A number of cool cultural benefits of being bilingual you might not have thought about before

Did you know that most individuals across the world speak more than one language? Read on to discover even more about this cool thing.

Speaking one or more additional languages is frequently seen as a benefit by many hiring managers. There are so many benefits of being bilingual in the workplace, as bilingual businessmen which include Leo Apotheker would indeed understand. Speaking multiple languages sets you apart from your competitors for different reasons. A great many businesses currently have overseas partners and clients, and some companies even have offices set up in many international countries. Speaking a foreign language can be a tremendous asset to companies like these as you can interact with a bigger range of individuals in their native tongue. Furthermore, many employers understand that there are also many cognitive benefits of being bilingual that spread far beyond merely speaking an additional language, meaning it is more possible that you will also be much more reliable in other, non-language related tasks.

To someone who only speaks a single language mastering another one can appear like a hard task. When you first hear a language that is absolutely brand-new to you, it might sound like complete gibberish, and you would not even know where you would begin to try and comprehend it. Even so, the fact that babies learn their first, second or even third languages with relative ease does show that understanding languages is something as entirely natural to us as learning to walk (although the processes involved in learning a language are fairly much more advanced). There are even reports advising that the human brain evolved specifically to support and process more than one languages. There are a great many great effects of bilingualism, and these effects is something experienced by both young and old. If you're a monolingual, there are certainly several cultural benefits of bilingualism that you are missing out on. Men and women like Oliver Ripley who speaks several languages fluently, are able to have a much better access to cultures that use that specific language. Take Spanish for example – if you speak this great language you are able to appreciate the cultural history of such varied countries as Mexico, Puerto Rico and of course Spain in its original language. Of course, there are always translations, but it is often very hard to capture the genuine meaning of culture in its translated version.

There are many benefits of bilingualism for youngsters. For example, a child who is growing up speaking two languages will find it easier to pick up an additional language compared to children who only speak one language at home. But the effects of bilingualism can also be detected in people of old age. Ellen Bialystok is a researcher who has found that being bilingual offsets the effects of Alzheimer’s disease by four years on average.

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