Speech researcher Swathi Kiran of Boston University works with bilingual stroke victims to help them relearn words lost to aphasia. As reported in Scientific American Mind, she found that these recovering patients improve faster if they start with the hardest stuff first.
“She has found that when pa­tients practice the language they speak less fluently, their vocabulary grows in both languages. But when the patients study words in the language they are more comfortable in, only that language improves.
“[She and her colleagues] found that training patients in their weaker language results in transference to the stronger language. Something about thinking in the weaker language automatically helps the stronger language, because they have to do some kind of translation to make sense.”
Researchers show pictures which patients then must name. They’ve found that naming pictures [...]

Izzi, my 14 year-old daughter, got to go to France this summer with her best friend (whose Mom is French). She stayed at grand-mère house in Brittany for the month of July for a total Francophone experience. And just a few weeks before, she had been recognized as the best first-year French student in her middle school. A proud moment for her Mom and Dad, but according to Izzi, the beginning of her downfall in France.
Her friend’s Mom was mightily impressed by Izzi’s award, and made a point to mention it when introducing Izzi to friends and family. It really put her new French friends at ease to know Izzi’s French was so good. Of course, as a first-year student in France for the first time, she was really not [...]

Everyone seems to think that learning a foreign language is a good idea. Wrong. It takes a lot of time, and causes a lot of headaches, literally. Its exhausting, and most importantly, it’s bad for business.
According to the Department of State, it takes about 2500 hours of serious study to learn a language sufficiently well to function diplomatically in that language, if the language is closely related to English, and as much as 4000 hours for a language less similar, say such as Japanese. Now I don’t’ have time to give you a citation for that, since it’s bound to take as much as three minutes on Google, but you can take my word for it. This also poses the questions: just how much of a foreign language does a [...]

Everyone seems to think that learning a foreign language is a good idea. Wrong. It takes a lot of time, and causes a lot of headaches, literally. Its exhausting, and most importantly, it’s bad for business.
According to the Department of State, it takes about 2500 hours of serious study to learn a language sufficiently well to function diplomatically in that language, if the language is closely related to English, and as much as 4000 hours for a language less similar, say such as Japanese. Now I don’t’ have time to give you a citation for that, since it’s bound to take as much as three minutes on Google, but you can take my word for it. This also poses the questions: just how much of a foreign language does a [...]

Question: Why is it that someone in my line of business, with a blog bearing the name it bears, doesn’t actually do any translating?
Answer: Why, sir, I wear that incongruity and low level shame as a badge of honor.
But sometimes I help. I was very proud to save a translation project the other day, despite my inability to speak Japanese much beyond ordering a beer or finding my way to the rest room. (I learned early on not to ask “Where,” but to ask “Which way…” (a pointed finger is usually the best linguistic clue one could ask for.) They don’t call it body language for nothing.
Okay, so in my house, I’m the one who speaks the worst Japanese. And my fourteen-year-old daughter, who loves to correct my Japanese [...]