The Advantages of Being Bilingual

Many people believe language is one of the gifts from God. Language not only allows people to express their thoughts and feelings but also to communicate with other. Based on Ethnologue’s latest statistics, the number of living languages in the world is about 7.106 (Ethnologue, 2014). Some people have capacity to know and use two or three or even more languages fluently. Those who have this ability are known as bilingual or multilingual person. One of founding fathers of bilingual studies, Uriel Weinreich, agree that “the practice of alternate using two languages will be called bilingualism, and the person involved, bilingual” (Hoffman, 1991). Bilingualism is common phenomena that occur in all the countries of the world in which people overwhelmingly attempt to learn another language other than their mother language. In article entitled Bilingualism, Birner states that there are a lot of advantages to knowing more than one language (Birner, n.d). This essay offers three reasons to support Birner’s idea. Being bilingual may improve brain function, create opportunity to learn third language and increase cross-cultural awareness.

            First, bilingualism is one of the exercise to optimize brain functioning. The brain plays an important role in human life. In the first stage, when people learn a new language, they will challenge their brain to recognize, remember and understand the language. They have to learn the words, phrases, sentences, grammar rules and all unusual features in their brain. These activities continuously stimulate the brain to think until people become fluent in two languages. When people speak to other person, the brain will quickly switch between different languages. One may talk to their parent in one language and to their friend in another language. According to Bialystok cited in Brien (n.d), it is being truly bilingual when speaking two languages and using them regularly so that it can improve the brain. For bilingual people, both languages are "always on," always active in their brains, no matter which language they are speaking at the moment. Therefore, being bilingual will force the brain to recognize the two different language systems.

            Second, a bilingual will be easier to learn another language. It is because of language is very similar to each other. For example one who can master the Chinese language with the kanji letters, he will probably able to master Korean language with Hangul letter or Japanese language with Hiragana and Katakana letter that is actually much simpler than kanji. In addition, when people learn English language, it will be easy to learn Dutch language because both languages have a similar structure and syntax (Damanik, 2013). Based on research of second language versus third language vocabulary acquisition, Mornar (n.d) shows the result that bilingualism in the Hungarian-Romanian students has a positive effect on their third language acquisition. In this case, besides the knowledge of a first language, knowledge of second language also formed a resource to the learner of a third language. Through learning a second language, the third and fourth languages come more easily.

            Third, when people learn a language, they are indirectly required to study the culture of the place where the language is used. A bilingual have easy access to different cultures and it encourage them to become open-minded and respectful towards the culture diversity. For example, one can determine Americans lifestyle from the dress or their character that tends to be individual-oriented, discipline, and strict to the time. Athanasopoulos et al, cited in Dean (2013) states that learning a new language can literally change the way you see the world. It means that because of cross cultural awareness, a bilingual will see the world from two different language perspectives.

            Finally, there are many advantages to be gained when a person becomes bilingual. Apart from enhance knowledge, bilingualism may also boost brain function, ease to learn other languages and increase cross-cultural awareness. Therefore it is important to learn second language because being bilingual will help and facilitate people in many things. It is never too late to get started as long as one continues to learn other languages.

REFERENCE:

1.      Birner. Betty. (n.d) Bilingualism, Washington, Linguistic Society of America.

2.      Brien, Sharon. (n.d) How Speaking Two Languages Can Improve Your Brain [Online] Available at http://seniorliving.about.com/od/lifelonglearning/a/How-Speaking-Two-Languages-Can-Improve-Your-Brain.htm (Accessed 20 November 2014).

3.      Damanik, Caroline (2013) ‘10 Bahasa Asing Lain yang Paling Mudah Dipelajari’, Kompas.com: Edukasi [Online] Available at http://edukasi.kompas.com/read/2013/02/13/15162348/10.Bahasa.Asing.Lain.yang.Paling.Mudah.Dipelajari (Accessed 20 November 2014).

4.      Dean, Jeremy. (2013) ‘10 Superb Psychological Advantages of Learning Another Language’, PsyBlog: Understand Your Mind [Online] Available at http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/09/10-superb-psychological-advantages-of-learning-another-language.php (Accessed 20 November 2014).

5.      Ethnologue (2014) Ethnologue: Language of the World [Online]. Available at http://www.ethnologue.com/ (Accessed 7 December 2014).

6.      Hoffmann, Charlotte. (1991). An Introduction to Bilingualism, New York, Longman.

7.      Mornar, Timea. (n.d) Second language versus third language vocabulary acquisition:

A comparison of the English lexical competence of monolingual and bilingual students, Hungary, University of Szeged.

LARGER THINGS FOUND IN THE WRITING

Many people think that writing is a very difficult thing to do so they often read some books without rewriting what has been read previously. Actually people never realize that there are many benefits of writing from something what they have read. Article entitled The Craft of Research, Chapter One: Thinking in Print (Booth et al., 2008) explains about one of benefit when people try to write it up is to help them to understand. What this means is that writing is to see the larger pattern in what people have read (Booth et al., 2008). Through writing people can find the broader things than what they have read because writing encourages them to find some information, stimulates their own ideas, and shares with others through the discussion and feedback.  Therefore in writing, people get more than just the basic concept to be able to understand from what they have read.

Writing allows the ability to thoroughly organize the basic concept of the material and to see the connections between concepts to each other. It is sometimes difficult to reach the goal and people may think they are “not enough” from what they have read so they need to find further information on a related topic to their writing. Through reading from other sources, people will gain knowledge and it is important to get the better understanding about the topic. A famous quote from the great author, Stephen King, that say “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write, simple as that” (Hanski, 2014). So basically reading and writing have close relationship because writing need adequate knowledge to give the new ideas in writing.

Writing helps people to elaborate the concept of what they have read by using their own thoughts so that they come up with the new idea. People will continuously develop the idea in their minds and need to write it up in their writing. As MacArthur et al. (2007) points out that writing is a powerful tool for getting thing done and a language skill to convey knowledge and information. In this case, it is meant to convey the idea that people need to correlates between the concept and previous knowledge or experiences from themselves.  

People write not only for themselves but also for others. Wardhana, cited in Pujiono (2011) states that writing is a skill in expressing an idea in people’s mind into a paper that can be read and easily understood by others. The point here is people will let others know his/her writing from what they have been read. In other side, the reader may give suggestion about the idea presented by the writer. These suggestions will become an input to the writer to get a new insight about their understanding or writing. In another hand, the reader may support or develop these ideas to make it better by adding some their own ideas. On the whole writing helps others to give the feedback about it.

It will be a lot of advantages when people not only read about something but also they try to write it up. At least people will get three benefits in writing from what they have read and they would see the larger thing behind the concept. Writing is the good activity for people and it this should be used as a habit. People must take a time to write because writing is the one of the process of learning.  

REFERENCES:

1.      Booth, C., Gregory, G. and Joseph, M. (2008) The Craft of Research, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press.

2.      Hanski, Mike. (2014) ‘Want to write better? Start reading, a lot’, Bid for Papers, 16 April [Online] Available at http://bid4papers.com/blog/read-more-write-better/ (Accessed 25 November 2014)

3.      MacArthur, Charles A. and Jill, F. (2007) Best Practices In Writing Instruction, New York, The Guilford Press.

4.      Pujiono, S. (2011) Penggunaan Strategi Catalisting Untuk Meningkatkan Kemampuan Menulis Esai Mahasiswa JPBSI FBS UNY, Yogyakarta, Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta.