Now in Secondary School we had French, after all it was the French Christian Brothers, Latin, it was Catholic, and Greek, it was a Prep School.
In Grad School for some reason I chose Russian for my language, the last person perhaps at MIT having to take a language exam. By then you could bring anything you wanted and the translation was some electronics paper and all you had to do was kind of get close. Actually I learned some Russian from a fellow Life Guard in New York, one Jimmy Bula, a Ukrainian, who taught me pronunciation and the vernacular. Little did I know but half the words were Polish.
So when I went off to Europe and Asia for my companies I had been exposed to Homeric Greek, Latin, Sicilian Italian, Puerto Rican Spanish, Ukrainian Russian, and some semblance of American English. I tried my Homeric Greek in the Marriott in Athens, and well, the waitress was from Astoria Queens working for her uncle for the summer so we went to English and I decided I would come up to speed. You see Greek is real easy, if you had medical and scientific training you were halfway there.
The solution, 3X5 index cards, 20 words a day, and trying to get around Athens by Taxi. You are surrounded by Greek, signs, people, papers, and after a week it starts to be absorbed. You get the first 100 words, here, there, this, that, where, how much, thank you, please, etc. The most important is "where is the bathroom?". For my wife it was "How much is it?" She knows that in 22 languages, and that is all.
But the language steps are simple:
1. Go to where it is spoken.
2. Lern the first 100 words
3. Learn the present, past, future of to be and to have
4. Get 20 verbs in present past and future.
5. Get 25 adverbs
6. Every day write and memorize 20 new words. Look fr them
7. Try your skill on the locals. They will enjoy it and at first you will not.
8. Repeat the steps again and again.
9. Watch television, except in France. Somehow French TV is too intellectual. Spanish TV is great!
10 Realize that for some reason you will learn some languages and others will be impossible. I am good at Russian but Czech and Polish are impossible. Too old to wonder why.
Now the Times piece state:
Last
year researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and
Northwestern University in Illinois hypothesized that language study
should prove beneficial for older adults, noting that the cognitive
tasks involved — including working memory, inductive reasoning, sound
discrimination and task switching — map closely to the areas of the
brain that are most associated with declines due to aging. In other
words, the things that make second-language acquisition so maddening for
grown-ups are the very things that may make the effort so beneficial. The
quest for a mental fountain of youth, pursued by baby boomers who fear
that their bodies will outlive their brains, and who have deeper pockets
than Juan Ponce de León, has created a billion-dollar industry. There
is some evidence that brain exercise programs like Lumosity and
Nintendo’s Brain Age can be beneficial, but if my admittedly
unscientific experience is any indication, you might be better off
studying a language instead. Not only is that a far more useful and
enjoyable activity than an abstract brain game, but as a reward for your
efforts, you can treat yourself to a trip abroad. Which is why I plan
to spend the next year not learning Italian.
Frankly it seems that the author has missed all the steps. You want to learn French, go live in France, and work at it. You want to learn Spanish, ride the NY Subways, do garden work in the summer, or watch soccer.
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