East Coast Kahuna

Languages and the Brain

I've always admired people who were able to speak more than 1 language. Wouldn't it be neat to have the ability to converse with many different people speaking different tongues flawlessly shifting gears as a well-tuned car? I occasionally have dreams where I have multilingual capability. I guess learning languages has always been something I like to do - although one stumbling block is my built-in defense of not wanting to appear stupid in public or making dumb mistakes.

In high school, Russian was one of my best subjects. I remember my teacher remarking how unusual it was for a mathematician (Math was my best subject) to be good in languages. Perhaps two different areas of the brain are involved. However, I found Russian to be a very left-brained language. Lot of the grammar is very well defined - once you get through the barrier of an unfamiliar alphabet, things are not too difficult. In Russian, most things are pronounced how they are written, unlike French, (which I've had trouble with pronouncing the right sound). I find written French is so much easier to decode. Fortunately, English is my native language because it would be a bear to try to learn as a foreign language with it's irregulars in grammar, syntax and idiom.

I've heard that each language learned opens up a new part of the brain. I've also heard taht the brain is terribly underutilized. Diseases like Alzheimer's destroy the brain so it makes sense when you hear about academic folks who have more knowledge and have opened up more brain channels are more resistant to this disease. Being versed in music in many forms and playing different instruments might also help.

This might be motivation enough to keep at trying to learn foreing language or learning more music theory.

posted by tjh14850 @ 11:20 PM