DESCRIPTION
Pupils at The Latymer School express their views on whether being multi-lingual makes people more intelligent.
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Video Transcript
Teacher: Researchers have said that, being bilingual or plurilingual – having many languages – stimulates better learning in the brain. In fact they say it make you more intelligent. Do you agree with that?
Student: I don't think so because I have a friend who’s dyslexic and he only speaks English, and he’s a lot smarter than me. I think it has an effect if you want to learn more languages; it makes it easier to learn more languages if they’re all based in Latin. But otherwise I don’t think that it has that much of an effect, because it’s a completely different part of the brain that works for science and maths than Languages. So it doesn’t really help I don’t think.
Teacher: OK, thank you.
Student: I don't think it has an effect on intelligence, but I think that learning Cantonese has helped me master other languages. For example, I speak German at school, and although the two languages are really different, I think having learnt a different language before has helped me be able to think in a different language and pick up things more naturally. So I think it helps me pick up things from just listening because that’s how I first learnt Cantonese.
Teacher: So maybe some of the skills that you learnt from learning the language help you in other areas. So perhaps that does make you more intelligent. It depends how you define intelligence doesn't it?
