Chinese doctors were recently baffled by the curious case of a young woman who suddenly became unable to speak English, a language she had been fluent in.

Last week, Wan Feng, the director of the Department of Neurosurgery at Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital in Guangzhou, China, posted a video of a 24-year-old woman who had suddenly fallen ill during class one day and developed a very curious symptom – the woman had been proficient in English prior to the classroom incident, but after, she could only speak Mandarin and Cantonese. The young woman could still read and understand English perfectly, but for some reason, she could no longer speak the language at all.

“She could speak Mandarin and Cantonese,” Wan said. “The only thing she couldn’t speak was English. Because she had been studying abroad for more than a year, and her English was very good.”

Frightened about her sudden inability to utter a single word of English, the woman sought medical help and was admitted to the department of neurosurgery at Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital. At first, doctors here suspected that a tumor had affected the language function of her brain, but an MRI revealed that the left motor area of the woman’s brain had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. It was the bleeding that had affected her English-speaking ability.

Photo: Clarissa Watson/Unsplash

The woman underwent brain surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain, and immediately regained her old English speaking ability, allowing her to continue her studies abroad. However, her story sparked humorous comments on social media, with some users asking whether they could operate on them to help them speak foreign languages better.

“What kind of surgery is this? Can you speak English after the surgery?” one person jokingly said.

“Doctor, bed number three will be scheduled for a German surgery, thank you,” someone else commented.