The advantage of bilingualism

Interesting Q&A in the NYT about how the regular use of two languages seems to be associated with delaying the onset of Alzheimer's. I was talking about bilingualism tonight with a couple at a birthday party. She's Spanish, hubby is Swiss German, and the kids speak English, Spanish and German. Someone had apparently told them it was bad for their kid's English to only be speaking Spanish and German at home (mom speaks Spanish to the kids, dad speaks German to them, and mom and dad communicate in English with each other). I tend to disagree, as do the mom and dad.

I didn't grow up bilingual, though I did grow up learning Greek (never became fluent until I was an adult). I still think learning Greek as a kid helped me develop a facility for, and interest in, languages. And I've never bought the "they'll all get mixed up in your head" argument. My senior year of college, I took Spanish, French, Italian and Greek all in the same semester. And it actually wasn't confusing, any more than taking chemistry and biology at the same time is confusing. That's not to say I don't mix up languages sometimes - the stronger foreign language does tend to dominate the lesser, so in my case, French tends to invade Spanish and Italian, though Greek, my worst foreign language, is usually pretty much on its own in a back corner of my brain. And none of them interfere with English directly, though occasionally things slip through, like last fall when I met a dog down the block, found out it was a mastiff, and then said "mastiff" the way you would in French, or you find yourself using "join" to mean "meet" far more often than normal Americans would - that's about as confusing as it gets.

If anything, I regret not learning more languages. I tried Portuguese and Russian, but didn't have time for the former and the latter's grammar killed me (though Greek grammar is similar to Russian). And I have noticed that it was easier to learn them when I was 21, though, after a week in Greece I was surprised how much of my Greek came back. Anyway, obviously I think language learning a good thing. So found the above article interesting.