Learning another language is wonderful. You may not completely buy the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the deliciously sci-fi name given by linguists to the idea that the words we use determine the thoughts we think. But knowing that the French have “fat mornings” instead of lie-ins, or that in Farsi the part of you that gets broken is not the heart but the gut, gives you a level of insight into the modes and mores of a culture that it is impossible to get by any other means.

Scientists tell us that learning a language is good for our brains, too. Evidence presented this week in the Annals of Neurology suggests speaking more than one language improves cognition. Leszek Borysiewicz, the Polish-born vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, told this newspaper that it conferred “huge advantages”. Schoolchildren, he believes, should be encouraged “to become as bilingual as they possibly can be”.

I heartily agree. Children raised with two languages are lucky indeed. But for the rest of us, the very fact of being monolingual can be a spur to intellectual discovery, so long as you’re at least exposed to the idea of other languages. My early thought on the subject was strongly influenced by my sister’s attempt to convince me that French was simply English backwards: our “dog” was their “god” and vice versa. I also believed there were so many languages in the world that simply by babbling nonsense I would end up saying something meaningful in one of them. More.

See: The Guardian

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