Without teaching him? This is exactly what happened to one Australian.
When a 22 year old Ben McMahon(Ben McMahon) woke up from a week-long coma after a car accident, he began speak Mandarin Chinese fluently.
"Everything was in a fog, but when I woke up and saw a Chinese nurse, I thought that I was in China", he said. " It was as if my brain was in one place and my body was in another. I started speaking Chinese - these were the first words I spoke".
According to the nurse, McMahon's first words were: " I'm sorry, nurse, it hurts here.".
To him it took him several days to learn to speak English again.
When his parents first came to see him at the hospital, he spoke to them in Mandarin, which shocked them.
Although the Australian had studied some Mandarin in the past and even visited Beijing, he had never spoken the language fluently until he woke up from his coma.
The incident itself occurred back in 2012, and after acquiring a new language, McMahon began to use his skills to good effect.
He led tours for the Chinese in Melbourne and also became the host of a popular Chinese show"Au My Ga", which helped Chinese expats better understand Australian culture.
Bilingual aphasia
This is not the only case where a person who has survived a brain injury or woken up from a coma has spoken a new language or accent.
· In 2013, a California man was found unconscious in a motel room. After he woke up in the hospital, he could only speak in Swedish.
· In 2010, a 13-year-old girl from Croatia woke up from a coma and spoke fluently in German, despite having just started learning the language before the brain injury.
Scientists attribute these cases to a phenomenon called " bilingual aphasia"Different languages are stored in different parts of the brain, and if one part is damaged, a person's brain can switch to another language.
Bilingual aphasia is possible because learning a native and second language different types of memory involved. When a child begins to speak, his brain processes language like any other skill: walking, jumping, and other motor skills. Responsible for this procedural memory, and we perform the skills without consciously thinking.
When an adult or child learns a new language, it is responsible declarative memory. The brain learns language as a subject, be it mathematics, geography or history, by memorizing rules and facts.
Over time, as fluency develops, some of this knowledge moves into subconscious procedural memory.
Children who grow up in a multilingual family from childhood may store both languages in their subconscious memory system.
Trauma or tumor may erase one language and leave the other.
How to quickly learn a language?
· Speak the language out loud from day one. Don't be afraid of incorrect pronunciation. The most important thing is to start practicing.
· Learn practice phrases first. If you're starting to learn a language, try to learn phrases that will be useful to you, such as "where is...?" to explain your basic needs.
· Don't focus strictly on grammar. Don't worry too much about grammar rules in the beginning; you can catch up on that later.
· Practice your language on Skype with native speakers. One of the best tools for learning a language is the Internet, especially video chats like Skype. With this free service, you can practice your conversation skills with native speakers from another part of the world.
· Listen to local radio stations. Another way to immerse yourself in a foreign language is to listen to a radio station in the country where that language is spoken. You can use the online collection her local radio stations from all over the world TuneIn.
· Check out the free ones online language tools, T such as, for example, Duolingo or italiki , where you can connect with native speakers for personal lessons.
· Be prepared to invest time and practice. A person who wants to learn a foreign language can achieve a good level in a few months by studying all day long, or in a year or two by studying 1-2 hours a day.
· Don't strive for perfection. Most beginners are too focused on reaching the final stage and often do not progress beyond the initial level. Just accept your mistakes and don't try to be perfect.
The human brain is not so simple at all, and here is another confirmation of this. If you have been interested in medical news in recent days, you have noticed the case of a Croatian girl who suddenly spoke German after a coma, but forgot her native language.
The entire Croatian press widely discussed this phenomenon. As the web resource “20 Minuten” reports in the article “Kroatin spricht nach Koma fliessend Deutsch”, a 13-year-old girl fell into a coma after a severe traumatic brain injury. Croatian Sandra Rapik was in serious condition for about a day, balancing between life and death.
When she was able to open her eyes and say the first words, the medical workers could not understand her, as she spoke in German. She started learning this language at school quite recently and knew it with a solid C grade. She suddenly forgot her native Croatian. In this regard, the girl’s parents had to resort to the services of translators.
When asked how this became possible, the doctors, led by the hospital’s chief physician, shrug their hands in bewilderment. Psychiatrist Milhaud Milas noted that “previously this would have been considered a miracle, but we are inclined to believe that there is a logical explanation that simply has not yet been found.”
This case is not isolated, and there are many similar to it. In fact, such phenomena occur periodically and are even well documented.
Xenoglossy
Yes, this phenomenon is called xenoglossy. The term comes from the Greek “xenos” - alien, “gloss” - language, and means that a person suddenly begins to speak an unfamiliar language, sometimes modern, sometimes an ancient dialect of an extinct language, and sometimes completely “unknown to anyone”.
One of the most famous cases that occurred in 1931 involved a girl under the pseudonym Rosemary. This girl was able to speak an ancient language, and considered herself Teleka Ventui, living in Ancient Egypt during the reign of the 18th dynasty, that is, approximately 1400 BC.
When analyzing Rosemary’s speech, which was sent to the famous Egyptologist Howard Hulme, it turned out that the child was not talking nonsense at all, but spoke competently in an ancient dialect. When Hulme was told where this text came from, he came to see for himself. The scientist asked her several questions and made sure that the girl was well aware of the customs, language and writing of the Egyptians of the time of Amenhotep III. In the end, Hulme had all his doubts dispelled, and he truly felt that he was communicating with an ancient Egyptian woman.
Eternal mystery
Learning a foreign language is far from easy. Syntactic, grammatical rules, and methods of constructing sentences differ significantly in different languages. In order to learn to speak a foreign language well, you need to learn to think like a foreigner. How can a person learn to speak a foreign language in just 24 hours? The human body has remained a mystery to us for thousands of years, despite the development of modern science.
The incident that happened with a Croatian girl knocks down the modern ideas of neurophysiologists and psychiatrists. Such phenomena are very difficult to explain based on materialistic concepts. However, these are quite ordinary phenomena, if we take into account the supernatural capabilities of our consciousness. Perhaps we have believed for too long that “life is only a way of existence of protein bodies.”
Did you know that people who awaken from comas can actually speak a foreign language? Yes, this is true, and it is scientifically called bilingual aphasia. It is thought to occur when one area of the brain that controls language is damaged while another remains intact.
Scientists neurologists say that this happens relatively often, here are some of the most striking cases:
Woke up speaking Swedish
A man woke up in a hotel room in Palm Springs, USA. He had no idea who he was and spoke only Swedish. He called himself Johan Eck, but all his documents showed that he was born in Florida and his name was Michael Boatwright. And although he lived for some time in Japan and China, he spoke exclusively Swedish.
Only "Deutsche"
Duhomira Marasovic mysteriously emerged from a 24-hour coma in her native Croatia. When she woke up from this coma, she spoke fluent German, that is, a language that this 13-year-old girl had just begun to learn at school. How's her Croatian? Not very good. She needs a translator to talk to her parents via...
Speak Chinese
Australian Ben McMahon studied Chinese in high school but was still at beginner level when he was involved in a serious car accident. When he emerged from a week-long coma, he began to chirp in Chinese like a nightingale. In fact, he was so fluent that he later landed jobs as a tour guide for Chinese tours of Melbourne and a Chinese TV show. True, he had to restore English within a few days. But at least he got a job as a result of this incident - the best consequence of an accident and coma imaginable.
Became a Hollywood star
Rory Curtis woke up from a coma speaking fluent French, a language he had limited experience with, and yet he still thought he was actor Matthew McConaughey. The good news is that he is lucky to be alive at all.
He suffered pelvic injuries, injuries and brain damage after his minibus overturned and five (yes, five!) cars crashed into it. He was in a coma for six days and came out of it thinking he was a Hollywood star. He eventually realized he was wrong, but his French-speaking abilities remain even now, two years later.
What is this, Welsh?
An 81-year-old man named Alan Morgan was evacuated to Wales during the Second World War. Despite living there as a 10-year-old, he never studied Welsh. He returned to England after the war, and lived there for 71 years before suffering a stroke that left him in a coma. Three weeks later he came out of this state and spoke Welsh and stopped speaking English completely.
Perfect English? Even the English can't talk like that!
Matej Kus was an 18-year-old speedway racer from the Czech Republic when he was involved in an accident. After a brief coma, he woke up speaking perfect English with a British accent, no less. Unfortunately for him, it didn't last long. Soon after the accident he returned to speaking broken English.
After waking up from a coma, 16-year-old English-speaking teenager Ruben Nsemoh spoke fluent Spanish, although before receiving a concussion while playing football, the guy knew only the basics of the language.
At the same time, Ruben lost the ability to easily express himself in his native English. However, within a few weeks after the injury, everything returned to normal: English began to improve, and Spanish, on the contrary, returned to the basic level.
Scientists call this phenomenon foreign accent syndrome. It is caused by damage to the part of the brain that controls the muscles used to produce speech.
“Speech requires precise control of the muscles of the lips, tongue and jaw (speech articulators) and larynx (voice box). If the placement of articulators, speed or coordination of movements is slightly impaired, then speech sounds may be altered,” the scientists explain.
At the same time, from the outside it may seem that a person has acquired an accent, but, in fact, he is losing control over the correct pronunciation. Or it looks like a person is fluent in another language, while he makes a lot of mistakes in conversation.
This is not the first such case. Thus, a Croatian girl, waking up from a coma, spoke fluent German, although she had only just begun to study it. And in 2013, an Australian man came to his senses after a car accident and spoke Mandarin, a dialect of Chinese, which he studied at school but was never fluent in. There are only about 200 such cases documented. One of the first dates back to World War II, when a Norwegian woman was hit by bomb shrapnel during an air raid and woke up with a German accent. Subsequently, friends and neighbors began to avoid her because they thought she was a spy.
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