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wine or fish soup. The choice was clear—I went for the wine! Little did I know when I signed up for my junior year abroad adventure that France, with its unique culture, beautiful language, strong traditions, glorious foods and wines, stylish clothes, amazing museums, excellent educational system, and brilliant residents (especially the men) was going to serve as my own personal enriched environment for the next twelve months.

    IS THERE A CRITICAL PERIOD FOR LEARNING A LANGUAGE?
    Everyone agrees that there is a very special time, called the critical period, during about the first six months of life when the brain is particularly good at learning languages. Wonderful work from Professor Patricia Kuhl at the University of Washington has shown that babies’ brains can soak up and learn not just one language but multiple languages during this time.
    But what if you start learning a new language a little later in life? Like most people of my generation, I began learning a second language (in my case French) at the ripe old age of twelve when I got to middle school. What part of my brain helped me learn this second language? It turns out that the brain does rely on many of the same areas as are used when learning to speak your native tongue. However, you also seem to recruit additional brain areas to help you with a second late-learned language. These additional areas are situated toward the bottom part of the frontal lobe on the left side, called the inferior frontal gyrus. You also use the left parietal lobe. Another study showed that people (like me) who learned language later in life actually had a thicker cortex in the left interior frontal gyrus and a thinner cortex in the right inferior frontal gyrus.
    Learning a second language at twelve years or later provides yet another example of brain plasticity. The brain, when prodded to make connections, will indeed do so. It might take longer and be more difficult, but it’s possible!

    I loved the year I spent in France because it completely immersed me in a totally foreign and exotic culture that in 1985 was far less infiltrated by American cultural icons like McDonald’s, Costco, and reruns of Friends than you see in France today. That year abroad also brought me one of the most romantic experiences of my life.
    It all started with my request to live with a family in Bordeaux who had a piano that I could play. I had played the piano from the time I was about seven until I was a senior in high school, and I still played casually (so as not to completely lose my classical repertoire) while I was studying at Berkeley.
    Monsieur and Madame Beauville were a lovely couple whose home had a few extra bedrooms upstairs, one of which housed a piano. Soon after I arrived, Madame Beauville asked me to make sure I was at home one particular afternoon at a particular time because she had hired a piano tuner to come. I happily agreed and waited for the little old man with white hair to come walking up the stairs to my bedroom to tune the piano. But to my surprise, it was not grand-père who made his way up the stairs to my bedroom, but a young, hot French guy named François. François set about tuning my piano and chatting with me in French, of course. Before that day I never thought I was particularly good at flirting. But that day I discovered I was good at it, and I could even do it in French! In that hour, I not only got a perfectly tuned piano for my bedroom but I snagged a card with the address of a sheet music shop where François worked part time and an invitation to come by and say bonjour anytime.
    Of course, I somehow found time in my busy schedule of lectures, coffee, and croissants to visit him in the music shop right around dinnertime, and he invited me for a bite to eat. After just a few more dates that began after his shift in the music shop, we were an item, and I suddenly had myself a very sweet and musically inclined French boyfriend.
    How had I come out so far out of