Bilingualism as a bonus for the brain
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Is being bilingual good for your brain?
Perhaps. Learning languages offers other, more concrete benefits
Economist (6/27/25)
Yes! I won't mince words. At least in my case, multilingualism has been very good for my brain.
In my rural Ohio high school, I took Latin and French, which is what were on offer. I enjoyed both of them immensely, but they were almost strictly for reading and writing, so they didn't have much effect on the way my brain worked, at least not that I could discern.
In college, I added Italian and German, both with reasonable spoken components, so my brain began to warm up.
Then I joined the Peace Corps and went to Nepal for two years. My brain was on fire. As I have described on Language Log (here), my group learned Nepali through total immersion and strictly on an oral-aural basis. After three months of training in Missouri, I could already function in Nepali society without any difficulty. When I got to my post (after a perilous trip trekking in), I had no one with whom to speak English, so I became essentially a native speaker of Nepali after one year in the country. I had indeed opened up whole new areas of my brain. That was really fun! I even dreamed in Nepali.
After I came back from Nepal, I enrolled in a Sanskrit course, and that was all reading and writing, with literary appreciation a strong component. At the same time, I took first-year Mandarin and loved it — the spoken part, that is, but had a strong aversion to learning characters. I have repeatedly written about that dilemma in learning Mandarin on Language Log (see the refeferences below for some sample posts). I also took Tibetan the same year; that was an eclectic "trip", because Tibetan was written in a brahmic script, had an archaic phonology reflected in its spelling, and had Sino-Tibetan roots.
More new rooms of my brain had been opened, but they weren't on fire the way they were in Nepal.
After a summer of Classical Chinese at Middlebury (you had to take a language pledge to attend, so my Mandarin language brain kept percolating).
Then off to London for Buddhist Studies and lots more Sanskrit, but no time for spoken language, which I yearned for. So I went back to American and resumed my spoken Mandarin training.
A summer of simultaneous Hindi-Urdu (easy because of my knowledge of Nepali, which has a huge amount of imported Perso-Arabic vocabulary (same is true for Turkic Uyghur, which I learned by going to Eastern Central Asia starting in 1993).
I'll stop the language litany here, but it has never ended, though I will draw one personal conclusion before turning the rest of this post over to the Economist. Namely, when I learn a language through listening and speaking, it always has a deeper, transformational impact than when I'm forced to learn it through writing. The writing makes me feel that I am at a quintessential remove from the language itself.
Reams of papers have been published on the cognitive advantages of multilingualism. Beyond the conversational doors it can open, multilingualism is supposed to improve “executive function”, a loose concept that includes the ability to ignore distractions, plan complex tasks and update beliefs as new information arrives. Most striking, numerous studies have even shown that bilinguals undergo a later onset of dementia, perhaps of around four years, on average. But some of these studies have failed to replicate, leaving experts wondering whether the effect is real, and if so, what exactly it consists of.
…Ellen Bialystok of the York University in Canada, the godmother of the field [bilingualism and cognitive studies], has compared the cognitive protection bilingualism offers to that afforded by a slice of holey swiss cheese. Doing other things that are good for the brain, such as exercise, is akin to stacking the slices. Their holes occur in different places, and thus collectively offer greater cognitive protection. But all these studies take for granted the uncontroversial mental superpower that you get from language study: being able to talk to people you could not have otherwise. Even if you can’t pick your parents and be fluent from birth, that should be more than enough reason to give it a go.
"Holey swiss cheese" — nice metaphor!
Selected readings
- "Learn Nepali" (9/21/16)
- "How to learn to read and write Chinese" (8/13/13)
- "How to learn Mandarin" (7/17/18)
- "How not to learn Chinese" (4/16/17)
- "How to learn Chinese and Japanese" (2/17/14)
- "Excessive quadrisyllabicism" (2/17/18) — I was reminded of this post by this tweet from the author of the following famous article
- "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/27/91)
- "Learning languages is so much easier now" (8/18/17)
- "Beyond fluff" (3/19/17)
- "Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye"
- "Sinological suffering" (3/31/17)
- "How to learn to read Chinese" (5/25/08)
- "Learning to read and write Chinese" (7/11/16)
- "The future of Chinese language learning is now" (4/5/14)
- "Paperless reading" (4/12/15)
- "Chinese without a teacher" (2/6/16)
- "Spelling mistakes in English and miswritten characters in Chinese" (12/18/12)
[Thanks to Philip Taylor]
Julian said,
June 30, 2025 @ 9:13 pm
"when I learn a language through listening and speaking, it always has a deeper, transformational impact than when I'm forced to learn it through writing."
Discussing with friends the challenges of learning a language solo from a book ** without the opportunity for real conversation.
One of my tips is: "say everything out loud."
Whether it's a "hi John" dialogue from Russian in three months, or a longer story, I read everything out loud.
When away from the book, I am constantly mentally rehearsing small conversational turns that might have a place in a real conversation, should I ever get there.
It's not much but it may help a bit.
** Or of course from things like Duolingo, but I find being tied to the system's designed rate of progress, among other problems, too frustrating.
Mai Kuha said,
June 30, 2025 @ 10:28 pm
Sanskrit? In that case, may I offer a little English-Pali word play: some years ago, I had to walk for what seemed like miles through an airport looking for my gate, passing one gate after another, so I kept muttering "gate gate paragate parasamgate"…
Laura Morland said,
July 1, 2025 @ 2:55 am
Victor –
Both my high schools, like yours, offered Latin and French only. No conversation. Then in grad school I concentrated on "dead" medieval languages: Old English, Old Irish, Old Icelandic. It turned out that I have a talent for translation, which gave me the false impression that I was good at languages.
Fast forward 25 years: we moved to Paris, and I faced the rude awakening that my translation skills were of little help in learning to speak a living language. I (who had read Camus at age 17), could only understand 15% – 20% of what I was hearing, and I could barely form a correct sentence without planning ahead.
So… I took a French class for 1-1/2 hours a day, five days a week, for nine months. And apart from my husband, I spoke English to only one friend — with everyone else I spoke French, even to the rude Parisians who tried to insist on speaking English with me.
My spoken French was so pathetic in those early days; I'm amazed in retrospect that people could bear to talk to me. But they did, and eventually the magic happened! One day I realized that I was speaking in French without translating from English in my head. On another, I realized that I was no longer frozen in fear when someone came up to me asking for directions, that I could understand almost everything I heard.
And yet… it still took another few years before waiters, etc., stopped trying to speak to me in English. Something finally changed in my rhythm, my choice of words. My accent will always peg me as a foreigner, but now any French speaker who talks to me for even a minute knows that I speak their language.
So I agree: the greatest benefit to speaking another language is expressed in the last line of your quote: to be "able to talk to people you could not have otherwise." I am so grateful for the friendships I could never have enjoyed, had I not crossed the bridge into fluency.
Philip Taylor said,
July 1, 2025 @ 3:16 am
" even to the rude Parisians who tried to insist on speaking English with me" — were they really being rude, Laura, do you think, or were they simply trying to help you ? I had a similar experience at second-hand when I took a Mandarin-speaking Polish friend to a restaurant in London's Chinatown (the restaurant deliberately chosen because the staff spoke Mandarin rather than Cantonese, which was the case in the vast majority of Chinatown's restaurants). Despite her clear fluency in Mandarin, they were so fazed by her Polish accent that they tried to force her to speak English, but (good for her) she refused and persisted in speaking Mandarin until they gave in.
DJL said,
July 1, 2025 @ 4:43 am
Any freely accessible version for those of us who don't subscribe to the Economist (thank god)? (the Wayback machine captures don't seem to work).
Victor Mair said,
July 1, 2025 @ 6:14 am
@Mai Kuha
"gate gate paragate parasamgate"…
splendid!!!!
Victor Mair said,
July 1, 2025 @ 6:17 am
@Laura
What a marvelous account of what it means, and how hard it is, for an adult to make the magical leap into fluency in another language! Yours has already become a classic for me.
Philip Taylor said,
July 1, 2025 @ 1:51 pm
DJL: maybe https://archive.is/lSCR2 ?
DJL said,
July 1, 2025 @ 3:36 pm
@Philip Taylor: it worked, thanks.
Coby said,
July 1, 2025 @ 5:53 pm
I remember reading in one of Eina Haugen's books that when he (a Norwegian-English bilingual) was growing up bilingualism was considered, by the educational authorities of the day, to be bad for the brain (it was part of Anglo-American anti-immigrant prejudice). I think he was influential in dispelling that attitude.
Coby said,
July 1, 2025 @ 6:01 pm
Laura Morland: French is, at least among European languages, unusual in having a big gap between the standard that is taught in school and the colloquial that people speak. Before 1970 or so the bourgeoisie spoke something closer to the standard, but since then almost everybody speaks français populaire.
Tom Dawkes said,
July 2, 2025 @ 9:39 am
Purely anecdotal, but two instances of how difficult it can be to use the language you're learning.
A friend knew two young newly-weds who were going to the Netherlands where the husband would be working. After six months, when the wife had found everyone spoke to her in English she was asked "Why haven't you learnt to speak Dutch?"!
And at a Dutch evening class I attended a fellow-student — with a son-in-law from Friesland — told us she had on one occasion approached an information desk and as she started to ask her question the receptionist said "Why don't we speak English? It will be much quicker"!!
Chas Belov said,
July 3, 2025 @ 3:40 am
Alas, I've never become fluent in either of the two languages I've studied, Spanish and Cantonese. So I get very little use out of either. But I do get some. A recent trip to a nearby Mexican market wound up code switching on both sides between English and Spanish.
It really depends on the staff member, some preferring to deal with me in English and some in Spanish or Cantonese. I do my best to go by how they greet me and respect their agency, although I slip now and then. One time I asked a clerk in that Mexican grocery who had been interacting with me in English for a bottle of honey that was behind the counter. They didn't understand me so I said "miel" and they got it for me.
In Cantonese, I've occasionally gotten comped a small bowl of the daily soup. I consider it a major victory if they serve me the daily tong seui.
I was recently offered a free bag of chips – American not British – for my Spanish (I, politely I hope, declined, since I don't care for chips and didn't want to waste them, although my word choice probably could have been improved).
I can also say thank you in Thai and Korean. I'd like to learn that in more languages.
Philip Taylor said,
July 3, 2025 @ 10:40 am
"A recent trip to a nearby Mexican market wound up code switching on both sides between English and Spanish. It really depends on the staff member, some preferring to deal with me in English and some in Spanish or Cantonese." — Are these two sentences to be taken as referring to the same (or an analogous) situation, Chas ? If so, may I ask why someone in a Mexican market might prefer to deal with you in Cantonese.
Chas Belov said,
July 7, 2025 @ 10:26 pm
@Philip Taylor: Yes, generally I mean just Spanish or just Cantonese. However, I can think of at least two Asian-owned Latinx businesses in San Francisco where you might encounter both Spanish and Chinese in addition to English.
I also recall shortly after starting my Cantonese studies, and having had high school Spanish, of overhearing a conversation on San Francisco's Muni Metro. It sounded like they were speaking Cantonese with a Spanish accent. Suddenly, they started rapidly code-switching between English, Cantonese, and Spanish. It made me dizzy to eavesdrop on them.
And an update:
There's a bakery where the proprietor usually addresses me in English. However, on the day after the 2015 Fall elections, he addressed me in Spanish, so I conducted my business in Spanish. And when I stopped in recently, he greeted me with "¡Buenas!" So of course I cheerfully said "¡Buenas!" back and conducted my business in Spanish as best I could.
I was also pleased to learn you can just say "¡Buenas!" in place of "Buenas dias" or whenever, just as in English you can greet someone with "¡Morning!" (Other than the single word being a different part of speech.)
Chas Belov said,
July 7, 2025 @ 10:26 pm
*2025
Chas Belov said,
July 7, 2025 @ 10:27 pm
*2024, dammit
David Marjanović said,
July 11, 2025 @ 10:23 am
Buenos dias; but buenas tardes, noches etc.
In my experience, as soon as Parisians notice French isn't your native language, they speak English to you – English in the French sound system, so it takes you half a minute to notice it's supposed to be English, and then you still don't understand it.
That's how I learned to speak French at
LudicrousParisian Speed.