Studying a foreign language is interesting because you learn a lot about how your own brain works in the process. I remember back in Psychology 101 at SDSU, being told that when you learn something while in a certain state, it’s easier to recall the information later while you’re in the same state. The example the teacher gave us was, if you’re dumb enough to study for a test while drunk (it was college after all), you’d do better on the test if you took it while in the same state of inebriation. While I’ve not tested this, I have noticed that memory seems to be tied to language in interesting ways. During my Japanese literature phase, when I was going to read all the classic works of writers like Soseki Natsume in the original Japanese, I read several interesting Japanese literary novels, including Kokoro, a story of a love triangle between in Meiji-era Kamakura. After reading it in Japanese, I found that I had difficulty remembering the plot when I talked about it in English, but discussing it in Japanese was actually easier.
