SDLC 105 Journal #10

[Byambaa Khurelbaatar]

When I saw that this article "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter" on the syllabus, I was more than excited to read it because bilingualism always interested me. I am a psychology major and I am writing a research proposal on the effects of being bilingual versus monolingual. I agree with the article that it is true that being bilingual has many positive effects to the brain and its development. People who know more than one language seem to have a faster processing speed than a person who solely speaks one language. Brain development starts at a young age so learning an additional language can really the development and can improve and help intelligence. I learned to speak English when I came here in the 4th grade. It didn't seem too difficult of a task to learn English because I spent the majority of my time around my peers and teachers at school so I was getting constant re-enforcement. I am very happy to have become bilingual. Sometimes it can be a little frustrating though because the way my brain works is that when I am talking or reading, I translate everything into Mongolian and if I don't know what a certain words means in Mongolian then I can not fully understand the English meaning. This is also a good thing because then I am able to learn both languages more as time passes because I like to know what the word means in both languages. To conclude, knowing another language has definitely been beneficial and I am eager to learn more in my target language.