Should Children Learn a New Language

at a Young Age?

Many people around the world discuss whether children should learn a language

while they’re young. It is important that this be talked about as it allows us to reach a

universal agreement. There are multiple reasons that defend learning of a new language, some

of which being:

 Teaching them about new cultures.

 It is easier to learn a new language when you are young.

There are also reasons that fight back against the learning of a new language, examples of

them are:

 It might pressure the child.

 The mother tongue may suffer.

As stated above, there are many reasons that support the learning of a foreign

language. One of the aforementioned reasons was that it allows children to learn more

about different cultures. Studies can prove this as when children were asked about the

culture of a language they had just recently learned, they were able to talk about the

surface level about said culture, meanwhile children who knew little to nothing about the

language couldn’t even find where it was on a map. Adding to the supports to this topic, it

is easier to learn a new language when you are young, as children produce GABA (short

for gamma-aminobutyric acid, which is a neurotransmitter, allowing faster processing of

information) at a higher rate than adults.

 As much as the supporting reasons of the topic mentioned prior do great at

supporting it, it also has its downsides, one of them being it pressures the child. If the

child wants to learn a new language and not only that, but to be able to read and write it,

they will have to focus on more than languages, assuming that the child is learning two

languages, one being their mother tongue and the other being the foreign language, which

causes the child to be pressured, which worsens both the foreign language and the mother

tongue. This allows us to transition to the second reason that learning a foreign language

isn’t sought after among certain people, and it is that the mother tongue might worsen. As

if the child were to put all the effort in the to-be learned language, the child may forget

certain phrases, words, the meaning of certain words, and maybe even how certain

lexicons in their mother tongue can be forgotten. Evidence of this being can be found in

this school, as most Arabs may struggle in Arabic due to either focusing on French or

English.

With both sides presenting great arguments, children shouldn’t learn a new

language, as it takes time, and said time is often hard to find these days, as we are

constantly bombarded with trying to keep up academically, stay healthy mentally and

physically, and trying out absolute best to keep the family bonds in the family healthy,

that we often don’t find ourselves enough time to pick up a new language.

To conclude, children learning a new language is a debatable topic, and should be

disagreed with, for multiple reasons too, the one’s which have been talked about being

that it pressures the child, their mother tongue may suffer, and often, they just can’t find

the time to learn the language. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a language which would

break the language barrier globally, and not need a lot of effort and time to learn?
Noureldin Mahmoud 8G 19410