It’s hard to pick a favourite PG Wodehouse line, but the one I’m perhaps most fond of is this: “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”
It’s funny, but it also succinctly captures something that I have long felt about language acquisition, which is that in order to truly embrace learning another tongue, you have to be prepared to look foolish and vulnerable. (Why that can be so difficult for the English – a monoglot minority on a largely bilingual planet – is another article entirely.) More people will perhaps be prepared to endure that humbling process now, as new research has found that learning another language can slow ageing in the brain by up to 13 years. Multilingualism, it is thought, promotes brain connectivity and slows its decline with age.
Of course, there are many good reasons to learn a new language. It’s enriching, it’s intellectually stimulating, it opens up your world and perspective, and it allows you to meet and communicate with many new people (some of them very attractive). There’s nothing like the thrill of busting out the subjunctive, as I did several times on a trip to France. My once fluent French was very rusty, but I felt inordinately proud of myself during a lengthy argument with a waiter about removing some stale tortilla chips, for which I had been charged €10 (!) from the bill. When he refused, I reached into the farthest recesses of my brain, and said: “This isn’t how customer service usually works. I’m annoyed now and it’s only the first day of my holiday. I was hoping to frequent this bar as the wine, in contrast, was very good”.
This earned his grudging respect (I think?) for the rest of the week. If humility is a necessary part of language acquisition, then being arsey might be a sign of increasing competence. Before I could let it go to my head, however, I was brought swiftly down to earth by a hotel receptionist who insisted that my pronunciation of the word draps (sheets) was utterly incomprehensible.
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(Explaining, when asked by someone else, why the prime minister had just resigned also proved difficult, as one struggles to verbalise Peter Mandelson even in one’s mother tongue.)
Sadly, I wasn’t brave enough to use my favourite French saying, which is: “C’est le petit Jésus en culotte de velours!”, which is like saying, “It’s the cat’s pyjamas” in English, except only in reference to a very nice wine, and translates as “It’s the baby Jesus in velvet underpants!” My aunt, who has lived in France for more than 40 years, had never heard it (“Maybe it’s from the south,” she mused, “They are more religious down there”), which makes me wonder if it has fallen out of use – French people, do write in. There is nothing I would find more pleasing than knowing this phrase is still in circulation. And now you know it, too. This is exactly what the neuroscientists are talking about.
When you speak another language – particularly one that you used to be good at but are now out of practice with – it’s almost as though you can feel the neurons connecting as you grapple for the correct word or verb conjugation. It’s been quite a multilingual month for me, as a week or so before being in France, I had gone to Italy with my dad. I speak English, Welsh, French and Italian, and a fun part of exercising my brain was being asked by my dad (English, Welsh, some French, some Russian) how to say things so that he could then practise with people.
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This was challenging, as often I had forgotten, but it also brought me so much joy. It was as though lost parts of myself were coming back to me (I maintain that we have different personalities in all the languages we speak). The nice thing about Italy is that people are just so happy that you are speaking Italian that they rarely turn their noses up at any mistakes.
My dad loves asking people he meets how many languages they speak – nothing will put you to shame more than the multilingualism of most London Uber drivers – and like me, he enjoys geeking out by discussing etymology, idioms and untranslatable words. By the end of our trip he was considering learning Italian. The neuroscientists say that the earlier you learn, the better. I say it’s never too late.
