“Everything that hard is good for your brain”

“Everything that hard is good for your brain”

Ellen Bialystok distinguished research professor of psychology at York University.

Recently I heard a podcast from American’s most famous female broadcaster, who actually has resigned the moment. Her name is Diane Rehm. I am sure most of you have heard that name quite often. In that podcast recording, she invited some researchers that focus on linguistic (I bumped into the podcast when I researched something for my work). I took attention the recording and listened completely to what the researchers discussing about bilingual. One of the researchers was Ellen Bialystok who said the quote above.

Diane Rehm herself, as a senior broadcaster, she leads the interview perfectly. Though her voice is no longer sounds like common anchors (due to her age, I’m sure), but her questions are undeniably sharp and efficient.

Listening to the recording, I found interesting facts about bilinguals, which I hope can be a basic knowledge for a parent like me who wants to raise a bilingual child.

Below are my conclusions from the podcast recording:

• People who are bilingual have longer time to be affected by Alzheimers. I think everyone in this earth knows this fact. This is because their brain is trained continuously.
• Kids who are bilingual potentially passed the university test when they grow up. They used to have complex thinking and it helps them to be critical and have better cognitive ability.
• Adults, however, can also mastering second or third language with their no-longer-fluid brain at any ages. Yet, it is easier for people to be fluent as a real native speaker if they are exposed to multi lingual since their early age, especially when they are 0-6 years old.
• The most effective approach for people to learn new language is through immersive environment when they are exposed to that language in every part of their daily life.
• Bilinguals are better in multitasking, meaning that they can share focus into two or more acts at one time.

Knowing that there are so many advantages for people to be able to speak more than 1 language, I feel motivated and fueled to realize my 2017 resolution: being bilingual at home and learn new language for myself.

As a parent for a 2-year kid who is now in her golden age, I do believe in immersive language environment to make her –at least- exposed to other language aside of Indonesian. We’ve been introducing her to English songs and games even since she was infant and I must say it works. She is having a good ability in recognizing English language very well and able to answer my question in English, even though only for some closed questions, but slowly but sure I and my husband believe we can make her bilinguals before she turns 6.

On another source I found the fact that someone should be exposed by at least 30% of their awaken time to second or third language, so that they will become a multilingual, said Fred Genesse, a psycholinguistic professor from McGill University, Montreal, US.

Given that perspective, if my kid has approximately 15 awaken hours a day, then I need to induce her approximately 4,5 hours full in English.. Let’s see the illustration below :

My kid wakes up at 7 am every morning, while I am off to office at 7.30. I have only 30 minutes in the morning to chit-chat with her. I come back home at 8.30 pm almost every day, while she is off to bed at 10 pm, so I have 1,5 hours at night to spend my time with her.

In total I have only 2 hours a day to really communicate intensively with my kid, not ideally 4,5 hours as the research suggests. Thus, we make sure that all media consumption during our absence is English-based.

Is 30% English during her awaken time hard to do? Yes! Not only because we can’t spend that much time with her every day, but because can’t have that consistency to always speak in English.

Some of the researchers believe, even though toddler cannot say and pronounce the words, the language ability comes first to the stage of understanding. So for parents out there who want to also raise bilingual kids, we do have to be patient and keep consistent.. if our kids haven’t spoken the words yet, doesn’t mean they don’t understand what we say in both languages. This is the note to myself as well, to be more patient and consistent to speak English with her. Because as the time goes by, she shows the progress positively.

As for myself, I’ve learnt Chinese Mandarin back in the days, like 4-5 years ago.. now I cannot locate exactly where it is inside my brain haha.. Trust me, it was difficult as hell! However, I enjoyed the process of learning new language. So I decided to challenge myself to learn new language (again) this year, but a much more simple (yet still needs effort to learn) : Spanish.

Gonna let you know my progress later!

 

PS: I am using the whole text in English, as what I mentioned in the title – everything hard is good for your brain. haha. Hope you enjoyed it! Sorry for here and there grammatical errors if any 🙂

 

How about you? what’s your difficult things to do this year?

 

Regards,

Mamabekerja.