Learning a second language can have a positive effect on the brain, even if it is 36 in adulthood, a study of 262 people tested either aged 11 or in their seventies suggests. The research 37 by Dr. Thomas Bak, from the centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, between 2008 and 2010. All participants said they were able to communicate in at least one language 38 English. 195 learned the second language before the age of 18, and 65 learned it after that time. The findings indicate that those who spoke two or more languages had 39 better cognitive abilities compared to what would have been expected from their baseline test. Dr. Bak said the pattern they found was “meaningful” and the improvements in attention, focus and fluency could not be explained by original intelligence. 40 , he admitted that this study also raised many questions, such as whether learning more than one language could also have the same positive effect on cognitive ageing and whether actively speaking a second language is better than just knowing how to speak it.

 In November, when India’s government unexpectedly scrapped 86% of the country’s currency notes, Vijay Shekhar Sharma seized the moment. As Indians scrambled to exchange the 41 notes for new currency, Paytm, Sharma’s digital payments startup, went on a promotional spree. With 42 ads, Sharma invited Indians to start using Paytm’s digital wallet to pay for everyday goods and services. 

It worked. By the end of 2016, Paytm had 177 million users, 43 122 million at the beginning of the year. Vijay had catapulted himself into a nation’s consciousness. It was a 44 by a small-town boy who studied in a Hindi medium school before conquering the country’s Anglophone startup world. Now backed by Jack Ma of Alibaba, an investor in Paytm, Vjjay is 45 into the more heavily regulated world of banking, with plans to offer digital accounts. He will face new challenges from deep-pocketed and more-experienced competitors, but knowing ViJay, he will win the next time around, too.

 Let children learn to judge their own work. A child learning to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time; if corrected too much; he will stop talking. He notices a thousand times a day the differences between the language he uses and the language those around him use. Bit by bit, he makes the necessary changes to make his language like other people’s. In the same way, children learn to do all the other things that they are not taught -to walk, run, climb, whistle, ride a bicycle-compare their own performance with that of more skilled people, and slowly make the needed changes. 

But in school we never give a child a chance to find out his mistakes for himself, let alone correct them. We teachers seem to do it all for him. We act as if we thought that he would never notice a mistake unless it is pointed out to him, or correct it unless he is made to. Soon he becomes dependent to the teacher. As a matter of a fact, we should let him do it by himself. Let him work out with help of other children if he wants it. 

If it is a matter of right answers, as it may be in mathematic or science, we should give him the answer book. Let him correct his own papers. Why should we teachers waste time on such routine work? Our job should help the child when he tells us that he can’t find the way to get the right answer. Let’s end all this nonsense of grades, exams, marks. Let us throw them all out, and let the children learn what all educated person must someday learn—how to measure their own understanding and how to know what they know or do not know.

 Let them go on with the job in the way that seems the most sensible to them with our help as school teachers if they ask for it. Perhaps anxious parents and teachers may ask “What if children fail to learn something essential which they will need to get on in the world? The answer may be “Don’t worry! If it is essential, they will go out into the world and learn it.”

Inter-language switching, once the pariah of language learners, is now an eminently respectable part of both bilingual language performance and linguistic analysis. Switching involves the use of more than one language code or system in an utterance. Such inter-language switching is endemic, creative and popular in many of the Outer Circle communities like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. In places like Singapore, it may routinely involve three languages or even more—in Singapore that means especially English, Chinese and Malay. 

Most studies of switching are concerned with the forms of languages. This can be phonological, as happens when we swap from authentic to foreign pronunciation. It can be morphological, for instance in the unstable realization of the plural in Asian Englishes in public signs. Such forms may well become either standard or fully accepted variants respectively in Macao and Malaysia. As things stand at present, however, this use (or not) of the plural is not standard, and constitutes switching or cross-code interference. 

Switching requires that both speakers share sufficient knowledge of two or more shared languages. It is also typically asymmetrical, in that one speaker will be more competent than the other, or that one speaker will make more accommodation than the other. This may involve the negotiation and choice of the language which the two speakers best share for communication, or it may involve the selection of language forms appropriate to the language level of both, and especially the weaker speaker. Switching is therefore a communicative strategy. It is often deliberate and strategic, as when a stronger speaker accommodates to a less competent interlocutor. But it can also be motivated by language gaps, when a speaker lacks command of language forms for a particular task of communication. And with really competent bilinguals switches can be part of competent, witty, expressive interpersonal communication, where the enjoyment and exploitation of language resources seem to emerge naturally, rapidly, and seamlessly in the flow of communication. Bilingual children do this with particular ease and unconscious grace. Switching is a natural part of finding appropriate expression for a message.

 In Dr. William Dement’s new book, he argues that a good night’s sleep saves lives. “There is plenty of compelling evidence supporting the argument that sleep is the most important predictor of how long you will live, perhaps more important than whether you smoke, exercise, or have high blood pressure or cholesterol level,” says Dement. Dement wants to alert the world about the power of sleep. He feels frustrated that so many people sacrifice sleep to meet the demands of endless days, that unnoticed sleep disorders shorten lives with heart attacks and strokes, and that people fall asleep while driving and cause fatal crashes. 

“I know about so many tragedies that I can’t even think about them anymore because I start to cry,” Dement said. A healthy person needs about seven to eight hours of sleep to feel wide awake and energetic for the entire day. If you brag that you can get by on just a few hours a night or if you feel you need nine to ten hours of slumber every night to feel good, you may need a sleep checkup. “When people think about sleep, they think about only one problem and that’s insomnia--when it’s really a vast terrain,” Dement says. Other disorders include sleep apnea (when a person stops breathing repeatedly during the night). In his book, Dement reports that every night more than 50 million Americans stop breathing and that apnea annually causes an estimated 38,000 fatal heart attacks and strokes in the United States. Apnea also causes extreme fatigue. Here is the good news: with treatment, sleep apnea can often be cured. 

When you sleep right, you rise feeling fresh and renewed. Your senses soak up simple pleasures, such as the clean smell of the air. It is Dement’s wish that everyone has that feeling, every day.