How Learning A New Language Improves Your Brain Activity

There could be any number of reasons for learning a new language – interest, work and studies, moving abroad, simple pleasure. Learning a new language is definitely interesting, but did you know it can also affect how your brain works?

Let’s take a look at how language learning affects your brain.

Academic Performance

Research shows that language learning actually has an impact on academics. In fact, language learners actually performed better than those who didn’t study another language across a wide range of subjects, not just a few. Since learning a language also involves remembering and applying a number of rules, it also helps with students’ performance in core subjects like math and science.

Concentration

Learning a new language also has an impact on the level of focus and alertness in learners. In fact, this improvement in concentration remains if you study a language for a minimum of five hours every week. This is likely because to form correct sentences and translate a sentence accurately, you have to focus on every part of a sentence – written or spoken – to understand the nuance and meaning.

The research around this also focused on students up to the age of 78, and this improvement remained consistent. This suggests that learning a new language will affect everyone positively, regardless of age.

Memory

Studying a new language also involves memorizing a number of complex rules, exceptions, applications and vocabulary. It also improves recall, because to accurately translate something or create a sentence, you have to remember these rules and words, so learning a new language also improves your memory function.

In fact, research has found that people who speak more than one language – regardless of what age they learned it at – will perform better than monolingual people on memory improvement games tests. Language learning improves memory both ways: long term, and short term.

Creativity

Learning a new language will understandably also improve your creativity. This is because it expands the number of people you can communicate with, and also helps you understand different aspects of culture and tradition, since these are often closely linked to language. You are able to see things from a different perspective, and thus improve your ability to think outside the box.

The thought processes involved in language learning also help, since languages often have rules that can be broken or changed around to make the same thing mean multiple things, or find different ways of saying the same thing.

Regardless of your age, learning a new language will definitely improve your cognitive function and brain function, so if you’ve been thinking of picking one up for a while, consider this your reason why!

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