Peace in a Pod

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to complete the Duolingo French course (I’m anything if not ambitious, clearly). It was while I was sitting on the couch a few days ago testing myself on my reflexive verbs, the weak Spring sunshine gleaming through the window, that I was suddenly filled with this feeling of just pure exoticism? (Read again, that’s EXOTICISM, not EROTICISM. I know French is a sexy language, but please, take your tête out of the gutter.) It felt like I was in holiday mode, basking in the sun (albeit indoors) and uttering phrases in smooth-sounding French. And of course, me being me, it made me think about additional-language-learning and how it impacts on us emotionally and psychologically. I have always loved languages and, in my time as as a psychology student, the field of psycholinguistics, which is the science of language acquisition. I was raised more or less bilingually, English being my native tongue followed closely by Irish, passed down to m...