Courting a love of words

When Zora O’Neill embarked on a trip through the Middle East in search of a new language, she was under no illusion as to the hardships she was about to face. Learning a new language to some sort of fluency, especially when approaching middle age, was not going to be easy. And the evidence against language learning at an older age was stacking up. A new study using an unusually large database of 669,498 people, pulled from a quiz on social media, bleakly concluded that our ability to learn new grammar declines after 17.4 years of age. And if you seek to learn grammar on par with a native speaker, start before you are ten years old, or so says the report. So how does that leave someone in middle age, or older still, who has fallen in love