FROM Nation, State, and Economy by Ludwig von Mises

From the cosmopolitan standpoint, one must describe the splitting of mankind into different peoples as a circumstance that causes much trouble and costs. Much labor is spent on learning foreign languages and is wasted on translations. All cultural progress would make its way more easily, every contact between peoples would proceed better, if there were only one language. Even one who appreciates the immeasurable cultural value of diversity of material and intellectual arrangements and of the development of particular individual and national characters must admit this and must not deny that the progress of mankind would be made quite extraordinarily more difficult if there did not exist, besides the small nations numbering only a few hundred thousand or a few million souls, larger nations also.

Quickly review important new information shortly before going to bed.

FROM about.com English as a 2nd Language:

Quickly review important new information shortly before going to bed. Research has shown that our brains process information that is fresh in our brains while we sleep. By shortly (this means very quickly - just a glance at what you are working on at the moment) going over some exercise, reading, etc. before you go to sleep, your brain will work away on this information while you sleep!

Philosophers vs. Housemaids

I see a lot of foreign housekeepers speaking Mandarin fluently in Taipei and I know the famous French philosopher René Descartes (勒內笛卡爾, 1596 - 1650) spent 20 years in Holland without learning Dutch, but I'm not so sure the following general rule holds.

FROM Physics and Politics by Walter Bagehot:

If you send a housemaid and a philosopher to a foreign country of which neither knows the language, the chances are that the housemaid will catch it before the philosopher. He has something else to do; he can live in his own thoughts. But unless she can imitate the utterances she is lost; she has no life till she can join in the chatter of the kitchen.

Mandarin Language Is Music To The Brain

From Science Daily:

Science Daily — It’s been shown that the left side of the brain processes language and the right side processes music; but what about a language like Mandarin Chinese, which is musical in nature with wide tonal ranges?

UC Irvine researcher Fan-Gang Zeng and Chinese colleagues studied brain scans of subjects as they listened to spoken Mandarin. They found that the brain processes the music, or pitch, of the words first in the right hemisphere before the left side of the brain processes the semantics, or meaning, of the information.

In the English language, Zeng says, changes in pitch dictate the difference between a spoken statement and question, or in mood, but the meaning of the words does not change. This is different in Mandarin, in which changes in pitch affect the meaning of words.

Be careful about your pronunciation.

The follow excerpt is from The Ethnic Phenomenon, by Pierre L. Van Den Berghe. The context is the use of language as an ethnic marker.

"Although language is a relatively subtle test, certain easily detectable
phonemes (音位) give the foreigner away. A classical historical episode concerns the massacre of French troops by Flemings in the city of Brugge (or Bruges as the French say) in 1302. The Flemings wanted to kill the French army of occupation in their beds without raising the alarm, so the problem was how to identify Frenchmen quickly and reliably, in the dark, in order to slaughter them without fuss. The solution was to make them repeat a short Flemish phrase, "schilde en de vriend," ("shield and friend") that contained phonemes unpronounceable to native speakers of French. History books tell us that the stratagem was devastatingly successful."

Texas Town Adopts Spanish As Official Language

From Reuters, Monday August 16 8:14 AM ET

``In past administrations, the meetings were done in English and they did not
explain anything,'' Rodriguez said.
The result, he said, was widespread apathy.
The City Council voted last week to make Spanish, not English, the
town's official language. That means that town business will be conducted in
Spanish, which then will be translated into English for official documents to
meet the requirements of Texas law.