Against all logic, according to a study, alcohol is one easy way to improve your foreign language skills
(Q TRAVEL) Researchers from the University of Liverpool, Maastricht University, and King’s College London gathered 50 native German speakers, all of whom had recently learned to speak Dutch at Maastricht.
The participants were then either given
Below are some terms translated from Spanish to help expats understand what local nespapers and television are saying about the pandemic.
I was inspired to write this by an article I read in another publication about tiquismos (Costa Rican slang) that have African roots. Believe it or not, there are many words that are used here today that originated with African slaves and workers who arrived here in the 16th and 17th centuries. Many of these people worked on haciendas in
The free, online training site is 5 years old now, and 27 languages are being offered with nearly that many in development. Not all courses are for English speakers, and the English course for foreigners is the most popular.
Of particular interest for expats in Costa Rica is the Spanish for English course, which quickly propels a learner into a basic vocabulary. No one claims that a Duolingo course can make a learner fluent, but the grammatical groundwork is comprehensive.
After 60 or so quick lessons, a learner can construct basic sentences, knows a little about telling time, as well as basic occupations and sizes: small, big, short, tall.
The program originated at Carnegie Mellon University. So, despite being free, the coursework is impressive. Each course is developed by bilingual speakers, and many are academics with vast knowledge of linguistics.
The Spanish for English speakers course has about 79,000 learners now, but many, of course, do not finish the lessons.
That is not the fault of Duolingo. The program sends out daily messages encouraging learners to sign on and complete a lesson. Its motto is that language learning requires daily practice.
The website is available on handheld devices, too. https://en.duolingo.com/
Some may want to use the oral capacities. Those with microphones on computers can use this optional feature.
Parts of this article courtesy of AM Costa Rica
In past decades, much has changed about the understanding of bilingualism. Early on, bilingualism was thought to be a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. However, it has since been demonstrated that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed executive control.
This bilingual advantage is believed to come about because of bilinguals’ long-term use and management of two spoken languages. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated.
“Inconsistencies in the reports about the bilingual advantage stem primarily from the variety of tasks that are used in attempts to elicit the advantage,” says senior author Guinevere Eden, director for the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University Medical Center.
“Given this concern, we took a different approach and instead compared gray matter volume between adult bilinguals and monolinguals,” she said. “We reasoned that the experience with two languages and the increased need for cognitive control to use them appropriately would result in brain changes in Spanish-English bilinguals when compared with English-speaking monolinguals. And in fact greater gray matter for bilinguals was observed in frontal and parietal brain regions that are involved in executive control.”
Gray matter of the brain has been shown to differ in volume as a function of people’s experiences. A prominent finding of this type was a report that London taxi drivers have more gray matter in brain areas involved in spatial navigation.
What about being bilingual leads to these advantages? To address this question the team went one step further. “Our aim was to address whether the constant management of two spoken languages leads to cognitive advantages and the larger gray matter we observed in Spanish-English bilinguals, or whether other aspects of being bilingual, such as the large vocabulary associated with having two languages, could account for this,” explains Olumide Olulade, the study’s lead author and post-doctoral fellow.
The researchers compared gray matter in bilinguals of American Sign Language and spoken English with monolingual users of English. Both ASL-English and Spanish-English bilinguals share qualities associated with bilingualism, such as vocabulary size. But unlike bilinguals of two spoken languages, ASL-English bilinguals can sign and speak simultaneously, allowing the researchers to test whether the need to inhibit the other language might explain the bilingual advantage.
“Unlike the findings for the Spanish-English bilinguals, we found no evidence for greater gray matter in the ASL-English bilinguals,” Olulade said. “Thus we conclude that the management of two spoken languages in the same modality, rather than simply a larger vocabulary, leads to the differences we observed in the Spanish-English bilinguals.”
The research team says their findings adds to the growing understanding of how long-term experience with a particular skill — in this case management of two languages — changes the brain.
