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Learning a second language

Learning a Second Language

There are many benefits to learning a second language. Being bilingual, or in other words being able to use two languages with nearly equal fluency, has the advantage of increased job opportunities, cultural awareness, ease of communicating while travelling, and gaining perspective on the mother tongue. Studies actually show that the earlier children learn a second language the better their cognitive abilities. It makes it easier to learn another language later on as they have already grasped the concept that things can be labelled in more than one way (i.e. in different languages).

Bilingual or multilingual speakers actually outnumber monolingual speakers throughout the world, whether through having parents from different language backgrounds, communities without a dominant language, compulsory foreign language education at school, or the increasing need to be able to communicate across cultures in our globalised world. Many jobs actually require a second language.

Bilingualism

There are several types of bilinguals depending on the balance between the competence of both languages. Compound bilinguals are usually fluent in both languages and equate words and phrases in both languages to the same concept (i.e. having two words for the same concept). For coordinate bilinguals, each word in each language has its own concept or association. Both coordinate and compound bilinguals are highly proficient in both languages, though one may still be dominant over the other.

Even if a child learns both languages since infancy through having bilingual parents, it is likely that overall their language ability may be less adequate not having developed neither one nor the other sufficiently. In other cases, one language may be used in certain contexts (e.g. school, work, or shopping), while the other language may only be used other particular contexts (e.g. home or travel). It is very rare for a person to be equally capable in two languages and be highly proficient in both, and exceptionally rare for a person to be so with more than two languages.