It turns out our knowledge of the languages we learn in school actually lasts a lifetime
How many of us remember the language we studied in school? Despite what you may think, it turns out that we know as much now as we did in the classroom. A study from the University of York found that those who learned French 50 years ago and have never used it since, have similar recall to those who have just taken their exams. Feargal Murphy, lecturer in linguistics at UCD joined RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime to discuss why that is. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above).
"What's surprising would be for people who have the experience of not being able to use a language or feeling that their language isn't good enough. I think it surprises those people, rather than someone who works in linguistics." Many people might find that they can only remember a couple of words from the language they studied for years in school, but as the study showed, "in an emergency, you suddenly find that you do have this vocabulary available to you, because your brain goes looking for it," says Murphy.
Using Sarah McInerney's example of only remembering how to say "please" and "thank you" on her holiday to France despite spending five years learning the language in school, Murphy explains: "I would suggest that in your situation, you had no reason to use French for many years. So when you went to France the pathways, as it were, to the French words hadn't been trodden upon for a while, the neural networks."
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, how your bilingual baby's brain handles two languages
"There's a thing called the activation threshold hypothesis, which basically says if you're not using it, it takes more effort to use it when you do get around to using it. But according to the paper we're talking about, had there been an emergency, you were in a car crash or something, suddenly your brain would have went to "voiture" [the French for car] rather than car, straight away. This is an interesting aspect about adults using language: motivation is an important factor. For a child it's not, but for an adult it is. Even for learning and for using, in both instances, motivation is important [for an adult]."
Sarah has a friend who maintains he speaks much better French and German when he's "a little bit drunk". Is there any sense in that, does your brain operate differently? "No, it's not his brain. It's his perception and his willingness to make a mistake. We're all smarter when we're drunk, we know that's one of the stages of drunkenness. But no, it's his willingness to make mistakes, his inhibitions are lowered, so now he's more fluent in French because he's not censoring himself. Adults are very bad about not willing to and not allowing themselves to be seen to make a mistake or get something wrong," says Murphy.
Why then do we not remember Irish as well? one listener Joan asks. There's a number factors, says Murphy. "One of them is again motivation. When we learned Irish in school, for a lot of people it wasn't that well taught, so we didn't really have much interest in it, so again lack of motivation to learn it. We probably do know more than we realise."
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From the RTÉ Brainstorm podcast, why Irish people never say what they mean
"A friend of mine is a physiotherapist and a patient that one of his colleagues was dealing with had a stroke, so his language was impaired, he wasn't speaking. Then the physio came to my friend and said 'that guy in room 314, he's starting to talk, but he's just talking utter gibberish, I don't understand anything. So Martin went down and the guy was there speaking in Irish."
Why? Aphasia. "The stroke had damaged the language area and therefore his access to his English language, which was the language he spoke. So when he went searching for words there was a set of words off in the corner, covered in dust that he hadn't used for a long time, but he could access it."
Read more: How Duolingo's owl can help us play around with languages
One of the key reasons, is because words don't contain meaning. "The meaning part is in the meaning part of the brain, your conceptual structure. So the French word 'pomme' and the English word 'apple' access the conceptual stuff. So when I've lost my ability to say the English word, I still have the ability to think the thought. Then I go looking for some other word that encodes that thought and it's suddenly my Irish word," Murphy explains.
Is there anyway of making your brain access the language you learned in school?
"Nowadays you can start off with some app on your telephone. Go to your smartphone first because your smartphone isn't going to laugh at you for making a mistake. So we're not gonna feel bad about making mistakes. You've done French in school, you've done Irish in school or whatever, you don't want to go to a class with other people. So you get your smartphone out and you and the smartphone start having classes."
