If you’re looking for ways to increase your IQ, you may have thought of learning a foreign language as a form of brain training.
But can you really get smarter mastering a new language?
It may improve your IQ, but other studies suggest it doesn’t contribute at all. But because language learning is a challenging mental task, it comes with a ton of cognitive benefits beyond increasing IQ points.
How in particular does language learning help in improving your IQ? And why wouldn’t it be beneficial according to some studies? What other benefits does language learning have?
How Learning a Foreign Language Impacts Your IQ
Acquiring a new language can influence your IQ in two ways.
First of all, language learning causes you to expand your perspective – to acquire a broader view of reality.
Whereas an English monolingual has less problems conversing in his own native tongue, a person striving to learn foreign languages often has to embrace new concepts in the target language.
Some of these concepts aren’t conveniently found in English. Arabic for example, requires you to read from right to left. Learning French or German might be a shock if you’re not aware of gendered languages. And of course, Mandarin would cause you to drop A to Z and intensively study a set of new characters.
Korean, my target language, didn’t only make me learn a new alphabet and honorifics, it caused me too to make a shift from Subject-Verb-Object to a Subject-Object-Verb sentence structure. That means “boy eats apple” would turn into “boy apple eats”.
Because you have to accept these unique features in whichever language you learn, you end up being more challenged than your monolingual counterpart as you move out of your comfortable language.
Which leads me to the second way that language learning can affect your IQ – you have improved cognitive function.
There are many benefits to being bilingual, regardless of whether you acquired it as a child or as an adult. Some benefits include:
- Improved multitasking
- Better able to filter out relevant information
- Improved auditory attention
- Slower cognitive decline
- Improved musical pitch perception (for tonal languages)
Personally, I believe the “challenge” of learning a new language in itself improves cognitive function. It’s just like doing other mental exercises such as solving the sudoku or playing chess – they require you to think seriously about it.
In the end, even if this doesn’t translate to gaining several IQ points from the IQ test, you would feel the difference in the way you deal with everyday life.
For instance, you gain access to a world of interesting foreign content as you become fluent in your target language (shows, movies, songs). You then witness a different culture that you may find interesting, which could serve as fuel to keep on immersing in the language.
And who knows, you could be talking to natives and making friends with them all while becoming smarter!
Why Language Learning Does NOT Increase IQ: The Contrary View
Studies have confirmed over and over that acquiring a new language can improve your IQ. This is definitely motivating to language learners from all walks of life.
The problem? We might be seeing only the confirming evidence for this theory, making it hard to notice the counterarguments on this matter.
Such as this study, which suggests that there’s no bilingual advantage in cognitive processing and there’s little supporting evidence for it. And this study, which also saw no bilingual benefits that transfer to other mental skills.
There’s a concept called the publication bias – the tendency to not publish a research if it yields negative or no effect. After correcting for publication bias, the studies above show no difference for both monolinguals or bilinguals.
Safe to say, there’s not enough evidence for the effect of language learning on IQ. And more research needs to be done.
In my experience, my motivation for learning a language is never to increase my IQ. I just got curious about my target language because of its culture, then it snowballed from there.
Nevertheless, the effort you put into your target language – the thousands of words you’ve learned, the hundreds of hours watching shows and movies, the countless pages you’ve read, the exercise of showing up and talking to natives – is NEVER wasted at all.
Conclusion: Should You Learn a Language to Get Smarter?
I think it’s still worth the try pursuing a new language. After learning Korean and its culture, I definitely never looked back.
Whether you end up increasing your IQ or not, whether you become fluent or not, you will discover many interesting things along the way – diverse culture, unique grammar rules, a whole new alphabet.
Is it not better to unravel the hidden secrets of the world?
To discover new friends and build meaningful relationships?
To turn off the subtitles and binge watch in your own free will?
They could be just a language away.
