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My Half-Century Attempt to Learn French By Marie Sherlock
Conventional wisdom dictates the best time to learn a foreign language is when you're young, very young, barely-out-of-the-womb young. The malleable brains of children — the logic goes — are quite literally designed to absorb new information (all of that neuroplasticity!). I am decades — many decades — past that blink- and-you've-missed-it deadline. Even my earliest exposure to a foreign language was apparently too late: Junior High French. I contemplated, for a nanosecond, majoring in French in college and that was the extent of my quest for bilingualism. Until retirement. I've traveled to France four times, taken French classes, bought all five levels of Rosetta Stone Français, and I've got the Duolingo app on my phone. I've even participated in a couple of immersion programs.
The first benefit is overall brain health. "Healthier brain aging is facilitated by using two or more languages," notes Marian. The second big benefit is pretty much a corollary of the first: "Knowing more than one language delays Alzheimer's and other types of dementia by four to six years on average," she says.
And yet — I am still monolingual. Oh. Mon. Dieu.
Did I miss the boat?
Thankfully, no. "That seems to be a bias the general public has as opposed to what the scientific evidence says about learning a second language," explains Viorica Marian, director of Northwestern's Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Lab. "It is absolutely possible to learn a second language at any age." In fact, Marian says that older Americans attempting to learn a second language have many advantages over those with supple younger brains. "Older adults are often much more motivated to learn another language especially when they know all of the benefits of doing so," she says.
Four to six years? That’s what the research shows.
"We don't have a treatment for dementia right now," explains Marian, "but we do have intervention lifestyle variables that have proved protective toward delaying Alzheimer's and dementia, things like exercise, level of education, social circles and language acquisition." She adds, "When you learn a second language your brain is constantly working, juggling multiple languages. It's like getting a workout for your brain.”
Read more of this story on NextAvenue.org
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AUGUST 2024
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