Around Town: The benefits of being multilingual

Years ago, on a trip to Guayaquil, Ecuador, a friend complimented me on my Spanish fluency. She said, “Es un adorno para saber un otro idioma,” which literally means that a fluency in a second language is an ornament.

Her words have stuck with me all these years, along with the idea that a second language adorns us, makes us beautiful, just like mascara or diamond earrings.

Last week, second-language fluency was the subject of the online petition to save the Mandarin classes at LCHS. The details of this dispute are still fluid, but the action taken by these parents reminded me of my path to Spanish.

My early years were spent in a three-generation home. Spanish was not spoken in our house. The main language was English. The second language was Yiddish.

Yiddish? English? No Spanish? Why, then, did I dream of train trips through the Pampas, of Machu Picchu and hikes in the Andes?

It was all because of my grandfather. My grandmother’s family came from Vienna. My grandfather, from Zvenigorodka (near Kiev, Russia), loved to tease her. In her presence, he’d tell me that he only spoke “low German,” but she spoke “high German.”

What he spoke was Yiddish, plus five other languages. Fluently.

Yiddish was the forbidden fruit. In our house, the adults switched over to Yiddish when they didn’t want the kids to listen. Gossip, scandal, sex, it was all discussed, not behind closed doors, but behind the veil of this gorgeous, nearly-extinct idiom, full of adjectives and double entendres, music and wicked jokes.

My course of action was obvious. Never let the grown-ups know you understand what they are saying. That way, all doors are open. It was my version of information wants to be free.

As a result, I never spoke Yiddish, but I understood it.

Experts distinguish between receptive and expressive language ability. My childhood gave me receptive language skills in Yiddish, but not the expressive. As a result, my neuron pathways were forever altered. Yiddish made me smart.

The late Caltech neurophysiologist, Joe Bogen, once told me that the neuron pathways in the brains of babies born into a bilingual home develop differently than in mere monolingual kids. The bilingual child is programmed to know that there is more than one word for water (agua/water) or milk (leche). The monolingual child’s brain thinks there is only one word for water. That’s why it’s easier for a bilingual child to learn three, four or five languages as adults.

Dr. Bogen encouraged us to expose our kids to Spanish right from birth, but living in La Cañada, it was hard to follow through with this once they attended preschool.

Recent research shows that everyone, even monolingual Americans, can benefit from learning a new language. (See Schlegel et. al., “White matter structure changes as adults learn a second language,” J Cogn Neurosci. 2012 Aug.) The researchers found that “traditional models hold that the plastic reorganization of brain structures occurs mainly during childhood and adolescence, leaving adults with limited means to learn new knowledge and skills. Research within the last decade has begun to overturn this belief, documenting changes in the brain’s gray and white matter as healthy adults learn simple motor and cognitive skills.”

This means that if you are an English-speaking monolingual adult and want to keep your brain young, you should enroll in a rigorous Mandarin class. Study the Mandarin alphabet. Go to the language lab. Four days a week. Your brain will feel like it is about to explode, but that’s just your gray matter developing.

My grandfather, the one who spoke “low German,” only spoke three languages when he arrived at Ellis Island — Polish, Russian and Yiddish. He quickly became fluent in English, and, after he fell in love with my grandmother, he became fluent in German. In his old age, he enrolled in a Spanish class at the L.A. High night school. He quickly became fluent and infected me with his love of Spanish literature. I still have some of his books.

That’s why language study is important. It’s all about people.

The real common core is language.

As for LCUSD, on Tuesday, representatives of the school district met with concerned parents and agreed to offer Mandarin 3 for the 2015-16 school year. If funding in the future is an issue, perhaps LCHS could collaborate with other institutions. Why not ask Prep, St. Francis, American Jewish University, the Lycee Francais, and PCC if they’d like to bring a robust and effective “world language” night school program to the Foothills? We could fill up those empty classrooms with rigorous AP classes in Korean, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, French, German and Hebrew. That way, La Cañada could model the real common core values, which are the ability to respect and communicate with our neighbors and friends.

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ANITA SUSAN BRENNER is a longtime La Cañada Flintridge resident and an attorney with Law Offices of Torres and Brenner in Pasadena. Email her at anitasusan.brenner@yahoo.com and follow her on Twitter @anitabrenner.