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Almost every day, Michael Bloomberg spends an hour and a half doing something that has nothing to do with his financial information empire, his work with the UN, or his philanthropic foundation.
He has a Spanish lesson at his office with a private instructor, sometimes in person but mostly on a video call, especially if travelling. Convinced that the day you stop learning is the day you start dying, the 83-year-old billionaire, has now been doing this for close to a quarter of a century.
For most of that time, over on the other side of the Atlantic, Sir Tim Martin was doing much the same thing. The founder of Britain’s Wetherspoon pub empire had every Wednesday from 3.45pm to 5.15pm blocked off in his diary so he could head to the Berlitz language school in central London for a French lesson.
The 70-year-old Martin started in 2003 and only stopped in 2020 when the pandemic struck his business, but is still reading classic French novels such as Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. Slowly.
This puts both men into a select category of people for whom I have much sympathy: the older second language learner.
The feeling is not coincidental. I have been learning Spanish on and off since the 1990s. In a good year, I can burble on in a way that polite native speakers lead me to believe is comprehensible. Mostly, I have the fluency of a fairly dim three-year-old, though nothing like the accent.
The question I keep asking myself, as I struggle on with the Spanish subjunctive, is whether the game is worth the candle. Is there any point trying to learn a language once you hit a certain age? Or does brain function decline so much it becomes an exercise in futilidad?
Considering how much longer humans keep living, you might think academics are right across this. But until relatively recently, studies of late life language learners have been a minority pursuit.
Happily this has changed and the results of recent research efforts make for heartening reading. Several studies have shown learning a new language over the age of 60 is entirely feasible. Yes, cognitive ability drops off as we age but it varies hugely among individuals and does not necessarily rule out mastering new knowledge.
Older learners may even have some advantages over younger students when it comes to teaching methods. The research shows young adults learn languages most effectively when given grammatical rules and structures, as opposed to lessons where they work out the rules themselves after, say, listening and reading exercises.
But older people do equally well regardless of which method is used, according to a recent paper by academics at the UK’s University of Essex.
That suggests they may be able to learn a second language more independently, regardless of who their teacher is or what sort of learning materials they are given, says lead author Karen Roehr-Brackin.
There are other reasons for older learners to be cheerful.
Canadian scholars investigating the cognitive effects of learning English as a second language as an older adult say preliminary results suggest late-life intellectual engagement can have measurable benefits.
Other studies, of younger people, show the process of blocking out one’s native language in order to speak or think in another helps you to focus on tasks at hand, a useful skill at any age.
But perhaps the most encouraging words I’ve heard about later-life language learning come from the University of Edinburgh’s Professor Antonella Sorace, founder of the Bilingualism Matters global research and public engagement centre.
For one thing, children are not only whizzes at languages because of the plasticity of their young brains. “They don’t have anything else to worry about,” says Sorace. “They don’t have a job, they don’t have a family, they don’t have other commitments in their everyday life.” So they are free to enjoy being immersed in a new language.
More importantly, there is no need to strive for linguistic flawlessness. People need to understand that perfection in bilingualism does not exist, Sorace says, even for younger people. Trying to find someone with just one language who speaks it absolutely perfectly is not that easy.
This is all good news for Tim Martin, who tells me he hopes to get back to French and “speak it fluently while I’m still on the planet”. Michael Bloomberg harbours the same ambition for his Spanish lessons, though often says that at his current rate, he will need to “live a very long time”.
pilita.clark.com