Inspiration

Alcohol Improves Your Foreign Language Skills, Says New Study

Salute! Santé! Prost!
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During college, I took a few years of Italian. I always did well on written exams, but would completely panic and stumble over my words whenever my Milanese teacher would call on me in class. If I ran into one of my classmates at a party or bar, however, we would instantly grab each other and start talking in rapid-fire Italian: this, after we were each a few drinks deep, mind you.

So why is it that people seem so much better at speaking their second language after a beer or two? (It's not just me, right?) According to a new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, it's not all in our heads—alcohol really does improve our foreign language skills.

Researchers from the University of Liverpool, Maastricht University, and King’s College London gathered 50 native German speakers, all of whom had recently learned to speak Dutch at Maastricht. The participants were then either given a low dose of alcohol or a control beverage that contained no alcohol, and were asked to have a conversation in Dutch for a few minutes.

The conversations were recorded, and then rated by two native Dutch speakers who were unaware of which participants were given alcohol. The subjects who were slightly intoxicated received better ratings than their sober colleagues, particularly when it came to pronunciation. These results proved the researchers' hypothesis that some alcohol can improve the ability to speak a second language.

"It is important to point out that participants in this study consumed a low dose of alcohol," said Dr. Fritz Renner of Maastricht University, according to Science Daily. "Higher levels of alcohol consumption might not have beneficial effects on the pronunciation of a foreign language."

So why exactly does booze help us with this particular skill? It might seem contradictory, since alcohol impairs cognitive functions like the ability to pay attention and remember facts. But it also lowers our social anxiety and boosts our self-confidence, which helps us when speaking to another person. The researchers' main goal was to test these contradictory theories; while alcohol's ability to relieve social anxiety is probably a major factor, they couldn't say so definitively quite yet.

"We need to be cautious about the implications of these results until we know more about what causes the observed results," said Dr. Jessica Werthmann of Maastricht University. "One possible mechanism could be the anxiety-reducing effect of alcohol. But more research is needed to test this."

For now, we will continue to practice our foreign phrases in bars and pubs around the world, making sure not to get too sloppy in the process.