TOKYO — I speak decent Spanish, picked up working several decades ago as a news and sports reporter in Spain, Mexico and Argentina.
Now I report from Tokyo. After seven years, I still can’t grasp Japanese. My weekly language classes have taught me humility more than anything else.
Ayaka Ono, my current Japanese teacher, estimates she’s tutored about 600 students over 15 years. They’ve been mostly between ages 20 and 50. I’m more than a decade beyond her eldest.
“I find older students take tiny, tiny steps and then they fall back,” Ono said. “They can’t focus as long. I teach something one minute and they forget the next.”
It’s well established that children have an easier time learning second languages. In recent years, scientists have studied whether being bilingual may help ward off the memory lapses and reduced mental sharpness that come with an aging brain. Much of the research on the potential benefit involved people who spoke two or more languages for most of their lives, not older adult learners.
“The science shows that managing two languages in your brain — over a lifetime — makes your brain more efficient, more resilient and more protected against cognitive decline,” said Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor emeritus at York University in Toronto who is credited with advancing the idea of a possible “bilingual advantage” in the late 1980s.
There’s good news for older adults like me: Attempting to acquire a new language is worthwhile, and not just because it makes reading a menu easier while traveling abroad. Bialystok, a cognitive neuroscientist, recommends studying a new language at any age, comparing the challenge to word puzzles and brain-training games that are promoted to slow the onset of dementia.
“Trying to learn a language late in life is a great idea, but understand it won’t make you bilingual and is probably too late to provide the protective effects of cognitive aging that come from early bilingualism,” she said. “However, learning a new language is a stimulating and engaging activity that uses all of your brain, so it is like a whole-body exercise.”
The latest research
A large study published by the science journal Nature Aging in November suggests that speaking multiple languages protects against more rapid brain aging, and that the effect increases with the number of languages.
The findings, based on research involving 87,149 healthy people ages 51 to 90, “underscore the key role of multilingualism in fostering healthier aging trajectories,” the authors wrote.
Researchers acknowledged the study’s limitations, including a sample population drawn only from 27 European countries with “diverse linguistic and sociopolitical contexts.”
Bialystok was not involved in the project but has researched second-language acquisition in children and adults, including whether being bilingual delays the progression of Alzheimer’s disease or aids in multitasking and problem-solving. She said the new study “ties all the pieces together.”
“Over the lifespan, people who have managed and used two languages end up with brains that are in better shape and more resilient,” she said.
Judith Kroll, a cognitive psychologist who heads the Bilingualism, Mind and Brain Lab at UC Irvine, used the expressions “mental athletics” and “mental somersaults” to describe how the brain juggles more than one language.
She said there have been several efforts to examine language learning in older adults and the ramifications.
“I would say there are probably not enough studies to date to be absolutely definitive about this,” she said. “But the evidence we have is very promising, suggesting both that older adults are certainly able to learn new languages and benefit from that learning.”
More studies are needed on whether language lessons help people in midlife and beyond maintain some cognitive abilities. Kroll compared the state of the field to the late 20th century, when the dominant thinking was that exposing infants and young children to two or more languages put them at a educational disadvantage.
“What we know now is the opposite,” she said.
Wade writes for the Associated Press.
The post Older adults may struggle to learn a new language, but classes are a worthwhile exercise appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
