Michael Erard said this quote

“ One of the first things to understand was how people knew what language to speak to whom. Where I've lived in the American Southwest, choosing to speak English or Spanish based on how someone looks is risky. If you try English and they don't speak it, you can switch to Spanish if you know it. But if you start with Spanish, you might offend: 'You don't think I speak English?' This can be the case if you're Anglo, even if you speak Spanish very well and just heard the other person speaking Spanish. When I described such an scenario to Indians, they couldn't relate — to them, choosing the wrong language wasn't embarrassing or politically charged. Or so they said. ”

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If you want big improvements, she said, chew gum. Gum? Sure enough, chewing gum has been shown to improve a person's immediate recall of learned words by some 24 percent. Long-term recall improves by a larger 36 percent. To get the benefit, you actually have to chew gum as you are studying; for some reason you can't merely move your jaw up and down. I also discovered that drinking sage tea increases one's recall of words modestly, as does the odor of rosemary. Something as mundane as coffee provides a benefit, too. Drinking two cups of coffee increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe, where working memory is controlled, and in the anterior cingulum, where attention is controlled.

~ Michael Erard

A related notion is that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn't think in any language. What people refer to as thinking in a language comes from being able to speak more immediately in a language without rehearsing it or translating it from a language one might know better; the spoken thought feels as if it's closer to its source in the brain.

~ Michael Erard

What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples — neat and discrete — and more like oatmeal. It's always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite political pressures to name them as if they were marbles.

~ Michael Erard

Why are there more male hyperpolyglots? One answer is that speaking a lot of languages is a geek macho thing (...) It seemed that a woman is less likely to say she speaks or knows a language if she studied it at some point in the past, while a man, wanting to display his giant repertoire, would include it.

~ Michael Erard