Learn another language, it’s good for you!

How is that New Year resolution to learn a new language holding up? If the initial enthusiasm is already waning under the weight of unfamiliar words, obscure grammar, and even an alien script, the advice of health experts is that you should keep it up.

Aside from the social, and potential economic, benefits of language learning, medical science has also determined that it can play a role in staving off dementia, and even speed the recovery of stroke victims.

That was not always the dominant view.

A century ago, some psychologists maintained that the brains of bilingual children were bound to be muddled, leading to cognitive impairments in their later lives.

Modern research indicates the opposite and also suggests that even taking up language learning later in life can have positive health benefits. New methods of scanning have allowed researchers to prove physical growth of grey matter in the brains of bilinguals.

And research from the United States in the last decade found that, among older people, bilingualism could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by as much as five years. Just as remarkably, a 2015 study showed that stroke victims were twice as likely to recover normal cognitive functions if they spoke more than one language.

“People with more mental activities have more interconnected brains, which are able to deal better with potential damage,” according to Thomas Bak of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, who co-authored the study. “Language is just one of many ways of boosting the cognitive reserve.”

Scientists who have, until now, focused on subjects who have known more than one language from an early age have since extended their research to young adults and older learners, with promising results.

“Nothing I can think of is more difficult or more cognitively engaging than trying to learn another language,” Ellen Bialystok, a bilingualism expert at Toronto’s York University, told a LiveScience interviewer in 2014. Learning a second language at any age “is an excellent activity to maintain cognitive function”, she said.

The important thing appears to be to use a second language regularly once you have learned it. Picking up a foreign language in school or at home and then neglecting it does not appear to offer the same advantages.

With such benefits now well-established, what does it mean for policy-makers and educationalists?

The good news is that more people in the world are bilingual – knowing two languages equally fluently – than the four in 10 who know only one. In many parts of the world, regularly using two languages in daily life is the norm.

Inevitably, those who grow up with dominant international languages – English is the obvious example – may be less inclined to learn a second tongue. Statistics from the European Union show that, while 92 percent of Norwegians know a second language, the rate is less than 35 percent among people in the UK.

In China, where many people are fluent in more than one of the country’s languages, there has been an increasing focus on the practical benefits of English, in particular, and it has become a compulsory subject at all study levels.

Even in the relatively monolingual US, one person in five speaks a second language, many of them from the large Latino community.

1. Lori Hanson, a US psychologist, recently listed the benefits of learning languages for the readers of the Miami Herald. She said bilingual children had sharper brain function and better memory retention and tended to be more creative and open-minded.

“As our world becomes more global, being able to communicate in a language other than English will only continue to grow in importance,” she concluded.

Sadly, however, language learning in schools is in decline in the English-speaking world, including in the UK where many language classes have been phased out, in part to save money, and where the pool of language teachers has shrunk.

The same is also true of other subjects, including music, a discipline also shown to have a positive impact on the brain, as education authorities focus on ostensibly more useful disciplines.

On the plus side, however, there has been a surge of interest in online language apps that points to a widespread desire to study another tongue, even among those who might have missed out at school.

Free and low-cost apps are providing stiff competition to established print and software learning methods that have tended to be too expensive for many casual learners.

The jury is out on whether apps can actually replace traditional methods but they can certainly supplement them and cannot do any harm to the would-be language learner.

Maybe you downloaded one at the New Year with the best of intentions and are already finding you use it less and less. Take heart; language learning, like most other things, gets easier the more you focus on it. Half an hour a day is probably better than the occasional four-hour marathon.

And remember, it’s good for your health.