brain power

Being Bilingual May Boost Your Brain Power

Last week, National Public Radio (NPR) reported a story, Being Bilingual May Boost Your Brain Power, that bilingual children may have more brain power and that Alzheimer's disease may be delayed or averted if one...
Multiple personalities with different languages

Mutlilingual identity: diversity of languages and ways of being

Scientific American magazine published an article about how speaking various languages can alter the personality of the speaker: Polyglots Might Have Multiple Personalities People take on different character traits depending on which language they are using This...
english as a second language

Multilingual San Francisco: You don’t have to leave your town to learn a new...

No more excuses about not having the money to go to the country of the language you want to speak. If you live in a metropolitan area, you are likely to find ethnic, cultural...
Obama and Medvedev Russian (matroshkis) stacking dolls

Spaceman: Being in between languages

When I lived in Argentina, a Spaniard told me about a friend of his whose parents were from Spain but grew up in Portugal. When the Spanish man visited Spain from Portugal, he couldn’t...

Hiding behind a multilingual mask

Being surrounded by various languages at the UN and then being forced to speak Portuguese, I had to think about what to do with my language knowledge and stop hiding.  United Nations, “It’s your world”...
Eating mutton fat soup for breakfast

Being in limbo: Difficulties of a Russian heritage language speaker going to a Russian...

The limbo land of being a heritage language speaker is one I’ve been inhabiting most of my life. It’s only recently that I’ve known the term “heritage speaker”, referring to those of us who...
Adult students studying together

How languages change the psychology of multilinguals

Steve Kaufmann, of LingQ, invited Tetsu Yung and I on his podcast to discuss how we change psychologically when we speak in different languages and the politics of learning certain languages. For years, I've felt...
Men and women, different languages

Why female foreign language students or speakers may not practice or show their languages

Multilingual women, where are you? In late January, I had a Skype call with Benny Lewis for about two hours to discuss our language learning trajectories and I asked him why there were more male...
english as a second language

Being multilingual: Is my language my homeland?

(My country is the Portuguese language. Fernando Pessoa) The idea of feeling an affinity with a language is not foreign to me given that I speak seven languages and have studied ten. In fact, my...
Spy

Why the CIA needs me and other 1st and 2nd generation immigrants for language...

I keep getting messages from the CIA on Linked In because they need 1st and 2nd generation immigrants to fill their huge need for foreign language speakers. According to this Reuters article, U.S. spy agencies...

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