The 21st century has connected the world in unprecedented ways. Learning a new language and studying its culture and literature opens up exciting horizons for your intellectual, professional and social life which empower with a renewed understanding of own language and cultural practices. Ability to talk to others and gather information beyond the world of English will contribute to personal development in becoming an informed and responsible world citizen. Studying second languages, the cultures where they are spoken and the literatures which best represent their most celebrated expression will widen inter-cultural awareness, provide with valuable communicative skills for today’s changing global job market and acquaint with the foremost thinkers and writers of countries beyond the English world. Studies on common factors shared between society’s historically recognized greatest thinkers have shown that most of them spoke more than one language. It gives access to historical and emergent traditions of literature, culture and thought. Through critical interpretation and dialogue, we can see how language mediated through texts arranges and allows different ways of knowing and living
The study of languages has long been a traditional cornerstone of the Humanities and it is widely recognized that the study of a new language entails the acquisition of a new world vision and enhances one’s ability to understand a culture in its own terms. It has been estimated that less than 6% of the world’s population speaks English as its primary language and, although twice as many may speak it as a second or third language, this still means that anywhere from 75% to 80% of the world population does not. More recently, a growing body of research has been exploring the neurological benefits of bilingualism and suggesting that mastery of more than one language enhances an individual’s cognitive abilities and may ward off the onset of dementia and other aging-related diseases.
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