How it feels to be bilingual
A bilingual person is someone who speaks and uses two or more languages. Being classified as a gatekeeper between cultures has its advantages and disadvantages. From my experience as a bilingual person I can state that becoming bilingual opened up a whole new world for me. It is one of the greatest blessings that I have in my life.
One of the major advantages of being bilingual is the ability to communicate with different kinds of people from diverse cultures and countries. The multicultural experience can broaden your horizons and offers a different perspective on life.
On a more practical side, being proficiently bilingual can provide you with more job opportunities. You seldom feel threatened by joblessness or scarceness of job offers. It’s useful when traveling abroad and you are able to communicate directly with the local community. It also provides you with social mobility.
A favorite advantage of mine is the ability to read more. Being able to tap into the writings of other cultures provides you with an opportunity of learning the other side of each story. It also assists you in expressing yourself with more clarity and with more diverse vocabulary.
On the negative side, it can be annoying to be constantly asked to translate and interpret things for the people living around you. Although it’s a great advantage for bilinguals to help others, the perception that it doesn’t take time and effort from your side just because you know the language, can be a stressful task.
Sometimes bilinguals find it harder than others to fit in their original culture. Biculturalism enforces its influence to keep bilingual people in a constant process of adjusting to cultures and searching for a method of identifying themselves with it. They usually end up seeking comfort with other bilingual and bicultural peers who know what they are going through.
However, recent studies support the idea that learning a second language has many cognitive benefits. It had shown that it has tremendous affect on preventing Alzheimer’s disease.
The cognitive efforts that involve moving from one language to another help to increase concentration and reduce mental confusion.
One of the amazing researches I came across was the one by the University of British Columbia. It concentrated on the discovery of the ability of babies born to bilingual parents to be attuned to the two languages they hear even before their birth.
A Tweet: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
— Nelson Mandela
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Email: msalsaif@hotmail.com
