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The most current research on language and language learning reveals, once again, that it’s much more complicated than anyone could have imagined.  There are those who have an unusual capacity, who seem to absorb words almost immediately.  A few days in a new Latin American country, and they are ready to begin a job in Spanish translation.  They are the anomalies.  In most cases, even with people who have a high capacity for learning new languages, it takes time and energy.

The bad news is that there isn’t a secret lock in the brain that will open the capacity for language the way it works for those rare types.  It is a cognitive science, and athough the structures of languages might be within intuitive reach, a massive vocabulary is not.  It’s not likely to learn a language on the plane between one place and the next.  But practice and repetition do work, and any time is a good time to begin, even if that happens to be on the airplane.  A little familiarity with the grammar, and a decent Spanish dictionary, and one can do an awful lot in a new place.  This is provided that they don’t stray too far off the beaten path.  For those who do want to see new places and meet new people, but not in the way that it’s meant to be experienced for tourists, then some more intensive work is absolutely necessary.

At least for the time being.  The studies in cognitive processes do keep revealing that the brain is a complicated and endlessly baffling instrument, and the more that scientists know, the more unknowable it all seems.

It’s very unlikely that anyone could be genetically programmed with that secret gift for picking up languages instantly, but the brain does seem to know more than one might think.  A great deal of work on the way word order processing works in learning another tongue reveals that there are rational and intuitive things going on simultaneously.  From a very early age, it seems, and perhaps even in the womb, the brain chemistry changes slightly when in a situation where the native language is not being spoken.  Also, and even more compelling perhaps, is that the brain seems to be able to grasp how the language is structured very quickly.  So even if it doesn’t know the words, it can recognize that the subject and objects, and the verbs and modifiers, fall into a certain pattern.  Maybe another generation might have enormous benefits from what linguistics is teaching now, but until then, poring over a phrase book in mid-flight is a very good idea.