The Department of Education through the Saskatchewan government declared Feb. 6-10 as French Second-Language Education Week .
I love going through local schools and seeing students trying out new languages or displaying their French work on the walls.
I realize that in the middle of Saskatchewan learning a second language may be a moot point to a lot of people since French is not spoken within a 100 kilometres of some Saskatchewan communities.
I am a special case, since I not only want to learn french for my own benefit but also need to learn for half the jobs that I want to apply for.
This was partially evident for an empty Community Gathering Place on the weekend when the Le Canada C’est Moi french workshop came to town to celebrate Canada 150.
French, according to aboutworldlanguages.com is spoken in over 53 countries, including Canada, with 220 and 300 million people worldwide speaking it as their first and second language.
While knowing both English and French would be beneficial, there are many benefits to learning any second language to go along with English.
English is only the third largest native language in the world with 335 million native speakers, next to Mandarin Chinese with 874 million native speakers and Spanish with 406 million native speakers.
Children are sponges. They pick up and understand things that just stick with them so teaching a second language early can be very beneficial later in life. Just like I am finding being a later in life unilingual person, having a second language would have opened up many new career doors for me.
According to psychological studies, there are plenty of mental benefits to learning any second language.
Those who know a second language score higher on standardized tests and are better at multitasking. Being bilingual also improves the functionality of the brain, staves off dementia and Alzheimer’s, and helps with improved memory.
Especially the middle of Saskatchewan where we rarely hear another language, becoming and staying fluent in another language may not be realistic.
But even just entering the learning process can provide these benefits to the human brain.
When in doubt there is always the internet when it comes to learning programs or chatting with native speakers as a way of practice.
The world is big and Saskatchewan is pretty small.
The joy of learning something new might be enough for some people to give it a try.
