THE IMPORTANCE OF BILINGUALISM / BY: ROZA ALHARBI

Most people believe that learning a new language besides English is a waste of time; however, there are three important benefits of it. First of all, by learning a foreign language the human brain will increase its power. It will help people to improve their memory by getting used to memorize and being exposed to foreign letters, words, and sentences. Consequently, their ability to learn new and different things will grow day by day. Secondly, learning other people’s mother language is a way to respect them and their culture. By learning a new language, people will be able to understand different culture’s history, stories, and problems. Furthermore, almost each word has a different meaning in every culture. As a result, people will communicate with each other clearly, and they will avoid problems of misunderstanding. The last benefit of learning another language is that it might help people correct the misconceptions that are common among them. To elaborate, people from all over the world have perceived images about both Islam and Muslims. Muslims should have a group of people who are capable of speaking other languages in order to communicate with non-Muslims to fix this image. Therefore, non-Muslims will understand Muslims better, and they may change their perspective towards Islam. To sum up, there are many benefits of learning new languages and the most important ones are improving memory, changing perspective, and accepting other people beliefs.

Roza Alharbi B5