Language instincts

Someone told me a couple of months ago that he can't pick up languages. "Some people has a natural gift for learning languages, and I am not one of them. For me it's a bigger effort". Judging from the tourists here, it seems EVERYONE pick up Spanish when they are on the right circumstances, regardless of any parameter I can think of. Of course, when traveling with someone that takes over the conversations - it's hard to learn. But I guess there is a natural instinct that helps in learning new languages, and it is waking up if you have to deal with it. It reminds me an interesting experiment I've heard about a couple of days ago in This week in science. When a group of children were given different tasks of calculating change in a noisy marketplace in Brazil - their success rate stood on 98%. Given the same tasks written on a paper in a quite classroom, dropped their success rates lower than 64%. Apparently, we just have the instincts to do calculations, and it's this formalization that can make the studding harder for some people. I guess the same is with languages - it's just these formal ways of teaching that can make it frustrating sometimes.

I'm currently in Antigua (Guatemala) for a couple of days, so I have the time to write a bit of my latest thoughts :). Thanks to all of you who gave me wonderful feedback. And let me know what you think about this blog, I'd really appreciate it.

Cheers,
Eitan.