"Studies have shown that learning a second language is one of the most effective brain workouts that you can do."
Hashem Al-Ghaili
Health benefits of learning a new language
"When you feel good, your brain is releasing one of the happy chemicals, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, or endorphins. Serotonin is in charge of your internal good feelings. In language learning, serotonin increases when you get to the genuine success part."
"When you learn a second language you are qualitatively different from a monolingual. When you learn two languages and you have two languages in your head those languages are always switched on, always active and the result is that they are constantly fighting between each other."
Julian Northbrook
Is it possible to forget your native language?
"Learning new languages is an exercise of the mind. It's the mental equivalent of going to a gym every day. In the bilingual brain, all our languages are active, all at the same time. The continual effort of suppressing a language when speaking another, along with the mental challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages, exercises our brain. It improves our concentration, problem solving, memory, and it turns our creativity."
Professor Li Wei
Institute of Education, UCL
"People who speak more than one language can also boost their Grey matter count when switching between languages, which can improve prefrontal cortex functions, including decision making and concentration."
Unbabel
What Happens To Your Brain When You Learn a New Language
"So, with attention, we are focusing on the language that's being used right now. So I'm focusing on English, and I'm inhibiting my Spanish. That's why bilingual children are better at tests involving ambiguous figures. It's easier and faster for them to turn off the rabbit and turn on the duck."
Storied
Is Bilingualism a Superpower?
"If you want sharper listening skills, here's a little tip from babies themselves. Try watching the mouths of native speakers to see how they form those strange sounds. Teachers in Native Dojo™ are all English native speakers from the USA, UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia."
Daiji Nara
Founder & CEO
"Bilingual people, people who speak more than one language, develop dementia four to four and a half years later than those who don't. It was a powerful confirmation of the idea of cognitive reserve."
Dr. Thomas Bak
Neuroscientist, University of Edinburgh
"The brain is a complex set of neural networks. When you're learning a new language as a child, you're building new networks. But when you learn a language later in life, you have to modify the existing networks and make more connections. Because learning languages later in life can be more challenging, the benefits can also be greater."
Professor Li Wei
Institute of Education, UCL
"Speaking multiple languages improves your divergent thinking skills, training you to think of multiple solutions to problems on a consistent basis."
Hashem Al-Ghaili
Health benefits of learning a new language
"Recent studies have also found that people tend to react more emotionally in their first language, and more rationally, in a more abstract way, in their second. And the way it is usually explained is that the first language is the one which we used to speak with family, with friends in informal settings. The second language is usually learned at school, at the university, or at work."
BBC Ideas
Why being bilingual is good for your brain
"Knowing two or more languages means that your brain may actually look and work differently than those of your monolingual friends. Being multilingual gives your brain some remarkable advantages. Some of these are even visible, such as higher density of the gray matter that contains most of your brain's neurons and synapses, and more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language."
Mia Nacamulli
TED-Ed, The benefits of a bilingual brain
"And a Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy had a study where students were tasked with learning a language at a very fast rate. MRI scans were showing that specific parts of the brain were developing in size. They were getting bigger just because they were learning a language."
Seeker+
How Does Language Change Your Brain?
"With learning a new language, what you are developing in your brain is called executive functions, and it is called as such because it is thought of as skills of a CEO: managing a bunch of people, juggling a lot of information, multitasking, and prioritizing. Indeed, 52% of CEOs in global corporations today are bilingual."
