Well, for mutual understanding!
Alcohol helps to speak foreign languages better, scientists say
Small portions of alcohol, as scientists have found out, really untie the tongue and allow a person to pronounce words more correctly and communicate more actively in foreign languages, follows from an article published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
"We have shown that drinking alcohol can help people who have just learned a foreign language to pronounce foreign words more accurately and faster. This, in turn, confirms the popular notion that small doses of alcohol help bilingual people speak a second language," said Inge Kersbergen from the University of Liverpool (in a press release Dutch courage: Alcohol improves foreign language skills – VM).
One of the most common and generally accepted ideas about alcohol is that alcohol loosens the tongue and makes a person talk about what he usually hides, or helps him overcome shyness when communicating with the opposite sex or foreigners.
Kersbergen and her colleagues confirmed that this is actually the case by observing the behavior of about five dozen Germans who recently learned Dutch and agreed to take part in an experiment conducted by psychologists from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.
The scientists invited the participants of the experiments to talk on a free topic with native Dutch speakers, and before the conversation began, they offered to drink a portion of "juice". In some cases, the drink was really non–alcoholic, and in others it was a tinted and diluted vodka.
Another group of volunteers followed the communication – they assessed the level of language proficiency of the participants in the conversation, but did not know how and why the experiment was being conducted. After completing the experiments, the scientists asked the volunteers to independently assess their level of Dutch language proficiency and compared these indicators with what the "linguists" from the second group told them.
The results were extremely interesting. People who drank a glass of vodka (so in the text – VM), on average, received five (out of 100) points more than sober participants in the conversation, and at the same time pronounced Dutch words much faster and more correctly.
Interestingly, alcohol did not affect the self–esteem of the participants in the experiments - both "drinkers" and "non-drinkers" believed that they knew Dutch equally poorly, nor their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. As psychologists emphasize, such conclusions do not mean that all people who want to communicate in foreign languages should constantly drink alcohol in large quantities. The participants of the experiments drank only a small amount of vodka (no, not a glass, after all, because of this, their native German would have started to get tongue-tied), and an increase in the dose, as scientists suggest, would not lead to an improvement, but to a deterioration of their language abilities.
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