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When I was first learning to speak Spanish, I went to a two-month intensive training course, then proceeded straight to Latin America and lived among native speakers. It was quite a challenge to immediately communicate only in Spanish after arriving, but it definitely helped my language progression. After about two or three months of living in the country, I found I was able to understand about 75-85% of what was being said. Around that time, as I was becoming more fluent, I decided I was going to try to think in Spanish. If any of you want to get to that point, it can very intimidating unless you think of Spanish as just different vocabulary words used to express the same ideas.

In other words, it can overwhelm you to try and think in a different language.  However, if you just try to think using different vocabulary words (ones in Spanish), it becomes a lot easier. Anyway, I was surprised that after a few weeks, I could actually do it and didn’t slip back into thinking in English that much.

I found that when I hit the point where I was pretty good at thinking in Spanish, my personality in Spanish changed. I tended to express things with more emotion and pitch in my voice. I was able to joke with people in ways I could not in English. However, there were certain things that were harder to express in Spanish and took a lot of work to try and master. In other words, I became better at expressing certain things and not as effective at expressing other things.

I love to talk to Latino people and joke around with them. They are great people and fun to talk to. My theory is that we become a little more uninhibited when we become fluent in another language. We are able to talk to others more freely because we know they don’t expect us to speak their language perfectly since we’re foreigners. We also start out with no mental blocks (socially) in the new language and country.

I do not have any hard evidence to support my theory, but I do have a lot of empirical evidence (gained by observation and experience).  I have talked to many people who have become fluent in a foreign language and just about everyone I’ve talked to states the same thing—that their personality changes when speaking in their second language.

Now, not everyone becomes more uninhibited. I know of a few people who have done just the opposite. For example, one of my friends that came here to the U.S. from South America became more reserved and serious after becoming fluent in English. In Spanish he was a fun-loving, joking person with a lot of charisma. Now people see him as more serious and less personable.

To me, learning a new language is almost a magical kind of experience where you seem to enter a new world. I believe that learning a new language helps you gain brain capacity and also helps you think in a whole new way. A while ago, I read some research where people had problems and by thinking through the problems in different languages, they were able to come up with different solutions they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

To learn more about speaking Spanish, click here!

To learn more about speaking Spanish, click here!

At night, it was at times so hot that I could hardly sleep. There were usually fans in the apartments I lived in so, of course, I would turn on the fans at night in attempt to take the edge off the heat.

As I did that, the native Latin Americans I stayed with would get very upset and tell me how bad it was for my health. They explained that if I slept with air blowing on me at night and it hit my neck, I was sure to wake up with a pain or a kink in my neck.

I thought they were kidding and I made a joke about it, but they were dead serious. Since I was a missionary there, I always had a native companion with me. Usually he would never let me turn on the fan at night so we wouldn’t wake up with neck aches in the morning. As a result, I almost learned to sleep in very hot temperatures at night!

The funniest part was when I got my way and had the fan on at night, every once in a while I would wake up with a kink in my neck (which is normal for me with or without a fan going.) The native people I was staying with, when they noticed I had neck pain, would always accusingly ask if I had slept with the fan on. When I would tell them I had, they would all gang up on me and say “Ah ha – we told you so!!!”. Then they would give me a bad time for sleeping “with a fan on.” I actually had a great time light-heartedly arguing back and forth with them trying to prove that the cause of my neck pain was from how I slept on my pillow. I explained that many Americans regularly sleep with fans on (ceiling fans or AC) and don’t get neck pain from them.

I absolutely loved getting to know the Latino people and conversing with them and learning about their culture and the different ideas they have. They really are great people!

Moral of this week’s story: All of us have ideas about what causes ailments or pain in our lives, and many of us have our own remedies that we swear by – chicken noodle soup, tonic, cod-liver oil and so forth. The interesting thing is that whole cultures can have completely different ideas about ailments, causes and cures. Science has proven many things, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions that we can all speculate about.

To learn more about speaking Spanish, click here!

 To learn more about speaking Spanish, click here!

It is very common for Latin Americans to play loud music from their homes with doors and windows wide open for all to hear. They play music for any type of party or get-together, for special occasions and of course, just for fun. One event they play music for that I really enjoyed learning about was one-year-old birthday parties. For a child’s first birthday, parents invite friends, relatives and the child’s Godparents for a big celebration where there’s a lot of music and dancing. For me, it was a very interesting that so many adults would get together to celebrate a party where the guest of honor (a one-year old) wouldn’t even remember anything about it or the people who came or participate in the principle activity of the party – dancing.

To me it seemed like either a great excuse to have another party with music and dancing, or a cultural thing that is done in other areas of the world where parents are so thankful that the child has lived through the delicate first year of life.

Now back to music in the streets. I especially noticed how loud their music can get when I lived, in a particular Latin American city. I was renting a small home/apartment that had 10″ decorative holes around the front door. There was nothing to block out sound except screen-door-type material; there was no solid surface covering the decorative holes. I spent the first two hours of every morning studying in the apartment and, because of the music from across the street.  I think I learned more Spanish music than I was able to actually study. It was okay, and I chalked it up to “cultural education” and Latin experience. I became familiar with a number of Latin bands and grew to love many of them. I now think salsa and merengue music is great!

Something that was very interesting to me was that music from one house never seemed to compete with music from someone else’s home on any given street. They must have had monthly neighborhood scheduling parties (with music) to decide whose home the music would come from each day.

Moral of the Story: For those of you who have Latino friends or neighbors and they turn their music up loud, you need to realize that they aren’t trying to “blast you out” or “compete” with your music, they are just doing what is culturally “normal” for them. You may want to go over to their house, introduce yourself, practice speaking Spanish a little and ask them to teach you some Spanish dancing moves. You could say, ¿Puede enseñarme a bailar? (Can you teach me to dance?)

To learn more about learning to speak Spanish, click here!

 To learn more about speaking Spanish, click here!

A few weeks back, my wife was reading from our local newspaper and discovered a very interesting article about language learning and its wonderful effects on the brain. The local paper here quoted a story from the “Toronto Globe and Mail” written by “Andre Picard.” I found it a very interesting read and wanted to pass it on to you.

The title is: “Bilingual adults may stay sharper longer as they age” New study links linguistic facility and health of brain
Being fluently bilingual may help to stave off the forgetfulness and inattention often associated with aging according to this new study.

Researchers at York University in Toronto found that a group of older people who had spoken two languages concurrently throughout their whole lives fared markedly better on tests that measure cognitive function.

In particular, the bilinguals scored highest on measures of so-called fluid intelligence–the ability to focus one’s attention and to respond to rapidly changing tasks–said Ellen Bialystok, a professor of psychology at York.

The findings published in the Journal of Psychology and Aging, suggest that being bilingual may offer some protection against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

The research is the latest to make a link between linguistic facility and the health of the brain.

It also adds to a growing body of evidence on the physiological and psychological benefits of bilingualism, though most of that research has been done on children. The studies have shown that children who speak two languages or more tend to be more creative, better at problem-solving and score better on literacy tests.

Bilingual children also tend to have an economic advantage as they mature because they have better job prospects.

Research has shown that, when bilingual children process information, both languages remain active, even though they use one language at a time. To ensure that the languages remain separate, the brain develops mechanisms to allow the speaker to block out instructions from the unwanted language.

Bialystok’s new research suggests that this ability to compartmentalize and focus carries over the other functions, and that’s why bilinguals remain sharper as they age.

The research involved a total of 154 bilingual and monolingual adult university graduates living in Toronto and the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The bilingual participants all spoke Tamil and English fluently and used both languages concurrently on a daily basis since childhood.

The subjects underwent a common psychological test known as the Simon task. Using flashing squares on a computer screen, the test can measure reaction time in a variety of ways.

On the Simon test, the older bilingual adults (age 60-88) did far better than their monolingual counterparts.
Learning the Spanish language will not only gives you fulfillment, personal enrichment and better job prospects, but according to this research, it will also help keep your brain healthy later in life. I had a grandfather who was an active learner his entire life; he was an inspiration to me. At the age 93, he wanted me to help him continue to learn Spanish. His body by that time was pretty worn out, but his mind was sharp as a tack. He is one of the people who inspired me to develop and create Spanish courses that are effective and help others to actually learn to speak and communicate.

To learn more about speaking Spanish, click here!