Being Bilingual Essay

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Did you know that there are more than 6.000 languages and dialects in the world? We live in a multilingual world that is becoming increasingly globalized and where we connect with each other every minute. Learning a new language is not a waste of time as previously believed. It is essential nowadays at least speak two or more of the leading languages. There are three main reasons for being bilingual: an additional language can help you progress in your career, you gain an awareness of other cultures, and it helps increase our understanding and knowledge of our own language. Fig. 1. World 10 Most Spoken Languages. The process of speaking fluently in a second language is not easy. It is not only about intelligence or aptitude but about attitude, motivation and compromise. The easiest way for someone to become bilingual is to start at a very young age, because his brain will process the sounds and rules of a new language naturally just like his native tongue. In fact, according to Dr. Susan Curtiss, UCLA Linguistics professor “The power to learn a language is so great in the young child that it doesn’t seem to matter how many languages you seem to throw their way.... They can learn as …show more content…

It is not impossible and certainly never too late to learn but, there are two big problem that we tend to see in older people that want to learn a new language. One is that the person has the tendency to translate while they talk and that it is not correct. In fact, one of the signs of being bilingual is to think in the language that are you learning. The second problem is that could be difficult to the learner, are the grammar rules this will be harder to learn as when you were a child. To avoid this, many countries in the Europe have adopted a policy which requires “native-tongue plus one or two foreign languages”, introducing languages from the earliest years of primary

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