It’s tough to choose a favourite PG Wodehouse line, however the one I’m maybe most fond of is this: “Into the face of the young man who rested on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had actually sneaked an appearance of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”
It’s amusing, however it also succinctly records something that I have actually long felt about language acquisition, which is that in order to really accept finding out another tongue, you have to be prepared to look absurd and susceptible. (Why that can be so difficult for the English– a monoglot minority on a mainly multilingual planet– is another post entirely.) More individuals will possibly be prepared to endure that humbling process now, as new research study has found that learning another language can slow aging in the brain by up to 13 years. Multilingualism, it is thought, promotes brain connection and slows its decrease with age.Of course, there are lots of great factors to find out a new language. It’s improving, it’s intellectually stimulating, it opens up your world and point of view, and it allows you to satisfy and communicate with numerous new individuals (some of them very attractive). There’s nothing like the thrill of breaking out the subjunctive, as I did numerous times on a journey to France. My when fluent French was extremely rusty, but I felt extraordinarily pleased with myself throughout a prolonged argument with a waiter about removing some stale tortilla chips, for which I had actually been charged EUR10 (!) from the bill. When he refused, I reached into the farthest recesses of my brain, and said: “This isn’t how customer support generally works. I’m upset now and it’s just the very first day of my holiday. I was wanting to frequent this bar as the white wine, in contrast, was very good”.
This made his grudging respect (I believe?) for the rest of the week. If humbleness is a required part of language acquisition, then being arsey may be an indication of increasing competence. Before I could let it go to my head, nevertheless, I was brought swiftly down to earth by a hotel receptionist who firmly insisted that my pronunciation of the word draps (sheets) was entirely incomprehensible.
(Explaining, when asked by another person, why the prime minister had just resigned also shown challenging, as one has a hard time to verbalise Peter Mandelson even in one’s mother tongue.)
Unfortunately, I wasn’t brave enough to use my preferred French saying, which is: “C’est le petit Jésus en culotte de velours!“, which is like stating, “It’s the cat’s pyjamas” in English, except only in reference to an extremely good red wine, and equates as “It’s the infant Jesus in velvet underpants!” My auntie, who has actually lived in France for more than 40 years, had never heard it (“Possibly it’s from the south,” she mused, “They are more religious down there”), that makes me question if it has actually fallen out of use– French individuals, do compose in. There is nothing I would discover more pleasing than knowing this phrase is still in blood circulation. And now you know it, too. This is exactly what the neuroscientists are talking about.skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to Matters of Opinion
Guardian writers and authors on what they’ve been disputing, thinking about, reading, and more
after newsletter promotion
When you speak another language– especially one that you utilized to be good at however are now out of practice with– it’s practically as though you can feel the neurons connecting as you grapple for the proper word or verb conjugation. It’s been rather a multilingual month for me, as a week or so before remaining in France, I had gone to Italy with my father. I speak English, Welsh, French and Italian, and an enjoyable part of exercising my brain was being asked by my father (English, Welsh, some French, some Russian) how to state things so that he could then practise with people.This was challenging, as typically I had forgotten, but it also brought me so much joy. It was as though lost parts of myself were coming back to me (I preserve that we have different personalities in all the languages we speak). The great feature of Italy is that individuals are just so happy that you are speaking Italian that they hardly ever turn their noses up at any mistakes.My papa loves asking people he fulfills how many languages they speak– nothing will put you to pity more than the multilingualism of most London Uber chauffeurs– and like me, he takes pleasure in geeking out by going over etymology, idioms and untranslatable words. By the end of our journey he was thinking about finding out Italian. The neuroscientists state that the earlier you find out, the better. I say it’s never far too late.