Learning a foreign language can be a very great way to develop the mind. And I should know; for I have not only been studying languages since I was a child” first by French classes in elementary school in Canada and later majoring in Spanish (and taking French and German also) in college, but I have studied a number of languages on my own. Let me describe two ways in which that is so.

Languages are made up of patterns that can easily be laid out in tables. This is more true for many other languages than it is for English, and learning the paradigms is a way to exercise the mind.Never heard of this before? Get up to speed here. But it is not enough to memorize inflection lists. One also must get used to actively using the forms in sentences and identifying them when they occur.

Much of the world’s greatest literature, including the Bible itself, was written in languages other than English. And much of what they said is lost in translation. A good exercise is to try and memorize a passage from such a prominent text in the original. I have done that with a number of texts; I now know Psalm 24 by heart!