"it sets up your brain for not-everything's-one-language pathways" Yep. Also, you get a good feel for difficult vs easy sentences. I only speak English and Sp

"it sets up your brain for not-everything's-one-language pathways" Yep. Also, you get a good feel for difficult vs easy sentences. I only speak English and Spanish, but if someone from Russian or Korea or Bangladesh with minimal English skills showed up to a party, I'd have a much easier time choosing phrases he could understand than folks who didn't know a second language would. This is partly seeing what it's like to be a beginner in a language, and partly from negotiating around the things you don't know as you learn. If you don't know how to say "it's in the trunk," you say "it's in the back part of the car where you put things, that you open with a key." And the other person will say, "oh, the trunk!" I suspect that this "ability to rephrase" also helps me explain technical things to non-technical people.