Diane Ankenmann's List: articles to read (FSL/LL)

• some of the cognitive processes that are part of intelligence are more developed in bilinguals.
• bilingual brains are better at doing tasks where conflicting information has to be processed.
• Since the bilingual brain is adept at suppressing the language that isn’t being used in a given moment, it has experience inhibiting unhelpful information and promoting important stuff.
• t the healthier bilingual brain actually weathers the ravages of aging better than a monolingual one.
• language multiplicity appears to hold off the effects of dementia. In one examination of 211 probable Alzheimer’s patients, the effect was so great, she found that the bilingual patients had reported the onset of symptoms 5.1 years later than the monolingual ones.

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• Language has a musical quality, and singing a foreign language may help people to learn that language more accurately.

• A previous study conducted by researchers at Lund University showed that learning a new language actually makes parts of the brain grow. According to a new joint study, learning a new language alters brain development.
• , learning a second language at later stages of childhood after acquiring expertise in the first language modifies the brain structure

• learning a second language, even as an adult, could delay dementia and improve cognition.
• languages that are easier to learn for English speakers in general include Spanish, French, Swedish, Afrikaans, Romanian, and Italian.
• Within 22 to 23 weeks — or about five to six months — of study with 575 to 600 classroom hours, most would be proficient in speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
• the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn are Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
• Arabic is hard to learn because there are few words that resemble any European languages.
• Japanese uses three writing systems
• Chinese language uses one writing system, it is a tonal language,
• Korean can still be challenging because it has different syntax, sentence structures, and verb conjugations that most English speakers are not familiar with.
• To become proficient in any of these four languages, English speakers need to dedicate almost two years — or about 88 weeks — with 2,200 classroom hours of study and practice.
• to learn “medium” languages, such as Russian, Thai, and Hebrew, these require about less than a year — 44 weeks — with 1,110 hours,

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