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Anyone who drinks knows that once you’ve had a cocktail or two suddenly many things in life that are difficult suddenly don’t seem to be nearly so hard anymore.
That backflip you’ve never been able to complete? Hold my beer. Asking out that girl in payroll that you’ve been afraid to approach for fear of being shot down? Be right back. Speaking a foreign language more fluently than ever. Hells ya!
No, seriously, that last one is actually true, at least according to a new study that I 100% believe.
Reports The Huffington Post…
A small study published last week in the Journal of Psychopharmacology shows that a small amount of alcohol can help people speak a foreign language better. Researchers found that imbibing helped people speak a non-native language more fluently, even when they didn’t think they were doing that well.
The study’s authors observed 50 native German speakers who were attending a university in the Netherlands, where classes were taught in Dutch. Each person in the study indicated that they drank alcohol on occasion. The participants had also recently passed a Dutch proficiency test.
Each volunteer was asked to engage in a two-minute recorded conversation with an interviewer in Dutch. Half of the volunteers were given alcohol before the chat, and the other half were given water. The amount of alcohol varied depending on the person’s body type. (For example, a 150-pound man was given slightly under a pint’s worth of beer.)
Then two native Dutch speakers, who weren’t told which participants had imbibed a little alcohol and which ones didn’t, listened to the conversations and ranked the participants using metrics such as vocabulary and grammar.
Guess which group rated higher? You got it, the ones who drank. Aww yeah! Who needs Rosetta Stone now?!
However…
Researchers theorize that drinking too much can have the opposite effect, making proficiency in another language worse due to slurred words.
That’s probably a pretty solid theory.
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