Author: Andrew Sullivan

Arturo E. Hernandez explores how age affects the ability to learn multiple languages:

Particularly sensitive to age is a person’s ability to speak without an accent and to detect speech sounds that are not present in their native language. For example, infants can detect sounds from a language not in their environment at six months of age. By 10 months of age they lose this ability. This suggests that the ability to detect speech sounds from around the globe is available to all infants but slowly fades away. Another arena where age plays a role is in the processing of grammar. Those who learn a second language later in life do not perform as well on tests of grammar as early learners. Hence, the ability to learn grammar and speech sounds appears to be very dependent on the age that one first learns a language.

Despite this general rule, there are some very interesting exceptions.

For example, Christophe Pallier and his colleagues tested a group of adults who had been born in Korea and adopted as children in France between the ages of 4-8. This group of adults were asked to listen to sentences in Korean, French, or an unknown language. The results revealed no difference in their brain activity when compared to native French speakers. That is, both groups showed similar activity for French, Korean, and a foreign language. Furthermore, the Korean adoptees had no discernible accent. They sounded French. The results are intriguing because they suggest that a language can be lost even relatively late in childhood. This suggests that the age at which a language is learned is not the only predictor of how well a language is spoken as an adult.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

Antonia Macaro considers how “doing nothing” may work to our benefit:

[A] lot depends on what we mean by “nothing”. In our achievement-orientated culture there is a danger of construing this as any activity without a clear end-product. In fact, there are different ways of doing nothing, some positive and some negative. There is a passive watching-TV-all-day kind of doing nothing, which is indeed often a sign of malaise. But there is also a “doing nothing” that includes reading, walking, reflecting, attending to the small things in life. An active doing nothing, if you know what I mean.

I’m not advocating doing nothing as a general policy in life. But it’s important not to confuse all unproductive activity with wasteful idleness. Allowing and cherishing a “doing nothing” of the active variety could enrich life as much as a passive doing nothing is likely to impoverish it.

Baggini looks to “The Dude” of The Big Lebowski, whose philosophy advocates “abiding” over “doing”:

I’m not sure many of us would really like to live like The Dude and the real world is more complicated than the often surreal universe of The Big Lebowski. But we can learn something from him even if we don’t become card-carrying dudeists. It’s that many battles are not worth fighting, even though our cause is just and our enemies in the wrong. The world is unfair and, if we cannot accept that fact, we will often end up further disturbing the peace of ourselves and others. We should not let people get away with everything, of course. But against the perennial temptation to believe something must be done, doing nothing is often the more courageous and fruitful path.

Oakeshott’s views on the matter here.

Israelis disagree about what makes a person Jewish, with the state using one identity test and rabbis, who oversee marriage and divorce, using another. The result? Some immigrants are in limbo:

In a concession designed to widen support for the new state, when Israel was founded its secular rulers left matters of marriage, divorce and burial in the rabbinate’s hands. It decides who is eligible for these rites, as well as carrying them out—so would-be brides and grooms must demonstrate their Jewish credentials. Supplying the necessary documents and witnesses can be inconvenient and galling: people resent having to prove what they know to be true. Immigration has made the system seem not just irksome but unsustainable.

For example, the Ethiopian Jews who migrated to Israel in the 1980s-90s, risking their lives and losing relatives along the way, have faced persistent doubts as to whether they are properly Jewish in doctrine and descent.

“I feel that I’m the Jew I want to be,” protests Fentahun Assefa-Dawit of Tebeka, an advocacy group for the 130,000-strong community. “I don’t want anyone to tell me how to be Jewish.” Western migrants, too, are sometimes doubted. The rabbinate considers some American rabbis too lax to vouch for their congregants and rejects their testimonies; it deems many overseas conversions inadequate. Many Israelis worry about the impact of such disdain on the diaspora’s political and financial backing for their state.

The biggest problem comes from the clashing consequences of two great ruptures in 20th-century history: the Holocaust and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under Israel’s Law of Return, anyone who has, or whose spouse has, at least one Jewish grandparent can claim citizenship—a standard expressly modelled on the criteria for persecution under the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws of 1935. The Law of Return also recognises conversions that the rabbinate rejects. The wave of immigration from Russia in the past two decades means the discrepancy between these two standards has become glaring. There are now several hundred thousand ex-Soviet Israelis who were Jewish enough to get in, but are not Jewish enough for the rabbis