It helps with ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind. Learning another language is one of the most effective and practical ways to increase intelligence, keep your mind sharp, and buffer your brain against aging.
Bilingual children who speak native language at home have higher intelligence. Children who regularly use their native language at home while growing up in a different country have higher IQs, a new study has shown.
This might sound weird but learning a new language enhances your cognitive and analytical abilities.
Researchers from Penn State University in the US have found that learning a language will change the structure of your brain and make the network that pulls it all together more efficient - and the improvements can be experienced at any age. Every time you learn something new, you're strengthening your brain.
What might be interesting to you is that there does seem to be a link between language and perception. Specifically, perception of gender and perception of colours. So language influences how our brains experience the world, but not our brains' ability/capacity/intelligence.
Being trilingual means that you speak three languages with general fluency. Some estimates put the total of the world's trilingual speakers at just over 1 billion people. That's 13% of everyone on Earth!
Summary: Speaking more than one language does not improve a person's general mental ability. However, while there is no cognitive advantage to being bilingual, there are broader social and lifestyle benefits that come from speaking multiple languages.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
In the absence of language input early in life, the brain does not develop specialized language regions. This impacts language skills throughout life, including reading and writing abilities.
Currently, the country with the highest average IQ in the world is Japan (106.5) ranking first, with Singapore, ranking second, Taiwan, ranking third, and Hong Kong, ranking fourth. China and South Korea also have some of the highest IQ scores in the world, China coming in fifth and South Korea sixth.
With 108 points, the inhabitants of Hong Kong reach the highest intelligence quotas worldwide. The last place, with only 56 points, is occupied by Equatorial Guinea. In addition to the simple ranking of countries, the following table shows the influence of prosperity and climate.
Polyglots are no more unique and genetically gifted to learn languages than anyone else. The only difference is that they have committed to take the actions necessary to learn a language, and faced their fears of speaking and making mistakes.
Until the age of about 12, a person's language skills are relatively vulnerable to change. Studies on international adoptees have found that even nine-year-olds can almost completely forget their first language when they are removed from their country of birth.
They concluded that the ability to learn a new language, at least grammatically, is strongest until the age of 18 after which there is a precipitous decline. To become completely fluent, however, learning should start before the age of 10.
Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus principally spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Through trade, invasions and conquest, the Aramaic language had spread far afield by the 7th century B.C., and would become the lingua franca in much of the Middle East.
2. Arabic. Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.
Bilingual benefits are found in language-independent working memory tasks that involve both storage and processing. Higher bilingual proficiency is associated with better verbal working memory performance.
Generally, if you're an English speaker with no exposure to other languages, here are some of the most challenging and difficult languages to learn: Mandarin Chinese. Arabic. Vietnamese.