The joys of bilingualism

Being bilingual is a great source of joy for me in so many ways.

If you are bilingual, I urge you to never neglect either of your languages.

For one thing, if you keep translating between English and your other language, it will deepen your understanding of English too.

And if you have not yet learnt another language, well, it is never too late.

You can practice it easily in our multicultural country and when you travel abroad, you will be able to converse with people in their original cultural settings.

Bilingualism opens the window to the treasures of different cultures.

In my case, my native one, the Hungarian and my adopted one: the English language world with its multiple cultures, like the Aussie, the UK's, the Indian, Canadian and the US.

I can review daily the news, for example, both in English and in Hungarian.

And I can always find important international news, which is there in Hungarian but not in the English and vice versa.

I can read Hungarian literature and view videos, in their original as well as marvelling at the richness of and the differences between Hungarian and English colloquialisms.

For example, in the original Hamlet, our hero laments:

'The time is out of joint…' Now how does the great Hungarian poet, János Arany translate this colloquium to Hungarian?