Learning a new skill always brings in some changes. And the same applies to learning languages too. Have you ever thought that if one starts to learn a new language it increases one’s brain activity, but slows it down as one becomes more and more proficient? This was all found in a study, conducted.

In the first few months, one can quantitatively measure language-skill improvement by tracking several brain activations. This has been said by one of the study co-authors Kuniyoshi Sakai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo, which he said in a school news release.

The study actually, included 15 native speakers of European languages who shifted to Tokyo and completed their introductory Japanese classes for at least 3 hours every day.

All of them were in their 20s. They had mainly studied English as kids or teenagers, but had never studied Japanese or travelled to Japan before.

After at least 8 weeks of lessons, and again 6 to 14 weeks later, the participants completed Japanese reading and listening tests while inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. It measured blood flow, an indicator of brain activity.

The starting MRIs revealed increased blood flow in certain regions of the brain. They included regions specialized for language, including grammar, comprehension, memory, and vision.

The heightened blood flow displayed that the volunteers were thinking hard to identify the characters and sounds of the unfamiliar language, the researchers explained.

In the second test, when the students became more skillful, the participants had lowered activation in the grammar center and comprehension area during listening tests, and in the visual areas of the occipital lobes when the reading tests happened

Co-author Sakai said we expect that brain activation falls down after successfully learning a language because it doesn’t need so much energy to understand.

This study was published on March 26 in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Perhaps, in the future, we can measure brain activations to specifically compare different methods to learn a language and select a more effective technique, the co-author said.

This study proves that learning a new language actually, has a significant impact on your brain activity. Specifically, more when one is in the initial phases of learning it.