Learn a language? It’s worth having a go to keep the old cortex toned

How did you spend your spare time this spring? If you only saw Instagram, you would be forgiven for thinking that spring 2020 was all about perfecting sourdough bread, doing handstands and making face masks from the shirts you used to wear to the office. Remember the office? But a huge amount of us turned to a pastime that doesn’t lend itself to Insta. Lockdown saw a huge growth in the number of people learning a new language, with some apps and online courses reporting an increase in sales of up to 200 per cent.

I was among those people. At the beginning of lockdown, I used a free audiobook credit that came with my phone contract to download Learn Italian with Paul Noble. Three months later, Non parlo fluentemente Italiano but I have a better idea of when my Italian friends are insulting me.

Like many graduates of the British education system, I left school thinking I would never speak another language well. School French lessons were nerve-wracking experiences. There were no points for trying but abject humiliation in front of the class for getting something wrong. Simultaneously, there was humiliation from the rest of the class if you tried too hard to get something right by, for example, saying a French word with anything other than a strong Gloucester accent.

I scraped an A Level in French but whenever I had the opportunity to use the language in real life, I was tongue-tied by the memory of those classroom traumas. Perhaps my school French teachers had merely been preparing me for the reality of trying to speak French in France. Whenever I did pluck up the courage to say a couple of words, my Francophone interlocutor would inevitably wince before responding in perfect English. It wasn’t until my thirties that I decided to try again. Maybe French just wasn’t a good fit for me.

I first flirted with Italian 15 years ago, using the Michel Thomas method. The late Michel Thomas was born Moniek Kroskof to a Jewish family in Poland in 1914. He was living in Vienna when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. He subsequently fled to France, where he joined the French Resistance and adopted his French-sounding moniker. Thomas was tortured by the Gestapo and spent two years in a concentration camp. Upon his escape, his skill with languages – he spoke 10 – meant he was able to evade capture by adopting a variety of identities. He was awarded the Silver Star for his work with the US Army’s 45th Infantry Division in France.

Thomas’s wartime experiences spurred him to investigate the capacity of the human brain and develop his own idiosyncratic method for learning a language quickly. There’s no writing or conscious remembering. Instead, it seemed to me that his technique involves building on what you already know. Thomas’s beginner’s Italian course involves a lot of familiar English words said with an Italian accent. On the course I bought, he was teaching two students in real time and left in their attempts to craft phrases in a new language, mistakes and all. He also left in all his increasingly exasperated responses to their failures.

I’ve long been fascinated by the phrases that language courses teach. Presumably the assumption is that the phrases you learn as a beginner will be immediately useful. So, from Michel Thomas, I learned how to say in Italian – with a grumpy tone – “I can’t talk to you in Italian now, I’m very busy.” Meanwhile, a “Teach Yourself Indonesian” book I picked up in the 1990s taught readers how to say, “Help! The tourist bus has gone over the ravine.” I never did make it to Indonesia.

Neither did I keep up my Italian practice, until this year. Paul Noble’s course uses a similar approach to that of Michel Thomas, building on words that have familiar roots. However, the Italian on Noble’s course is delivered by a native speaker who absolutely doesn’t need exasperated correction.

Learning a new language has all sorts of benefits beyond being able to ask the way to the train station in Rome and the enhanced cultural appreciation that comes with making an effort to speak as the Romans do. There have been many studies into the effect that learning a language can have on school-age students’ achievement in other subjects across the curriculum. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that students who are studying a second language see improvements in their attainment in literacy, maths and science. It’s thought that learning new vocabulary boosts memory. Having a second language also helps students to improve their English skills by encouraging them to be aware of the elements of grammar and language structure.

Learning a second language may increase the size of your brain. A study by Sweden’s Lund University measured the brains of recruits to the Swedish Armed Forces in Uppsala before and after they set about the task of learning a new language. The trainee interpreters’ progress was compared with that of a control group of medical students. Both groups were studying at a high level in a particularly intense fashion but while the brain structure of the medical students remained unchanged, the researchers found that parts of the language students’ brains – specifically the hippocampus and cerebral cortex – had grown to a measurable degree.

The benefits of having a second language persist into old age. A study of 85 people with dementia in northern Italy, of whom roughly half were monolingual and half were bilingual, found that those who spoke two languages had experienced the onset of dementia an average of five years later than those who spoke only one.

The brain is a muscle that can only improve through use. We won’t all have a natural talent for languages but it’s still worth having a go to keep the old cortex toned. There are dozens of free resources available for the eager learner. BBC Bitesize, which reflects the school language curriculum to GCSE, is a good place to start. The ubiquitous Duolingo, which offers courses on everything from Korean to Klingon, is as addictive as Candy Crush.

For me, one of the most important benefits of learning a language is being able to show that I want to make an effort. I started learning Italian out of respect for the wonderful Italians who have gone the extra mile to help me in the past. It’ll be a while before I can make sparkling conversation but Paul Noble’s course has helped me add some random phrases which I’m sure I’ll use at some point, including, “You need help, mate.” Which is “Hai bisogno di aiuto, amico,” if you’re interested. Yep, if we’re ever able to travel outside the UK again, I’m ready.