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A new study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex suggests people who speak two languages have more gray matter in the executive control region of the brain.
In past decades, much has changed about the understanding of bilingualism. Early on, bilingualism was thought to be a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. However, it has since been demonstrated that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed "executive control."
This "bilingual advantage" is believed to come about because of bilinguals' long-term use and management of two spoken languages. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated.
I find learning more languages makes it easier to acquire new ones because you get better at it, but idiomatic speech and use of metaphor seem to take a real hit.
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday July 18 2015, @04:50PM
I see people suggesting that they listen before reading, but it's hardly that cut and dry. Sure, for a language like Chinese the amount of time it's going to take to read is going to make that a fairly easy decision. But, with reading it's much easier to take the snippets of language you encounter and store them for future memorization. You also have the benefit of knowing what the words are and more easily looking them up.
That being said, listening is an essential skill for anybody that isn't deaf and you're not going to be speaking the language effectively if you don't work on it. But as a means of internalizing the language it sucks. You have to have a fairly decent vocabulary before that really happens and people greatly underestimate how much time that's going to take.
FWIW, most of a persons vocabulary beyond the basics comes from reading. People often times underestimate just how limited the vocabulary needs are of daily living. You can learn most of those works in a few months, without special tools. But, the words you need to be fluent and comfortable are more likely to be had by reading. To make matters worse, it's definitely possible to read 700 wpm, but good luck listening that fast. And somebody that's practiced speed reading can go even faster without missing words. You encounter a huge number of words like that and the number of times and ways in which you encounter a word is the best indicator of how well you'll know the word when you're done.