Anyone notice that they're throwing out known translations for these phrases? "Love was in the air", or maybe "a premonition of love"(for 恋の予感), "the spirit of the stairwell" (for l'esprit de l'escalier) is a bit ambiguous, but I'm sure that in context it would make sense, they're not linguistic constructs, but cultural ones.

It seems that every time somebody writes an article like this, they emphasize that sort of ill-conceieved reason for learning a language. If they want to talk about cognitive benefits, they should stick to that.