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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:47PM
Of course some languages are more similar to each other and are easier to learn, but in no way is Spanish just English with some inverted word order. Not even close.
The verb conjugation system is totally different, words have gender in Spanish (English has no gender) and words must match each other in gender and number.
Plus the one thing that *all* languages have that must simply be memorized: idioms. These are expressions that have meaning only as an entire unit but make no sense when broken down into their component words.
An example: That is the author's best work "by a long chalk".
Another, in Spanish: "Era un olla de grillos". In English, "It was a pot of crickets." Meaning: It was a disorganized mess with nobody being able to come to a consensus or understanding.
And then there is simply knowing the common (idiomatic) way of expressing something and using it so you don't sound like a foreigner who doesn't know the language. "Do the needful!"