05/19/2017

Three Ways Learning a New Language Helps Your Brain

Language-learning can make you a more creative-problem solver

Remember your seventh-grade Spanish class? Of course you do. But do you remember anything from it? You might’ve left off language-learning with decent proficiency at some point in your educational career, only to forget most of it with disuse in the years since. But picking up where you left off–or backtracking to the very beginning–isn’t a bad idea as an adult. In fact, trying to learn (or relearn) a language as an adult can help your brain in ways that spill over into the rest of your working life–even if you never actually become fluent. Here’s how.

The brain matures starting in early adolescence, and once that process gets underway, we become more analytical in the way we approach problems. Adults tend to look for solutions by breaking challenges down to their component parts. That isn’t a bad thing, of course, but analysis isn’t the only way to solve a problem.

When we learn a language, we don’t just absorb all the explicit grammatical rules, then consciously apply them every time we want to say something. Picking up a new language depends much more on exposing ourselves to lots of examples of the language being used in one situation after the other. You get a feel for linguistic patterns contextually, and then learn its structures implicitly. Think of it this way: You may speak and write excellent sentences in English without being able to diagram them or explain what the “pluperfect” verb form is.

Please click here to read the complete article from Fast Company.