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Dutch courage: drinking a small amount of alcohol improves foreign language speaking skills


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This is so true. Times I could speak Chinese best back when I was living abroad... in dreams and mildly tipsy. I was probably downright fluent tipsy in a dream.

 

I feel like there's a skill that a person can acquire if live somewhere where you don't speak the language fluently - it's like, the skill of being able to turn the few words you know into a conversation. I didn't even really realize this was a discrete skill until I was in Mexico with dh, who took Spanish all through school back in the day. I speak like ten words of Spanish. Somehow I turned my ten words and smatterings of French and Italian into being the one who had to do all the conversing and translating. Dh was beyond useless.

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This is so true. Times I could speak Chinese best back when I was living abroad... in dreams and mildly tipsy. I was probably downright fluent tipsy in a dream.

 

I feel like there's a skill that a person can acquire if live somewhere where you don't speak the language fluently - it's like, the skill of being able to turn the few words you know into a conversation. I didn't even really realize this was a discrete skill until I was in Mexico with dh, who took Spanish all through school back in the day. I speak like ten words of Spanish. Somehow I turned my ten words and smatterings of French and Italian into being the one who had to do all the conversing and translating. Dh was beyond useless.

I realized this was a skill when traveling with my daughter. She was attending a local preschool while I went to language classes. She was so upset she couldn’t communicate her wants. I’m like, “you want to go on the big red slide and don’t know the words? You know red is rojo, big is grande, and have the ability to point, right? How is that not enough?†She had no idea that was actually a valid way to communicate.

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Whiskey helps with math tests too but I would love to find methods on how to replicate this confidence and laissez faire attitude sober...

 

Gosh. 

 

I don't think I could get away with recommending this to my students. 

 

I tell them to try hard candy to distract them, but ... 

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Alcohol on the plane and you see strangers talking to strangers. My ex-colleagues would practice their Chinese on me since I don’t mind. Alcohol makes my alcoholic cousins swear more and they are already multilingual so the swearing gets very colorful. My husband scolds and complains in many different languages too so my kids has already pick up “the bad stuff†in different languages.

 

Gosh.

 

I don't think I could get away with recommending this to my students.

 

I tell them to try hard candy to distract them, but ...

My alma mater allowed coffee, tea, hot cocoa, Red Bull for drinks and chocolate or other “quiet to eat†foods for the exam hall. Almost everyone in my class brought coffee in for the three hour exams.

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When I was at university I lived with a girl who was raised in a Spanish speaking family and community until the age of 4 or 5 but then her mum remarried and she moved to somewhere that only spoke English and they spoke english at home. Over the years she lost her ability to speak Spanish fluently or even conversationally but when I knew her she was realising that when she'd had a few to drink a lot of her Spanish would come back to her.

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Whiskey helps with math tests too but I would love to find methods on how to replicate this confidence and laissez faire attitude sober...

Also with music performances.

 

Dh says that Valerian herb/supplement helps too, calms your mind so you stop over thinking...

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