Published On: March 9th, 2017|

Lee’s Summit Journal – EMMANUEL NGOMSI

You have probably heard this before today, even casually. As long as there will be new parents and new kids out there, it will be worth saying it again: Learning a second language increases a child’s intelligence. There are numerous anecdotal stories but also reliable rigorous research to support this claim. I was born and grew up in a small village in the rain forest of Central African country of Cameroon. Traveling no more than 10 miles away from my village, Kouansi, to the next one put me in the middle of a totally new dialect. Even in our home, I communicated in one dialect with our mother and in another with my father. Being fluent in multiple languages was more a survival necessity than a luxury.(more)