
Here are a few videos that will help you to get started!