Language
There are lots of opinions on the subject of bilingualism in Canada, and they’re boring as heck, even when they’re revived under extraordinary circumstances, such as… well, a condolence speech. There’s one side. And then the other side, sympathy for the poor people who have difficulty learning a second language:
I know that people have picked up languages later in life, but once you’ve passed 17, 18 years old, your porousness for new languages drops off. It’s hard. Remarkably. Which is not to say you cannot learn a language… you can, really poorly.
Sometimes the debate confines itself to a province… “Should Manitoba officially adopt French and English?” asks the CBC podcast. And a language professional weighs in:
Up to age 11, your brain absorbs language, so you can learn 50 words a day and five languages hearing the word one time in station. So we forget the power of the brain. After age 11, 12, 13, which the school system often starts now, that word has to pass through your brain, thinking, hearing or reading or whatever, a thousand times. So it becomes a real chore. You would really have to work at it. So of course people get turned off.
I like not thinking of Canada at all… I like thinking about language just by itself… Like when Steve Levitt asks Steven Pinker for tips, or when Levitt confesses to a trick he used when visiting China.
Or when Arthur Brooks talks about learning Catalan:
[…] there’s research on this, and that’s the research Raymond Cattel and subsequent researchers on crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is one of the reasons that people are better teachers when they get older, people have better vocabularies when they get older, they’re better scrabble players when they get older. And the reason is because of pattern recognition, and you can help that along.
You can get better crystallized intelligence, sort of a bigger library and a better ability to use it as you get older if you study a foreign language. Now I had looked at that literature. I try to live according to research. I mean, why be a behavioural scientist if you can’t live according to the research? And I saw that people became happier and they had richer lives, and they actually were better able to learn foreign languages after 50.
I said, huh, what if that’s true?
So, I had never taught in Catalan. I just sort of spoke in street Catalan up at that point, because when I lived there, and with my wife, et cetera, we speak 50-60 Spanish and English at home, with some Catalan thrown in. And so I decided that I was going to give a series of speeches in Barcelona, in Catalan.
And I studied up and I did that, and it dramatically improved my ability to speak Catalan. My Catalan is much better at 61 than it was at 41, or 31 as a matter of fact. And that’s made my life better.
Yes for little language experiments done in the spirit of joyful investigation! Let’s have more of that please!
Cooking
Julia Turshen’s Palm Springs Pearl Couscous Salad is a great salad.
And Madeleines are a great cookie! You can make the batter ahead, pour it into the molds (silicone makes it especially easy to remove), and cover it overnight until you bake them the next day.
Passing along
Lunch at Le Croissant makes you feel like you stopped in a tourist spot in Europe somewhere… a sunny, busy atmosphere!
Gabor Maté on 10% Happier: “the American psychotherapist Carl Rogers called it unconditional positive regard, which means that you accept somebody with all their flaws, however they are, but you accept them. And that’s what parents need to give their kids.”
In the same vein, this poem by Kahlil Gibran titled “On Children”.
A glimpse at Mason Currey’s method for note-taking in Jillian Hess’s Noted newsletter. (I find it inspiring! I want to go organize notes!)
Park notes
The river is high…
And then in the middle of the week, we got snow like cotton balls…
Between the weather conditions and the river height, there are mushrooms on trees, decorating the bark like lace, filling the cavities with frills…
Happy Sunday!