You might have read in the Daily Mail recently their suggestions for things that will keep your mind nimble. Written in response to suggestions that playing computer games, doing Suduku and so on were good for the flexibility of your brain. In fact this research (based on all sorts of serious research) suggests not. It says that doing those exercises mainly makes you good at doing those exercises! The Mail suggests …. Drink Cocoa, Gossip with Colleagues, have a baby, listen to foreign languages, go running, cook with Rosemary (the herb), eat breakfast, have a nap, drink 2 cups of coffee, don’t work too hard, play board games, cut your food intake by a third, write it down. Obviously some easier not do than others. The one of these that interests us especially is the suggestion that ‘listening to foreign languages’ can improve your brain – make it more flexible and less prone to dementia.
This suggestion is based on research carried out by the well-known linguist Professor Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto. In studying dementia in older people she found that those who were bilingual were on average 4 years longer without any effects of dementia than those who were monolingual. According to the Mail, she reports that ” learning a second language appears to increase the density of grey matter in the areas of the hippocampus part of the brain that govern attention and memory”.
You can do this in many different ways – apps for your iphone that repeat expressions or listening to tapes or CDs but for sure the best way of listening to a foreign language is to actually speak it with another person – for example at one of the evening classes you can find at UIC. There might be a different reason though for the positive effects - it does seem that having a busy social life is one of the best indicators of a long and healthy life and it may simply be that those people who are bilingual have a bigger or closer set of friends! Who knows? It seems a bit unlikely that just by listening to a different set of sounds you could improve your brain!
But one thing is for certain, the more of a foreign language you know the more the group of friends you may have! Even just making friends in the class – but then you have the opportunities to travel, work in other countries and so on. And of course it’s great fun and the sense of achievement may also help you live longer! Also … don’t forget to use sites like facebook where you can talk to people in other countries and make friends.
Come along to see what we do – as well as English at UIC we have classes in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese and Chinese. In UIC we also have a system for pairing you with a native speaker of the language you are trying to learn – for example a Spanish person in London to learn English pairing with an English person trying to learn Spanish.
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