Lingua Stanca

The New York Times helpfully pointed out recently that my hapless monolingualism not only makes me stupid now, but also may hasten the onset of Alzheimer’s in my fast-approaching dotage.

The op-ed piece was headlined “Why Bilinguals are Smarter,” and its author was Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a staff writer at Science. I felt hugely defensive from the get-go, and not just because I’d been already been implicitly outed as “dumber.” With a name like Bhattacharjee, I had to assume the author is fluent in Hindi or Urdu in addition to English—making him one of the countless millions of world citizens who are smarter than me.

Then I got to wondering, is “Yudhijit” a guy’s name or a woman’s name? How do you even pronounce it? I felt more stupid by the second.

The word Science gave me pause, also. I mean, Was there any subject at which I’d sucked worse when I was in school? Mathematics, maybe. But that was about it.

I began reading the piece—a decision I quickly regretted. This was the lead paragraph:

“Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental that being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.”

That got me to wondering my if lifelong ineptitude at bilingualism means, conversely, that my cognitive skills are actually deficient. That’s a depressing thought, given that even though I took French from junior high through my freshman year in college, the best I can do now is pick out the odd word here and there. When I overhear Gallic conversations on the streets of DC, they translate in my head as roughly “Blah blah blah TODAY. Something something RED something NOW. Yadda yadda yadda MARCEL MARCEAU.”

Not that I was anywhere close to fluent even back in the day. Or back in the jour, as I like to say. At the height of my “powers” (and no, I don’t know the French word for that), I could conjugate a few major verbs and utter a smattering of complete sentences—in the present tense, anyway. Even there, I often mixed up masculine and feminine words. My pronunciation always was atrocious, and I could read at perhaps the comic book level. (Not even the graphic novel level, though graphic novels weren’t yet a thing—a chose!—back then.)

For the life of me, I don’t know how I ever passed a French course. I do have a recollection of linguistic binging and purging—stockpiling French words and phrases for tests, spewing them onto the page at exam time, then walking away empty and spent. Is it possible that I simply retook Beginner’s French every time? It’s a mystere.

What I’m saying is, bilingualism hasn’t even really been a “use it or lose it” thing for me. It’s more that I never had it in the first place. True, I seldom even hear French in my daily life, let alone have occasion to speak it. The point, though, is that I had precious little aptitude for the language even when I was regularly hitting the books. Hitting the … romans? No, wait, that means “novels.” Hitting the … livres! (OK, busted—I just Googled that.)

Lynn took French in school, too, and she’s about as fluent as am I. We joke that we could reside in France for the rest of our lives, hearing nothing but French spoken every day, yet still live to a ripe old age as clueless monolinguals—eking out an existence by pointing pitifully to eau and pain and prevailing upon the kindness of etrangers. Except that it’s not quite a joke. At least in my case. Lynn might eventually pick up the language. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t, though, even if an entire village were to adopt me as its community service-project idiot.

I’m always amazed by stories of non-English speakers who became fluent in our exceedingly difficult tongue simply by watching American TV. I can envision myself sitting intently through entire seasons of old French sitcoms, yet picking up only the nonverbal stuff—like the Romanian fan of Happy Days who arrives at long last in the city of Milwaukee and longs for someone to ape the Fonz’s “Aaaaay!” because everything else sounds like gibberish.

Several years ago, suckered by the propaganda one hears that Spanish is easy to learn, Lynn and I enrolled in a night class offered by our county government. For several weeks, we drove on a weeknight to a middle school for instruction from a Castro-hating Cuban matron who thought the best way to teach complete novices her native language was via total immersion. Frankly, that lady was insane. But anyway, ask me what Spanish I remember from those weeks. I’ll tell you: Nada. And I didn’t even learn that word there.

Here’s another passage from the New York Times op-ed piece:

“The collective evidence from a number of studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function—a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind—like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.”

Great! I’m easily distracted, and I remember pretty much nothing that I don’t write down. In fact, I’ve missed more than one meeting at work after blocking out the time on a desk calendar that I then neglected to consult. So, I’ve got to figure that if I weren’t moron-lingual, I’d in many ways be in much better shape. Talk about that “executive function”! What my brain’s got is more like untrained administrative assistant function. (No offense to secretaries and other office aides.)

This, finally, was the New York Times piece’s penultimate paragraph:

“Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism—measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language—were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.”

Again, I’m wondering if my complete failure in the area of bilingualism conversely portends a particularly dismal fate. Perhaps the fact that I couldn’t beat a French toddler in a debate means I’m due any day now to start losing even the tiny store of mental acuity I currently possess. This thought is very upsetting. Why, I’ll even go so far as to exclaim, “Sacrebleu!”

But damned if Wikipedia doesn’t advise that sacrebleu—described as an “old French profanity meant as a cry of surprise or anger”—no longer is in widespread use in the major French-speaking countries.” Zut alors! Now my working vocabulary of French words may not even surpass double digits.

I guess the one positive in all this, if you want to call it that, is that given the Alzheimer’s thing, I soon may forget all about my complete inability to transcend the English language. Along with everything else.