I thought the article for this week, "Why Bilinguals are Smarter," was fascinating. I really wish someone had shown this to my parents eighteen years ago! My parents subscribed to the view stated at the beginning of the article, that "a second language [is] an interference, cognitively speaking, that hinder[s] a child’s academic and intellectual development." According to the research in the article, this is actually the opposite of the truth. My parents thought that since I would be growing up in an English-speaking country, it made more sense for me to grow up speaking English perfectly rather than both English and Farsi but not as well. Of course, now they've heard all of the academic opinions on the benefits of bilingualism, and regret not teaching me their native language as a child. By the time they decided to start teaching me, I was in elementary school and resentful of all things Iranian, and refused to learn. I'm glad that I've decided to go back and learn Farsi -- maybe I'll still be able to reap some of the benefits!
I definitely think that being multilingual, or even just knowing parts of other languages, can help one be more mentally aware of other viewpoints. The more we are exposed to, the more we can learn.
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