9 years, 10 months ago

How to learn 30 languages

How to learn 30 languages Getty Images Some people can speak a seemingly impossible number of tongues. Getty Images If you want to stay sharp in old age, learning a language could be the best neural workout Those lasting benefits are a stark contrast to the failure of most commercial “brain training” games you can download – which generally fail to offer long-term improvements in memory or attention. He recently ran a survey of Chinese speakers learning Japanese to examine their “ego permeability” – with questions such as “I find it easy to put myself in other’s shoes and imagine how they feel” or “I can do impressions of other people”, and whether you can change your opinions to suit the people you are near. “There must be some type of home in your mind for each language and culture and the related experiences, in order for the languages to stay active and not get all mixed together,” Keeley says. “If there’s a single factor that stops people learning languages efficiently, it’s that we feel we have to be native-like – it’s an unreachable standard that looms over us,” says Temple University’s Pavlenko.

BBC

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