Parlez vous français?

Yes, I’ve started to re-learn French! Once upon a time, thanks to school lessons, two au pair stints in France plus latterly working for a specialist French holiday company, I was pretty fluent. These days, I really cherche mes mots, as they say (or don’t say!). So I thought it would be fun to see what I could dredge up from my memory and hopefully become more confident in conversation when I revisit France. The other significant benefit is that learning a foreign language is proven to increase the size of your brain and I reckon mine could do with some help there.     

Scientific tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electrophysiology can now tell us not only whether we need knee surgery but reveal what is happening in our brains when we hear, understand and produce second languages. Recent brain-based research provides good news. People who speak more than one language fluently have better memories and are more cognitively creative and mentally flexible than monolinguals. Studies in North America suggest that Alzheimer’s disease and the onset of dementia are diagnosed later for bilinguals than for monolinguals, meaning that knowing a second language can help us to stay cognitively healthy well into our later years. In addition, although most of us begin to learn a second language when children, even if you learn as an adult, studies at the University of Edinburgh show that later learning is equally beneficial. So I’m delving into my old dictionnaire a lot more frequently these day – anything to stay healthy and well!