It absolutely adds advantage to those interested in literature, it allows you to see your first language outside itself and generally increases your understanding of your first language. I would consider that a cognitive advantage but it is not exactly an advantage for the general public. Interestingly (at least to me) I have found programming languages* even more beneficial in this sense which I also find ironic, stem sorts often seem to miss the nuances of spoken/written language but as a humanities sort the hard line logical brutality of programming languages has given me valuable perspective on the nuances of the spoken languages.
*I apparently forgot what this footnote was for, like I said, I am a humanities sort
Sounds like these were some kind of raw cognitive tests. I'm certainly in the camp that bilingualism is helpful in all sorts of ways, and is almost an objective way to be "smarter" - but if the paper's legit, presumably bilingualism doesn't automatically boost other cognitive functions (somehow I picture those things where you have to say which shape comes next)
>Sounds like these were some kind of raw cognitive tests.
Absolutely. Outside some niche areas being bilingual is not going to make you better at general problem solving, will come in handy on occasion in that you will see the problem from a perspective that you would not have without a second language but generally will not add much. Like I said, I am a humanities sort so these sorts of things tend to trigger me. I think for the majority of people a second language should be a pragmatic choice, not about some vaguely suggestive idea of increased cognition but directly about what learning that language will offer them.
And it also helps wonders in acquiring a third language, which can be very useful in its own right. When all you know is the language you were raised with adding another is hard work, once you have that second one the next one is so much easier. But I readily believe that knowing another language isn't suddenly going to make you better at math or physics or geography. It wouldn't make much sense, if anything I would expect you to be less good at other subjects because you've just filled up a bunch of your brain with knowledge leaving less room for other things assuming your storage is finite.
I would probably say if you are going to go to learning a third language than you would probably have been better off studying linguistics instead of that second language which will make all language acquisition easier. But hindsight, how many learn a second language with the intent of learning a third or forth? and once you learn that third you probably are going to have a decent intuitive grasp on linguistics even if you can not maintain a discussion with a linguistics major.
How is studying linguistics supposed to make language acquisition easier?
Linguistics is the academic study of languages.
My toddler is learning three languages growing up (English, Mandarin, German). She picks them up just fine, because she hears them spoken around her; I don't think she'd benefit from learning linguistics instead.
The same way in that a CS PHD is going to be able to pickup programming languages better and more quickly than someone who has learned C++ and python, they understand the underlying mechanics of language, what makes it work. But a toddler is something different, they primarily mimic and play with the language gauging function on result, how do people react to what I say. Learning languages from a young age is why the OP study shows no cognitive advantage and why people with only a single language tend not to have a good understanding of their language, it is a part of them.
But I was mostly speaking of peers, the sort who would be posting on HN, don't think we have many toddlers on the site. Learning multiple languages from a very early age seems to result in the languages being a single language from the perspective of the speaker, they have different situations in which they speak in different ways much like the average monolingual will speak more formally in a job interview compared to when they are out at the bar. Second and third, and etc languages are very different things between those that learned them from the start and those that learn them later in life.
> The same way in that a CS PHD is going to be able to pickup programming languages better and more quickly than someone who has learned C++ and python
Huh? This is about as convincing to me as the claim that learning linguistics makes it easier to learn a human language. It's also sort of a non-sequitor.
Someone who understands python and C++ would be trivially able to understand a massive swath of modern programming languages. I see little that having some deeper theoretical background would help.
And in human languages, even more so than programming, theory is almost irrelevant to regular practice. As the upstream comment says, we learn by practice, not by memorizing and applying rules.
>Someone who understands python and C++ would be trivially able to understand a massive swath of modern programming languages. I see little that having some deeper theoretical background would help.
Yes, they will be able to quickly pickup related languages with relative ease just as someone who knows a romance language will be able to pickup other romance languages without much difficulty. But that person who knows C++ and Pynthon with nothing of the underlying workings will have a more difficult time learning assembly, Forth or Lisp than a related language just as the person who knows a romance language will have a more difficult time learning Swahili than another romance language. Not a non-sequitor at all. When you look at CS or linguistics and how they relate to the languages they deal with what they really are are the study of what those languages have in common and understanding that will decrease what you need to learn when learning new languages.
Understanding a language and using a language are very different things and this is why toddlers can pickup languages with more ease than others, they do not care so much about understanding, and this is the primary limitation of our first language(s) and why being bilingual offers little cognitive advantage for most people.
I don't really know much about linguistics or linguists (though I would certainly believe that linguists find picking up new languages easier), but I don't think the analogy holds for a CS graduate.
PhD graduates don't have magic in-depth knowledge about programming languages. PhD graduates (in any field, really, not just CS), choose to dive very deeply into a very specific topic in their field. They do not just "go to more CS classes". They spend time becoming an expert on a very narrow topic. And for a CS PhD, that very likely would not be "general principles of programming language design".
I would not expect your average CS PhD to be any better at picking up new programming languages than a CS undergraduate.
Also, you asserted downthread:
> Understanding a language and using a language are very different things and this is why toddlers can pickup languages with more ease than others
No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition. As people age, their brain's change to optimizes learning skills for other tasks, and language acquisition skills usually suffer.
>PhD graduates don't have magic in-depth knowledge about programming languages.
No magic involved, they generally have a good understanding of how a computer functions which means they can relate a language directly 1:1 to what the computer is doing instead of relating it to what another language they already know does or by simple trial and error.
>No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition.
Toddlers are in the 12-36 month range, they primarily mimic and use language on simple cause and effect terms, if I say this than this is the result. They do not understand the concept of language or languages and if you teach them with multiple languages they do not see them as separate languages they see them as a sound and a result. We develop those distinctions and understanding of meaning during childhood and adolescence.
> The same way in that a CS PHD is going to be able to pickup programming languages better and more quickly than someone who has learned C++ and python, they understand the underlying mechanics of language, what makes it work.
... have you ever actually met anyone who got a PhD in CS? Because first off, very few people will actually study the "mechanics of language" in doing a CS PhD. If you're studying compilers or formal methods or maybe software engineering, sure, you'll study up on programming language semantics; but if you're learning AI or operating systems or computer architecture, you're very unlikely to touch those semantics. But even assuming you have someone who has actually taken those graduate-level courses (and I have!), it's not actually helpful for learning new languages. Learning semantics is essentially learning how to give meaning to the expression "a + b" (there are many ways to do this, and they have different tradeoffs), but if you want to learn a language, all you really want to learn is that "a + b" adds two numbers together, let's move on.
There's a similar gap between learning languages and being a linguist. As I understand it, most linguists are not polyglots (actually, I think a majority of them may be monolingual!), and most polyglots are not linguists. The linguist is the person who will tell you that English doesn't have a future tense: instead, you indicate the future by using specific helping verbs in the present tense. Anyone instructing English as a second language will slap the linguist on the head for being an idiot and tell you that the future tense in English is the "will X" construction.
Natural language acquisition uses specialised circuitry in brain, and doesn't really run on general logic / intelligence, like programming languages do.
That's why analogies between the two are of limited use at best.
The rest of your comment isn't really wrong. I even agree with most of it. It's just not really relevant to your point.
> Learning multiple languages from a very early age seems to result in the languages being a single language from the perspective of the speaker, they have different situations in which they speak in different ways much like the average monolingual will speak more formally in a job interview compared to when they are out at the bar.
Last I checked the research was still open on that one. What you are saying might work as a gross simplification, though.
> Second and third, and etc languages are very different things between those that learned them from the start and those that learn them later in life.
Yes. And exactly when you learn them and in what context also seems to make some context.
Where I grew up, a small EU country just knowing the local language would be super limiting. Here we learn Dutch, English, German and French in high school, and I picked up some Polish while living there. I'm not exceptional at all here and I'm nowhere near where someone who studies linguistics is.
Sure, and if you learned linguistics you would have been able to pick up those languages more quickly with a better understanding. But like I already said, most should learn languages for pragmatic reasons, what it offers them, not for some vague reasons. I guess my point was that there would be advantage to having people study linguistics in high school instead of a second (or third or whatever) language, give the students the ability to understand language instead of a language that many just forget after highschool. This changes with where you are in the world, some like yourself need more than one language just to get by but I do not think that rules out the utility of learning language in a more foundational/fundamental way.
You may well have a point. But: I know several people with a degree in linguistics and while it may help them to have a better idea of the structure and deeper understanding of languages in general it doesn't seem to help them at all in day to day communications with people in other languages. They tend to get hung up at the details of grammar and the finer points of sentence structure whereas what matters is to keep up the flow of information. Function over form any day. You see the same with music: people that know a ton of music theory can be very good musicians. But there are plenty of musicians who have a fairly shallow understanding of the theory but they pick up an instrument and start making music rather than to wonder about the theory behind it.
Language and music have a lot in common in that respect, it's perfectly possible to be proficient at either without having a very deep understanding of the theory as long as you are willing to put in the hours, and having that deep understanding is - as far as I've been able to discern - absolutely no guarantee for being good at making music or communicating with other people. It may help some but I doubt that it is the kind of thing that works for everybody in the way that you assert. It's hard enough to get kids to learn a new language, even if it has some direct applicability. Getting them to learn an abstract science which lays a foundation that they then may be able to apply to learning another language may well be one demand too many.
Still, for whoever it works it may be worth the extra investment in time and effort.
>it doesn't seem to help them at all in day to day communications with people in other languages.
Humanities sorts are terrible at communicating with those who are not humanities sorts, just as most doctors and lawyers are terrible at communicating their specialties to the laymen. I am not talking about studying linguistics to the ends of getting a degree in it but in a more pragmatic sense, if you want to learn a bunch of languages than it is very useful to learn what all those languages have in common so you do not have to relearn the same thing in new contexts, you just learn the contexts.
>Language and music have a lot in common in that respect, it's perfectly possible to be proficient at either without having a very deep understanding of the theory as long as you are willing to put in the hours
They do but becoming proficient is different than success. Satie and Bukowski were proficient but not at all ignorant but plenty have success while being ignorant. It is that pragmatism thing again, what are your goals, learning music theory will probably not help much if you want to become a success in a popular music genera but it could be very useful if you want to become a success across genres. Where do you want to shift the ignorance and the knowledge? what will be of most use to your goals.
So, that may not be what you are talking about when you 'talk about studying linguistics' but - and this is in a way very funny because it is exactly the point of this whole discussion and yet we seem to have a misunderstanding right there - it is what other people will interpret when they say that you should 'study linguistics'. Maybe not to the point where you'd get a degree in it but even as an extra field during your high school studies.
And in my experience your CS degree example simply fails: CS does not prepare you at all for dealing with the various programming languages and their implementations of various concepts. The parts of CS that would apply to that bit you can pick up in a few weeks by reading some books and even then you're going to be dealing with implementation details most of the time by the time you want to apply that knowledge.
If you understand variables, assignment, control structures (if, for, while, pattern matching etc) and abstraction mechanisms (subroutines, functions) then you've got the bulk of it. But it isn't going to help you more than a little bit in tackling a mid sized Java, Rails or C++ project.
If you were going to design a new programming language or write a compiler for an existing one then it may well help, and also if you are going to be working on novel data structures or to try to improve what's already there.
Being a linguist or studying linguistics may well help me to read works in dead languages or maybe to analyze other people's writings. Because that's the kind of stuff that I see the linguists around me do that seems to actually use their skills.
If there would be a single bit of advice that I could give to someone that intends to study multiple languages then it would probably be: take a year or two of Latin. Even though it is a dead language that little bit of foundation will help you gain a much easier entrance into other languages all over Europe (if those are the languages you intend to learn).
If you are going to study in language areas outside of that region, say Asia then I have no idea what would help other than to move there an immerse yourself for a couple of years.
The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual.
Second language acquisition research is a joke, you cannot transform your learning by deep diving on it.
And way too many linguists are barely capable of learning languages to fluency, it's not common for them to be polyglots. Being able to understand the hardest grammatical concepts in say Polish, Arabic, or Hungarian in a half hour doesn't imply one has any capacity to acquire those languages (producing output in real time involves none of the mental calculus done when grammar is consciously processed as a set of rules, except for a little editing after the fact in the "monitor" part of the brain, you can only fluently produce grammar, words, and prosody that have been acquired.).
I found this and I don't think there's any good proof he is bilingual...I will not set the bar so high for a coworker or friend but as a linguist I don't buy "used to be but I forgot it"
"He was once fluent in Hebrew, but told an Israeli journalist that he was now rusty, and conducted the interview in English."
> isn't suddenly going to make you better at math or physics or geography
There are other forms of intelligence. Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those. Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.
> Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those.
I've yet to have my other languages besides English help me
with studying of other concepts unless they were strictly
locally focused. Even my French didn't help in Canada where
it is more used as a means of exclusivity than one of
inclusivity and communications.
> Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.
It might be. But the vast amount of information in English is
such that you'll never exhaust it. I read about France in French
and about Germany in German mostly because I can, not necessarily
because I have to, the same subjects (in the news) are usually
also available in English. And as for texts that are only available
in say Chinese, French or German: I am aware that I will have to
forego anything only available in Chinese because the expected
pay-off from learning Chinese at my age is so low that I will spend
my time in some other way. But if I were much younger I might give
it a go.
But I doubt if it would make me any more intelligent.
There's always more to read in any language, but I'm not looking for more, I'm looking for the best, and they are certainly best read in their original languages. Shakespeare in Spanish can't be the same. I want to read Descartes in French, the great philosophers in Mandarin (or whatever form of Chinese they wrote in), etc.
You can assert there's no value to you, but many assert otherwise. I'm not sure there's value in our individual assertions.
Also, there's a lot of evidence that language drives cognition; that how we perceive and think about the world is constrained and influence by our language, and that other languages enable us to see and understand the world in other ways.
Connections across cultures and broader abilities to empathize are exactly what a general public or a society needs to be healthy. Humanities should not try to assert its worth in utilitarian terms; by playing that game it has already given up its own.
I agree with programming's effect on natural languages, and I think it goes both ways. Programming makes me a more precise punctuator, while Shakespeare makes me comment in couplet.
That seems to reflect my lived experience. Do bilingual people in general seem to be more intelligent? I don't think so.
But, like many other things in life, the access of even a second language in my opinion gives you another tool to use as intellectual leverage to gain greater or richer understanding to many specific domains that you would otherwise require someone else to digest the information for you.
That doesn't mean you can have the tool and immediately gain the benefits of having it. It just means that compared to someone who does not have the ability to speak a second language, you have less friction to access domains of knowledge locked behind languages other than your native tongue.
Having a second car doesn't automatically mean I travel more. But if I used that other one specifically for roadtrips, it puts me in a category of people that is far smaller than the general population or even the general population of drivers.
If “bilingualism” is expanded even further to include having wealthy parents who are legacies at Harvard, I would say it does have an effect on outcomes.
I have to imagine there are parallel benefits as well. Just as a Java developer will become a better Java developer by learning programming languages with other paradigms, I have to believe knowing multiple spoken languages has tangible benefits outside of understanding the language itself.
A Java developer becomes a better Java developer if they learn alternative concepts that Java doesn't empasize as much. Learning Lisp, Haskell or C is going to be useful, for example.
But a Java developer won't become a better Java developer if they learn C#, which is basically Java with different capitalization conventions.
I guess something like that happens for natural languages. You get those benefits if you actively learn new concepts. The difference of course is that you are unlikely to have done that purely by being bilingual. Many bilingual people just picked up 2+ languages as they were growing up.
A confounder in the above study could be that they counted pairs like European languages and English as two different languages when in reality they are very similar.
knowing english and german is not knowing two full languages imho. you’ll get more exposure to german culture but it’s not the same as knowing English and a slavic or asian language.
I speak French, English and Spanish. In that order.
Some concept exist in one and not the other. Addressing someone in a formal way. Addressing a group a once ( “y’all” )
But I know bits and pieces of German, Latin and Polish… those have lots of grammatical differences that force you to think about the structure of your sentence. Recognize a datif from a ablatif. That type of things.
It actually help with writing correct French.
But I’m not sure it would make me “better” like learning a functional language or ASM made me a “better” developer.
I'm not so sure. Natural languages are not very much like programming languages.
When you speak a language fluently you're able to speak and understand without thinking about it. Children can be fluent with no formal training in grammar. Meanwhile, for me at least, programming is the opposite: I have to learn all the rules on a formal level and my mind can't wander while I'm programming at all.
I think the benefits of knowing more natural languages are pretty clear: the ability to speak to and understand more people. Plus the art, entertainment, and other cultural productions you get access to.
French being my first language, I can says the same things with fancier words in english.
But sometime I will use English turn of sentences in French and it sounds weird ( just did it a l’envers here, pretty sure “turn of sentence” does not exists in English )
I’m ok at Spanish too. My main motivation is to be able to talk to random peoples when traveling.
English came de facto because of the internet and US soft power.
Not sure it makes me better at writing or speaking.
“Anglo-Saxon” is a bit of a broad term… you might describe Modern English as Mercian (an Anglian dialect), with lots of Saxon, Old Norse, and Old Norman influences. As well as other influences; I think those are the big ones.
Just to give an example of why “Anglo-Saxon” might be too broad a term—surviving Old English texts like Beowulf are in what you might call Late West Saxon, and the differences between Saxon and Anglian dialects help explain why Chaucer, who spoke something you might call Anglo-Norman, is much more accessible to modern readers.
If you want more of that Saxon influence, listen to West Country English, where it survives today.
In France I would blame post ww2 soft power. The old cliché about French gents not speaking English is irrelevant for anybody under 40yo.
It’s interesting to see French word in English from the William the conqueror period, too. ( like “phrase” from above or the tired example “sheep” vs “mutton” )
One thing bilingualism has allowed me to do is differentiate better between the words and the things the words represent. This is mostly driven by words from different languages that translate to each other, not sharing all meanings of words. Of course I cannot think of an example right now that usefully illustrates how this leads to insights. It has explicitly come up in some philosophical discussions with friends and family who were going down a path intellectually that was driven more by the language than what it represents.
IMO, your programming language comparison is somewhat similar in that even knowing multiple, similar languages allows you to differentiate between the syntax and the concepts expressed by the syntax. E.g. different ways of constructing classes and objects in different languages will make you understand the core of OOP better, similarly to different ways to loop, etc.
> But, like many other things in life, the access of even a second language in my opinion gives you another tool to use as intellectual leverage to gain greater or richer understanding to many specific domains that you would otherwise require someone else to digest the information for you.
personal example, but after studying mandarin for many years, i can read original texts (like novels, non-classic poetry, and so on) without having to wait for someone to translate it first
- You can not be an effective software developer if you don't speak English (it's a second language to many of us).
- If you are interested in literature, history, philosophy or adjacent fields, reading sources in their original language is an advantage. Philosophers are more likely to be fluent in German, for instance.
- Reading news in foreign languages is often illuminating.
- Most translations are just extremely horrible. I can only understand a tiny amount of languages, but I'd rather put in the effort to read in a foreign language than suffer through bad translations.
Probably depends if your view is outside of a popular language looking in or inside a popular language looking out.
If you only speak English you probably aren't lacking access to to many fields of study. If you a one of the few who only speak Koro, you probably feel differently about to volume of knowledge available to you.
One benefit if you know another language, you are more likely to have experienced living in a different culture. So you may take a more meta and critical view of the current cultural trends, not feeling as much pressure to conform.
I am a mild pariah among my parent friends for suggesting that 'spanish immersion daycare' was a way of recruiting lower-cost childcare workers (in the USA).
They're everywhere, and it seems they are the most common type of daycare, actually. (upper midwest, usa)
Sort of related: in english Canada, french immersion often ends up being a way to send your kids to a better public school, and for whatever reason the english / french kids (as in enrolled in those programs) tend to split along socioeconomic lines.
It's seen as a step up in quality, but almost entirely because you're self selecting into the pool of parents who are more invested into improved education. There's also a sense that the "problem" kids are going to be concentrated in the English track. So win win.
I'd be curious to learn/chat more about how you're approaching it as a French-speaking parent. :)
I'm a native English speaker/~B1 French speaker trying to very intentionally create a bilingual household environment. It's not pure immersion, but I can (and do) narrate what I'm doing for most daily activities in French, read aloud in French, consume French audio, etc. All much to the bemusement of my own French mentor, who's validated that I'm not instilling a terrible accent, but is also getting peppered with questions in my search for French children's literature.
My kid is barely 2yrs, so my plans for English immersion are still vague, but here goes:
- consuming all media in the original language instead of dubs
- kindergarten already does some bilingual exploration, she's a native English speaker
- Later on I intend to do an "English day" each week at home where we would only converse in English. From my personal experience, the best path to fluency is having no choice but to speak in a given language. I also want to create boundaries to prevent mixing the two languages.
About french children's book, I could send you a mail about it. Depending on the age of your kids "la courte échelle" has great stuff.
This is an awesome way to provide both an extra language when kids don't have much else to do and fit it easy to pick them up, _and_ it saves on costs? What could be better?
Yeah, kinda weird to point it out as if there is some conflict of incentives between costs and benefits. It's a pretty darn good language to pick even if you just wanted your child to learn another language regardless of costs.
I'm only saying that the primary motivation for Spanish immersion, good or bad, is probably cheaper child care costs, for the center, not the parent. Our kids are in one. Or were, until we moved.
As a parent of a 5 year old entering K this coming fall, we were set on the Spanish immersion program at our public school. Less expensive childcare costs never factored into the decision, and learning of cost savings is a bit of a shock to me. I never considered that aspect to private programs.
better could be having a work life balance system or remote work setting where the child can grow up with the love and attention a caring mother could provide
You know kids like hanging out with other kids. It’s fantastic for socialization. They generally enjoy getting to hang out and learn with other kids all day.
Back in the day when people had huge families and lived with their cousins, kids got this built in, but I think the idea of having a few kids that don’t get to see other kids every day with a stay at home mother is actually fairly unnatural.
You know what would be even better? If everyone got a pony and a puppy and a million dollars! But that's not really feasible to provide for everyone (at the moment).
You're down voted by the fanatics here, but there's nothing wrong at all in what you said.
In some countries everybody is convinced that you should send away your kids early so they learn to "socialize", whatever that is. If you don't do it you are insane and a threat to society.
In some countries everybody is convinced that you should wait years longer before you send away your kids, because they are not biologically developed enough yet to be away from the mother. If you send them early you are insane and a threat to society.
What seems to be the rule is that 99% will defend the status quo or what their government says, no matter what the status quo is and no matter what it is their government is actually saying. During the pandemic, this meant that literal science around the virus was different depending on where you lived and who ruled you - and few people thought that was strange.
As for caring for young children, I think it depends mostly on the mother. Some mothers think it's boring to take care of their kids after a while or even hate being with their children all the time. They should leave them with day care or a relative if they can. Some mothers love spending all their time with their kids. It's a shame if they have to leave them with day care because they have to work to pay more taxes and tributes.
Probably depends on where you live or want to travel. Spanish is of limited use in Europe and Africa, of almost no use in Asia, and massively useful in the Americas.
Globally speaking, German is useless, unless you're European and trying to find a job in Germany because it pays better than your home country. The only German speaking country is full of educated people who also speak fluent English. You'll never meet an internationally minded German who doesn't speak excellent English. Spanish, however, is spoken in an entire continent, which also has a very low level of English, plus several other countries and is closely related to other latin/romance languages, giving you a head start on learning/understanding those.
Chinese/Mandarin might be super useful if you're living in China or a nearby country, but a) why would you want to live in China if you're not Chinese? And b) the language of international business in China is still English.
I agree that German isn't especially useful globally, but you're wrong on a couple points:
- There are several countries with German as an official language, and a few other with German-speaking minorities. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium all have it as an official language (though the last few are not terribly significant). There are also around half a million native German speakers in Italy. It's also useful as approximately the root language of Germanic languages, and makes it faster to pick up e.g. Dutch and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian languages.
- All internationally minded Germans do not speak English. Large swaths of Germans speak no, or only basic travelers' English. That everyone speaks English in Germany is an illusion that English speakers experience in Germany because they largely mix with only one social class, and the non-English speakers are invisible to them.
(I'm a native English speaker and fluent German speaker who's lived in the US and Germany for equal amounts of my life. My girlfriend, for example, is not comfortable in English, nor are quite a few of my friends, particularly those that are blue collar, somewhat older, or from the east.)
Good point about the other German speaking countries. I don't really know why that slipped my mind.
But the social class thing you mentioned is kind of my point. I think it's pretty much true in all of those German speaking countries, that if you only want to interact with service workers in cities and professional, college educated, internationally minded people, you will have plenty of people to talk to and might not ever feel a need to know German.
Yeah, probably the chancellor and foreign minister were the only two from their generation that were educated, internationally minded and don't speak English.
Her English is pretty bad. The commenter I was replying to insisted all internationally minded Germans speak excellent English. That's false for Angele Merkel and Guido Westerwelle, and it's literally impossible to find more high profile counterexamples.
Yeah, you're totally right. Angele Merkel was definitely not internationally minded. (She does not speak English well, nor did her foreign minister.)
It's also a pretty terrible thing to assume that everyone who wasn't born into the upper class isn't internationally minded. Again, my girlfriend doesn't speak English well because she's from a working class family from the east, but she's been to a couple dozen countries, and manages a team of people from several countries.
You can learn Cantonese for fun, but Mandarin is more useful for business or travel.
> It's the 3rd most spoken language in the US
That's interesting, but why would that influence your decision which language to learn? Almost all the Cantonese speakers in the US probably speak English, and there aren't that many in the grand scheme of things? (Especially compared to total number of Mandarin speakers.)
It's all subjective. I learned Spanish at the defense language institute and then used it extensively in South America and Mexico for work and travel and it opens so many doors. One thing is that I'm not hispanic so people see me speaking it there and it blows their minds. For hispanic people if they don't speak it they are judged and if they do, they're judged somewhat if it's not up to snuff so maybe your experience in those situations is different.
I had friends who went through the same language school for Chinese and German among other languages and they never used it. All the German linguists got reclassed into other languages like Spanish in the 90s. Last year I went on vacation to Puerto Vallarta and it was so useful even in a tourist heavy place like that. But I am sorry you do find it useless and I don't doubt it based on whatever your daily life is like and hobbies.
On a separate note it's not too late to learn Chinese or German!
Show me any German native speaker under 50 who’s not fluent in English. Language groups with small numbers of English competency is going to get you much further.
I am surprised that someone might think it should. When I consider my extended family, more than half of them use two or even three languages on a daily basis but in terms of “smarts” seem to be normally distributed, with no special correlation in this regard.
So I’m unsurprised by the conclusion of a rigorous and larger study.
This is just an observational study. It seems fairly useless for understanding whether a given person will be smarter if they learn a second language.
Looks like the “controlled for” socioeconomic status, but I doubt this fully captures the difference in populations between bilingual and non-bilingual people.
It could be that the population of bilingual people, had they not been bilingual, might have scored lower on these tests, and therefore being bilingual brought them up to par. Impossible to tell.
A result that can only be surprising in places where monolingualism is the norm, like the US, and knowledge of other languages (outside of those acquired from one’s family) is taken as a sign of erudition. If you’ve ever spent time in countries like Switzerland, you’d know their are plenty of people who speak 2 or more languages but are otherwise of average intelligence.
Switzerland is a bad example, because it's socially and multilingual.
Whereas if one looks at basically monolingual societies (e.g. most of the countries in Europe) one find that not only is not everyone bilingual (and no, "everyone" does not speak English) -- multilingualism definitely correlates with class and education.
Why would Switzerland be a bad example in this context? The point of the study is that bilingualism does not afford cognitive advantage, so you have to consider countries where bilingualism is not associated with the factors you cite to see if this bears out. Pointing at other countries that function in the same way as the US in regard to a dominant language would just demonstrate more of the same as is found there.
It's understandably hard to get actual numbers on the proportion of bilingual people.
There is a semi-random 50% number thrown around, but just to take the two biggest countries, there's no way we get accurate data on people in India and China given their size and lack of reporting of the inner regions. In China in particular, no one will boast about being fluent in a non-official language in a survey.
I think the same thing happen at smaller scale in european countries. There will be one official language, and whether people are bilingual or not won't be assessed more than striclty needed. The only study I saw were for educational purpose for small kids, out of that there will be no specific tracking of a Georgian immigrant starting a family in Germany, or a Spanish businessman being fluent in Italian because of his girlfriend.
It's understandably hard to get actual numbers on the proportion of bilingual people.
It's not "easy" to get the data but it's a well-studied topic. As attended to by people who presumably have thought about the matter and know what they're doing.
So I'll take their number (at around 60 percent for multilingualism) at face value. Seems to correlate with observations from traveling (through which one rapidly makes the amazing discovery that no, not "everyone" speaks English or is otherwise bilingual).
I kinda became sceptic of "trust us, it's ok" assumptions in many fields. I trust experts, but I also trust them to give insights on how they deal with the complexity, even if we don't look at the actual numbers etc.
For instance on this specific study all the research is based on Cambridge Brain Science/Creyos, and that gives me pause on how much the results are reliable (they are still valuable, way better than nothing, but might have huge flaws as well)
In that respect I'd like to know how they deal with "the gov might deport us in reeducation camp if we're too loud about our original culture" kind of situation, and wouldn't be surprised if the answer was "we pull numbers out of a magic hat", as it has been in many very prominent studies.
This might be a thing where the correlation was the other way, so people got it in their heads that doing the thing would make them smarter.
Like any time you see an article about how intelligent people drink more coffee, or swear more, or wear hats more often than others. So people start cursing into their mugs while adjusting their caps.
And, it might be true. It probably is true. But none of those things made them intelligent. So intelligent people might have been more likely to have learned and spoke a second language. But that didn't make them intelligent. So aping the trappings of intelligence won't make you intelligent.
This is just an anecdotal data point but my mother was bilingual and near the end of her life had a stroke. It impacted her language-- but mostly for English, not nearly as much her native language.
She could understand both English and Italian, but would almost entirely speak Italian, not even realizing which language she was speaking. Is that a "cognitive advantage"? Maybe? I am not qualified to answer that.
But to me it suggests that perhaps more "real-estate" in the brain takes on language when one is bilingual.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but as I understand it losing a particular ability is usually a sign of brain damage. It is likely that she learned English as an adult (or older than a toddler at least) and it was being stored in a more specific and more constrained area of the brain.
i think the point here was that it might be useful to have language redundancy so that brain damage which robs you of one language may leave you with some of your backups
Someone close to me suffered something similar, she lost Spanish but kept the ability to speak Lithuanian (Her native language) shortly before her death, doctor commented that it was something he had seen before
It made treatment complex, because no one knew enough Lithuanian to communicate to the degree necesary
Yes, depending on where the stroke/aneurysm the effect can be totally different. I had one a few years ago, I was still able to chat with my colleagues and the hospital staff in Japanese and English, as well as in French (my native language) with my family back in France. However when looking at texts in French or English, I was recognizing the letters but putting them together I wasn't recognizing the meaning behind them. It took me a few days before being able to decipher them again, but it took me 3 weeks before recovering a decent reading speed.
But some blood that had escaped in my skull at that time was blocking some nerves linked to the vision, so I had a dead angle of around 45 degrees on my right side until the blood naturally disappeared.
I believe there was indeed some research done in the past in which multi-lingual people would generally recover better from strokes compared to people knowing only a single language.
Perhaps additional "connections" are made in the brain that can be used when other "connections" are broken due to stroke.
Anecdotic-ally, my father also recovered quite well from his stroke and he knew Dutch, English and likely a bit of latin languages as well (had Italian and Chinese penfriends when he was young, often used Latin proverbs, ...).
Strokes that effect language come in two forms. One of which is you can understand speech but can't generate it (you can respond to verbal requests but your speech comes out as word salad if any). The other is you can generate speech but not parse it (you superficially participate in conversation, but its entirely one sided as your responses have nothing to do with what was just said). I don't know enough to tell you about multi-lingual cases.
Was your mother a late bilingual? From this paper [1], we know that for late bilinguals, regions for each language are spatially separated in Broca's area. Broca's area is responsible for speaking, while language understanding is attributed to Wernicke's area*. It's possible that the stroke affected only the part of the Broca's region responsible for English speaking. And since language understanding is handled by another region, it wasn't affected.
*For completeness, according to current neurolinguistic models it's more complex than that, more brain regions are actually responsible for speech/understanding.
English is not very widely spoken in Mexico overall, with only around 12% of the population speaking it, and only a small number of these being truly fluent.
Estimates are that only 5% of Brazilians can speak English, and most of those speakers are middle- and upper-class professionals living in larger cities.
Everyone? I’m the only one in my large American family (all the way through to second cousins, etc) or friend groups (excluding foreign born) who has any competency in any foreign language - and not even to fluency. Monolingual is the norm in the US with the exception of Spanish speaking immigrants.
It would be pretty easy to come up with criteria that support or dismiss benefits of learning two languages, or any pair of specialties at all given inherent tradeoffs
For example, folks who learn programming languages early and intensively have a certain analytical advantage. But this is not a positive in all situations. We all have limited energy/time/focus, so each area we learn necessarily costs us in other areas.
And that’s great. We should develop strengths and build on them. Our lives are short and our attention is limited
I couldn't get access to the article, and the abstract gives no relevant detail to what they are assessing on which subjects... do the other commenters have an access to it, or could eventually tell us more about how this study was done ?
As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!
I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four languages, I always feel as if I'm lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. I wish I only needed to speak one language, saving my mental capacity for other things. Constantly juggling languages doesn't help.
The main benefit of knowing multiple languages in everyday life is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.
Moreover, all my friends from my country also speak four languages. Unfortunately, I don't hear of people from Moldova faring much better than others.
*My mother tongue is Romanian, but everyone in Moldova also speaks Russian (due to the Soviet past). At school, I learned French and later studied in France. I picked up English mainly through computers and the internet. Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn. I don't feel any advantage in learning a new language either.
I would gladly trade Russian and French over knowing Dutch right now ;o) There are months when I don't speak those two so they are of little use for me anymore.
I am also originally from Moldova and speak the same 4 languages. If I had to guess, this is fairly common in Moldova -- at least in private schools.
I would say there is a very mild advantage, even recognizing vaguely similar words in other languages when traveling. I find Russian to be very useful in a way that French and Romanian aren't.
English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish are the most "useful" as they each unlock a large part of the world that tends to prefer its own.
Oh, salut ! (Romanian "salut" not French "salut", lol)
It's indeed still useful when traveling to those countries that speak these languages. But that's mere few weeks per year. English could have worked anyway as everyone is becoming proficient in English.
I always loved the Romanian joke where someone says "mersi" and then you reply "oh, I didn't know you were French" but I suppose that comes up with many words.
I mentioned it at the end but yeah, probably on par with the others. It "unlocks" all of Latin America minus Brazil and few Dutch/French territories, but even Brazilians speak varying amount of Spanish.
I've found that with Brazilians, even if they don't speak Spanish, I can speak Spanish at them and scrape by. It's much easier that me relying solely on English to communicate, fwiw.
I don't agree on French not being very useful it has lost some status but you can get by with it in many places of the World and I would put Hindi and Swahili on that list too.
> Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!
This has been my experience as well. My native language is English, and I do just fine in it. But I've also studied a couple other languages, and when I try to put together sentences, whatever word is closest sometimes pops out.
I almost never find myself accidentally sticking English words into sentences, but I will frequently mix words from my second and third languages. It's brutal.
A friend of mine whose languages are Japanese, English, Spanish and Korean (in that order) told me that learning the third language is the hardest. Once you figure out how to stick to just one language at a time, learning more languages is a lot easier.
My experience is similar, the third language is indeed a problem. When learning the first foreign language in my mind it was "native vs other". Then when adding the third any gaps in my vocabulary would be filled by the previous language in a sort of layered cache approach. Unfortunately it is hardly ever useful to find the right Spanish word when you want a Japanese one.
English has a reputation of excessively borrowing words from foreign languages. I don't think English is actually any more prone to doing this any other languages, but English does have a stronger habit of insisting on using foreign spellings and pronunciations for words.
I wonder if it's different if you've studied the language vs if you grew up with it.
I learned polish from my parents when growing up and English from living in Canada and cartoons. My native tongue is English but I can speak polish fairly well and read and write it. I don't ever feel like I accidentally reach for polish or English words when I need the other.
I had the same experience. German was my second, Chinese Mandarin my third. The first two years I was learning Mandarin, I found reading, writing and listening were fine. However, when it came to actually speaking, I was constantly stuttering because my brain wanted to substitute in German words instead of Mandarin words.
My girlfriend at the time natively spoke two languages (English and Hokkien) but was less proficient in both than many people who were only native speakers of one of them. She did, however, manage to pick up Mandarin a whole lot easier than I did.
Exactly, I'll find myself doing translations in my head while speaking in English (my second language). And I find interacting socially much smoother in my native tongue.
I'm not sure if that relates directly to being able to connect deeply with the society of my upbringing, or that there is some hidden neural pattern there? For what it's worth, I've now been speaking English primarily longer than my mother tongue.
A difference might be related to idioms and slang. For example, in English, I might want to say that some commitment "isn't worth it," whereas in French, it might be more natural to say « ça ne vaut pas la peine » (literal translation: it's not worth the pain). Or I might want to say, "that's just the way things are," but the more natural French translation is « c'est la vie » (literal translation: it's the life, or "that's life").
Perhaps in one's native tongue, the idioms and phrases that are fitting to an idea come to mind easily, whereas in a second language, you may need additional effort to find roughly equivalent phrases that are not exact translations.
That may or may not be relevant to the thinking pattern you were mentioning, though I figure the lack of direct translations can sometimes be a barrier to fluency. The idea of "untranslatability" (aka the lack of a direct translation) was also explored last week in an interesting HN discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35629354
That difference between the literal word-by-word translation [1] and the semantic translation is my point of focus.
In English, my suggested translation would be that “It isn’t worth it.” But since this word-for-word translation would feel unnatural (that is, it’s typically better to introduce « la peine » even if the word trouble/pain wasn’t in the original sentence), there can be an extra cognitive load that interrupts fluency.
With enough conscious practice to train this, the translation of common idioms can become automatic. But meaningful translation instead of literal translation of idioms (especially of those more rarely used) can be a potential reason for someone to stop thinking in a target language, and revert to one’s native language to start thinking of the most natural translation for the phrase.
As another example, if I want to say “When pigs fly” in French, my instinct is to stop and use another phrase because the word-by-word translation is probably unnatural. In this case, my instinct is correct, as the proper meaningful translation is « Quand les poules ont les dents » (word-by-word translation: ‘When chicken have teeth’). So, dealing with idiom translation is an added mental effort to translate, which may cause thinking in one’s native language for some people.
The variations of the idiom's translations are definitely interesting. If you're curious to read more about the language variations, Le Figaro has a nice article about the idiom's equivalent in other languages (though they use the variant « quand les poules auront les dents »).
From Le Figaro [1]: « Précisons enfin que notre expression est un idiotisme et qu'elle ne possède pas, par conséquent, de stricts équivalents à l'étranger. Ainsi nos voisins anglais ont-ils l'habitude de dire «quand les cochons voleront», les Espagnols, de lancer «quand les grenouilles auront des poils» et les Allemands, de flanquer un «quand les poissons apprendront à voler». »
English translation: "Finally, let us specify that our expression is an idiom and that it does not, therefore, have strict equivalents abroad. Thus our English neighbors are used to saying "when the pigs fly", the Spaniards say "when the frogs have hair" and the Germans say "when the fish learn to fly."
Thanks; I didn't know "idiom" is "idiotisme". Nice.
The examples from Figaro all seem to have their verb as a subjunctive in French, so "When pigs would fly" - we usually say "If pigs had wings", or "Yeah, and pigs might fly". Your translations don't carry the doubt that words like "might" and "if" impart. There are hardly any/no verbs in English that still have a subjunctive distinct from the indicative, a fact that I regret.
There are some places in England (north east) where they pronounce the subjunctive of "to be", even though it isn't written distinctly; they say "If I wear a rich man". I think it's from the German, as in "Wenn ich wäre".
If you have to translate in your head when using your non-native language that you have not mastered the language enough yet. I often think in english nowadays even if it is not my native or my everyday language, no translation required.
Each language has advantages in certain contexts.
> The main benefit of knowing multiple languages is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.
Hah, that's the least of benefits IMO. I'm not sure if you have no interest in the following or just forgot them, but these are things I enjoy: literature in the native language, comparing words and idioms and understanding how different languages influence each other and also how different cultures led to the creation of certain idioms. Conversations with people in their native tongue when I travel and the stories, adventures, and knowledge that unlocks.
To anyone reading this who only speaks English, while I agree with this person and the study that I don't necessarily feel smarter, learning another language is absolutely worth it for the advantages I stated above. My life is more rich because of it.
Completely agree with you, I have the same experience, just that instead of French, it's Spanish for me. In French I am not fluent, but it still adds up to the mess.
As someone who also speaks four languages, I agree with most of your post but here are some more advantages I can think of:
* Access to more media
I regularly consume newspapers, subreddits and similar in other languages to get different points of view on things.
Then there's literature and films (especially the ones that don't have translations)
* Ease of travel (this is highly dependent on the languages you know)
* Connecting with people.
Simply switching to someone's native tongue gives you a familiarity with someone that takes much longer to get if you're speaking their 2nd (or 3rd) language.
* Bragging
Especially in the US/UK you'll get a lot of positive comments from people because they think you're some kind of genius (which the study above disproves...)
Before I started working, I thought knowing this many languages would be helpful in the business world, turns out I have barely ever used them as the working language is always English.
I speak three and echo the above. English gets you most of the way in most places, but you can form stronger connections if you can meet others on their home turf instead of making them come to yours.
Might not afford you IQ points but it does afford you diplomacy points.
But these are confounding factors related to your socio-economic status. You're probably smarter than someone who is too poor to travel, uneducated, and who will die in the same village they were born. But it's not because you know more than one language.
Assimil Dutch is an amazing course! It brings you to B2 in about 45 hours of applied study (just doing as the instructions tell you!) I really like Assimil courses in general but the polyglot community widely believes that the Dutch course is their best of all.
You can also find it online, but be sure to find the audio files also. They are essential. Each of the 100+ lessons are like this: After rereading the lesson text with the notes until you can read it without assistance - you then listen to the audio until you can understand the audio without reading the text, then you say it out loud until you can say it at the same speed as the audio without difficulty. So half of the course length involves the audio.
I speak 7 (4 acquired as a child, 1 in school, and 2 as an adult) and I find I'm able to understand understand cultural nuances better, which helps me to bridge cultural gaps and have multi-perspectival views on most things. (this is quite apart from the unproven Sapir-Whorf hypotheses stuff about language influencing thoughts -- it's not like that at all). Having multiple languages simply gives me affinity for multiple cultures and helps me pay attention to certain details that are easily missed by people not of that culture.
Being able to live between cultures isn't necessarily something that is prized by many, but having been an outsider in every culture I've ever lived in, this ability has helped me become a chameleon and blend into new cultures (corporate cultures, community cultures etc.) in order to feel a sense of belonging.
So the benefits for me are purely sociological -- I agree that being multilingual confers little advantage in terms of performing executive tasks (which is what the linked article was testing).
You've probably invested thousand of hours in learning all of those languages. Some just by circumstance/luck (maybe something like this? mom speaking 1 language, dad speaking another, both speaking a common language, the place you were in having another secondary language), some through your own efforts.
As always, the real question we can't really test is: what could you have done with probably literal person-years of study/research/leisure time, instead?
Because Mister Offensive Tone, I know that there are trade offs to everything and sacrifices to be made with each choice. And I am not convinced that all that time I spent learning those other languages was spent wisely.
I have also noticed by moving to a country which is hyper focused on everyone learning many languages that it creates a ton of resentment and loss of other abilities, for example reduced STEM skills.
Right, learning many languages is subject to diminishing returns. European languages look barely distinguishable to me, so learning them would be a waste of time.
The investment you’re talking about is likely minimal. They only acquired two as an adult. There is time being spent there but learning a language is a fun and rewarding activity, which tends to become easier the more of them you know.
I speak 5 and had gotten used to being the exception; then I moved to Brussels and it’s normal here to meet people who speak even more, far more fluently than I do.
I was at this board game Meetup and met this young Ukrainian kid the other day. 13 years old. She was speaking fluent Russian and would switch to perfect French to speak to us, while following the conversation we were having in English. Her mom mentioned she speaks Ukrainian, and that her lessons are in Dutch at school. 13 years old - damn.
Anyway yeah when you have a good technique and some experience, learning a new language can be much quicker, and very passive.
There are different levels of investment and different level of expectations, and I say this as someone that speaks 3 languages (Romanian, English, French) and understands a few others at a basic level (German, Italian, Spanish).
Children have a very limited vocabulary and tend to make a lot of mistakes (grammar, word usage and pronunciation mistakes) and those mistakes are easily overlooked, especially by adults, since we tend to try to encourage them. Not the case for adult learners.
The second difficulty level is <<cultured>> native speaker. This is massively more difficult since you need to advance from maybe a basic 5-10-15k words to probably 20-40-60k words.
To give you an example of C2, for Romanian you need to be at least a well educated high school student and really understand finer details of Romanian grammar. A native Romanian speaker who hasn't finished at least high school at a good high school is probably a bad C2, despite being a native speaker (or more likely a decent C1).
Now, you obviously don't need to be at the highest level for every language you know, but the gap in effort between levels is huge and people underestimate that. Most people that speak multiple languages are probably somewhere around B1-B2 at most of them. Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.
The CEFR is a tool to evaluate proficiency, but it's misleading if you look at it as a "ladder" with "native" at the top". Most adults aren't C2 in their own native language, despite "investing" sometimes hundreds of thousands of hours "learning" it.
This video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj5qPF_puU] by Olly Richards sums up my feelings on the definition of fluency. Personally, I believe even as early as B2 you can call yourself a fluent speaker, because it's roughly the level where you stop struggling to express your thoughts or to understand other people's. But it also depends how you have learned. B2 can look very different depending on whether it was leared in mostly academic vs literary vs spoken contexts.
> Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.
Those tend to be cultural. My native language is French, but I cannot browse /r/france without wondering wtf everyone's talking about. I'm extremely disconnected from French culture as I moved out when I was 14, so I never experienced adulthood in French and I had to learn things like what "Pôle emploi" is or some such. I'm still C2 in French,
I also do make mistakes in English, but I catch plenty of native English speakers make egregious mistakes or not know fairly basic things about their own language. Another commenter mentioned the their/they're your/you're distinction is one that natives tend to mess up more often than non-natives; anecdotally, that seems correct to me.
I find this discussion absurd. Here's a paper that most people have not read and then add their own subjective anecdote to it to confirm their personal opinion.
Has anyone bothered to look at the tests that determine cognitive ability in this context? Here's one(or it's advanced version the double trouble test):
“assess the ability to inhibit cognitive interference that occurs when processing of a specific stimulus feature impedes the simultaneous processing of a second stimulus attribute.”[1]
What this test is basically saying is that being bilingual doesn't give you an edge at playing Lumosity, because as we have learned from past discussion these brain improvement apps don't actually "improve your brain"(whatever that may mean), they just train your performance on certain tasks. Why does measuring concentration relate to being bilingual?
What the personal comment below does in fact try to remind people of indirectly is that being natively multilingual actually makes it harder for a person to be controlled and directed and by extension give you access to vastly different perspectives on a lot of topics especially when those languages stem from different language families.
Hear hear! Exactly my point. Can knowing a second language be a benefit. Well if you like Spanish movies, then being fluent in Spanish will certainly increase you enjoyment. Nobody denies that.
Will it make you a better chess player? The simple answer appears to be: no.
It one my gripes with classical education. What benefit is there of learning Latin? Well, you can read Virgil in the original, and if that is your thing, power to you. Will it make you a better person? No, just no.
(Maybe, you'll have a slight, slight advantage when learning another Roman language. But surely, you would have been much better off to learn French to begin with, if that was the goal.)
I had to do 10 years of Latin; I hated it. I eventually scraped a bare pass on my second try at the exam.
I'm sure my knowledge of my mother-tongue, English, is much enhanced by having studied Latin. To the extent that cognition is verbal[0], knowing your own language better must improve cognition?
[0] I suspect the researchers' definition of cognition is carefully tuned to exclude verbal thinking.
If you speak a language that has been influenced by Latin, learning Latin is really useful for understanding our own language.
Additionally, because of the way that Latin is taught, you learn a lot of classical history and philosophy through the process, which - given the impact of Rome on the world - is useful across a wide range of disciplines.
Knowing well Latin makes it easier to learn new languages that inherit from it, both on the vocab side and the grammar side. French doesn't really have declinations, for instance. My wife studied it extensively during her studies, and she can pick new languages much quicker than me due to this.
I put my hand up: I didn't read the paper (just the abstract). Their findings surprised me.
I speak (quite badly, nowadays) French and German, as well as my mother-tongue, English. I'm quite sure that my understanding of my own language is greatly enhanced by knowing French and German. And I'd be very surprised if a better knowledge of your native language doesn't enhance at least some aspects of cognition.
But this is a particular constellation of languages: if you exclude modern loanwords, it seems to me that the flow of vocabulary has been mainly from French and German into English, rather than vice-versa.
Decades ago, I did a class in Mandarin (now completely forgotten, except a few phrases). I don't think knowledge of Mandarin improved my understanding of my mother tongue at all.
So my surprise is that the researchers found no cognitive enhancement at all.
Perhaps their cognition test battery excludes those aspects of cognition that depend on thinking with words? It seems to me that I think mainly with words.
As a reader of the research paper, another limitation of the study is that the study did not appear to differentiate between people who learned a second language as an adult, versus people who grew up bilingual.
~~
To add context on how participants self-reported their bilingualism, the authors wrote: "To obtain information about the number of languages spoken, which languages were spoken, and demographic variables (such as age, country of origin, SES, and education), we asked participants to complete a detailed questionnaire. The questions used in the present study are available in Appendix S1 in the Supplemental Material available online."
From the downloaded supplementary material, the only questions asked related to language assessment were:
"5. What language(s) do you primarily speak at home?
"6. How many languages do you speak?
Select one: 1-20"
I could not find any other questions related to language assessment.
~~
From the questionnaire, it looks like the researchers did not examine whether studying a second language as an adult to a very high level could confer cognitive advantages. The study possibly treated people who grew up bilingual and didn't acquire a second language as an adult, and also people who self-reported as bilingual but did not reach a high level in the language, into the same group.
The conclusions of the study would be stronger if the researchers examined how the cognitive abilities of monolingual people who undergo training in a second language and practice it to an advanced level, could change their cognitive abilities over time.
In fact, it remains plausible that adult language acquisition could still provide cognitive benefits. Another research paper with conflicting conclusions [1] studied the effect of language acquisition on older adults aged 59–79 years old. The authors of this different study concluded that "learning a foreign-language may represent a potentially helpful cognitive intervention for promoting healthy aging."
Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English. I have lived or worked in countries where those languages are spoken. Each language feels
like a unique perspective on life and unlocks the understanding of a new culture for you. When talking to a taxi driver or reading a local newspaper you will
be confronted with words or phrases that have no literal translation into your mother tongue. For a moment you are left without clear references and you have to make a significant cognitive effort to understand a concept that does not exist in your native culture (and therefore language). The construction of new references and meanings is what makes learning a new language all worth it. Understanding a new way to describe this world (while ideally living in a different culture) can make you a more empathetic, curious, and serene human being - in opposition to the polarizing black and white thinking that dominates most parts of the world these days.
You seem to speak 4 languages so well that at least in one of them you can't count to 5 ;)
Please take this tongue in cheek, as in kind of like the other comment said: for lots of folks splitting that atte tion is detrimental at least in some regard.
Personally I think some diversification in language is good. It "keeps you on your toes". If you never use a muscle it will deteriorate. But you won't be able to exercise all of your muscles equally all the time.
That said I do get your point about viewpoints. It's so easy to just have exactly one if all you speak is one language. Plenty of places in the world today where that is the case. And it's not just the ones we see in the international news all the time.
> "You seem to speak 4 languages so well that at least in one of them you can't count to 5 ;) "
For what it's worth, I counted 4 languages instead of 5, assuming the comment wasn't edited. The commenter wrote: "Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English."
Brazilian Portuguese is a single language as the dialect of Portuguese used in Brazil [1], versus the European Portuguese dialect used in Portugal [2].
I guess I was too precise when I wrote "Brazilian Portuguese" and caused some confusion. ;) It is actually quite different from European Portuguese, especially when spoken.
>lacking a certain level of expertise in each one.
Couldn’t you be describing the other end of the Dunning Kruger effect? As an intelligent person, you are painfully aware of the limits of your knowledge?
I really can't relate to most of your points. Words either come naturally as they do for everyone else or you don't use the word in that language therefore you will try to guess it or think of a similar one. This just means that you are not exposed to the same vocabulary in both languages. All my Comp Sci and Math vocabulary is in English because of school/online/talking to others. All my botany and plant knowledge knowledge is in Spanish because its my mother's hobby and that's how I know it. Only if I switch the languages will I struggle with the vocabulary.
The only time when I felt having to use more mental capacity was when I wasn't fluent in the language, the idea of languages being a constant cognitive load is as ridiculous as thinking that you are better off not knowing anything at all due to the toll knowledge takes on your mental capacity.
I also don't experience the extra cognitive load of choosing between languages when trying to express ideas, unless I'm trying to learn a new vocabulary word that I'm not familiar with. In specific, I can't relate to the commenter's point that: "When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!"
As objective evidence, I use a software app called Glossika to practice listening and speaking to some extent, where the software plays a spoken English audio phrase and pauses before playing the translated audio. When I see the English for the phrase "The computer crashed" in Spanish track, the Spanish equivalent only comes to mind, and I don't simultaneously think of the French translation—even though I'm later asked to translate the same English phrase in the French track. At the start of each track, I have a certain context in mind (to make responses in a particular language), so I don't personally struggle with having to consciously focus to avoid mixing up words. In my experience, after at most ~20 seconds or so working in the target language, I say the right translations without any extra conscious effort of avoiding the usage of the wrong language.
The same goes for conversation practice. At the very worst—sometimes at the very start of a conversation—I can mix up a basic word. But after about less than a minute or so of speech, I'm think and express only in the language I'm practicing; I don't continually struggle with interference with other languages.
For my personal experience, studying both French and Spanish has even been beneficial for vocabulary acquisition. Learning that "le public" means audience in French made it a lot easier to shortly after remember that "el público" also means audience in Spanish. The sounds in French and Spanish are different, along with the words that typically surround new vocabulary words, so I don't personally struggle with choosing between different word options from different languages.
Speaking French and Spanish also has a separation due to the way that pronunciation physically feels. The back-of-the-throat guttural R in French especially feels and sounds a lot different than the Spanish trilled R with a vibrating tongue near the front teeth—so there is a barrier to mixing up French and Spanish words with these different sounds, as they "feel" very different to say in the mouth and throat. Spanish words also have a "stress" on the second-last syllable or syllable with a certain accent (e.g. Le envió for "I sent it to you" with a stress on the accented ió), whereas French has roughly equal stresses as a "syllable-timed" language [1], so the feelings of speaking the languages are very different, even if the vocabulary can be similar at a first glance.
In summary, I just can't relate at all to the idea of "juggling" between languages from practice with audio programs and conversation practice each week, though I recognize that different people have different experiences.
I don't see why its ridiculous. Brains are not magically above the constraints of information lookup from a database. The more you know, the more you have to sort through somehow.
Don't know how ridiculous it is, but I live in a Spanish speaking country, using English at work, consuming English part of the internet, occasionally using Russian during the day (because of Russian "refugees") and no one around me speaks my native language. There is a cognitive load.
I would think that the cognitive load is there because you are speaking a foreign language (whether one or many). I don't think it's debatable that speaking a foreign language day in day out with no one to speak your native language can wear you out.
I also speak the same four languages plus one more.
I do consider there are advantages to speaking several languages.
I learned from English that you can be very precise, but also economical in exposition of complex matter.
I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian. I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.
I learned from French that there are way more words for expressing feelings than I was using before, and also a certain way of having no-pressure intellectual, exploratory conversations, exchanging ideas among peers. It has a certain rhythm and many turns of phrases that work very well for this.
In Romanian you can be incredibly sophisticated (via modern French influence), but also stay close to the agricultural and pastoral roots. The language just has this great dynamic range. Romanian literature has examples of great works that are essentially collaborative, and have hundreds maybe thousands of authors (some likely illiterate), and that were passed along in oral form with various modifications that were finally recorded and published less than two centuries ago, and are very much readable by modern speakers.
===
Bonus: More things that I learned from English are certain expressions that guide you into a (I think) pragmatic world view, e.g.:
- thinking clearly about hidden assumptions, e.g. "don't make assumptions", is easy in English, but is convoluted and indirect in the rest of languages I speak.
- what I call "scoped" phrases, e.g. "just because IDEA1 does not mean IDEA2", or "IDEA1, though IDEA2", where English language helps you to avoid exaggerating or generalizing too much, by making it easy to "scope" your statements, but also helps you to be explicit about the boundaries within which your statement is true: "Just because I refused your first request, does not mean I don't want you to try again."
Having your sensibilities hurt from thinking this somehow detracts from the human condition is quaint but doesn't make the statement any less appropriate.
It was a trick question. Parent said you can translate anything to Russian. That's a rather uninteresting statement in practice given the parachute example. And there are entire kinds of such examples different in nature.
> In Romanian you can be incredibly sophisticated (via modern French influence), but also stay close to the agricultural and pastoral roots.
What makes you think French has a less "agricultural" root than Romanian. Both languages have existed since a time when industrialization was still far in the future... are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation?? This sounds kind of ridiculous to me.
> are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation?
I think it's true.
Modern French is derived from a form of French spoken among aristocrats; the Norman Conquest didn't bring to Britain a great influx of peasant French. For a long time, an educated Briton (a) spoke French, and (b) had lived in France, and even been educated there.
It's also that until the 19th century and compulsory education there were multiple dialects of French spoken throughout the country. "Royal French" is a descendant of Norman and was the language the bourgeoisie adopted after the revolution and that the rest of the country standardized on.
Same thing happened in the Americans French colonies in Canada and Louisiana; the settlers brought the "Royal" French with them because they were majorly from the north.
> English language helps you to avoid exaggerating or generalizing too much
I speak English and another 3 languages. IMO this is not due to the language itself, it's 100% cultural. English has as much power as any language I know (Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish) to make exaggeration and generalization, it just seems to happen that most English speakers tend to use those less then, say, Brazilians (but probably more than Swedes, I think).
> I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian. I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.
Nabakov didn't feel the same way.
That said, as someone with decent Russian, I do like the language in many ways. I agree that it's a nuanced and powerful language in ways that English isn't; English is so ambiguous and low-context that you can say anything but I love Russian in that I can state things like number, gender, if they go & come back / complete, and do so in a word or two.
I speak Russian fluently but I wish I didn't. I don't find it beautiful and the information that I've involuntarily consumed in Russian throughout all my life did more harm than good.
Overall, I am fluent in 4 languages, 2 were acquired early from the environment, 1 in my childhood, and 1 as an adult. Only English proved to be truly useful in life and it is the only language that I actually enjoy using. I dream of living in an English-speaking country and never touching any other language again. I know, it's a weird sentiment.
> I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere).
I don't find Russian to be particularly more expressive than any other bigger slavic language, like Polish or Yugoslavian. I would say that it's largely a myth propagated by Russians. It has a bunch of newer loan words from French, German and kept some of its' older synonyms, oh and a lot of archaics from Old Church Slavinic. In that sense it isn't more nuanced than English. One more con is that the convoluted sentence structure makes it an unfriendly language for non native speakers to learn. Phonetics are terrible, a bunch of my friends that had been studying Russian fairly well and still don't know how to pronounce those rarely used words.
How is Russian language used to scare people? If you live in EU and hear a lot of Russian you shouldn't be scared since a lot of them are Ukranian refugees from the East and South. There are very few Russians you should be scared of, except some angry and very drunk ones in tourist resorts, fortunately those aren't coming in droves anymore.
I speak a few different languages, knowledge of languages is overrated if you don't use them regularly. Actually I regret learning some of those, that time would have been better spent on acquiring some technical skills. I have met very few people that are truly bilingual, most of them say they are, but aren't actually equally as good in both. A lot of Ukranians are bilingual btw, but it's easier when two languages are that similar.
>As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!
I've heard that there is an unusually high rate of mental illness among European Parliament translators.
For what it's worth, I couldn't find a supporting result after a few quick searches on Google Scholar and regular Google.
At most, I found a systematic review article [1] with the conclusion that interpreters for refugees experience higher levels of emotional and work-related stress, but it seems like this is more of a result of the content being translated, versus the act of translation.
It seems plausible, too, that assuming the claim is true (though I couldn't source an article to confirm this), it may alternatively be a result of the content of the translation or the pressure of the job (e.g. there may be serious consequences if there are mistranslations), versus the act of translation itself.
> I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice.
I also speak four languages and mostly agree with your take. I'm native in Spanish; English I learned gaming, and reading Tolkien as a kid. The other two, German and French due to a combination of self interest, education and travel. While I often fantasize about picking up a couple more (namely Norwegian and Japanese), I quickly become disappointed as I go through the motions all over again. It's a huge mental effort for a seemingly low _tangible_ ROI.
Sure, listening to music or reading in the target language and understanding most of it is quite the magical experience, probably similar to what cracking a secret code feels like; but there is no practical gain to it afterwards. It's a bit like reading/writing poetry: an intense but ephemeral enjoyment. More of an art form than anything else really. Unless, of course, you find yourself immersed in the language by way of relocation, then it truly does make sense to learn it. I do get your point with Dutch though: now you've got to figure out a fifth system for conveying an idea you're perfectly capable of saying in four other systems; it gets tiring.
I've been comparing it with programming languages lately. The question often pops up in HN: "what's the best programming language to build a backend in?" -- imagine you already can build a great backend in Python/Go/TS but you start picking up Rust only for the purposes of building said backend, what's the point? Just use whichever language you know best and build the damn thing already. Simple enough right? As is often the case though, this type of analysis is superficial; you may build a fantastic backend in say, Clojure, but then miss out on the opportunities a more popular language with a larger community may have to offer (e.g. Python). Writing Python may not necessarily provide general cognitive advantages over writing Clojure, but it will give you easier _access_ to the entire ML ecosystem, for instance. Does being capable of using more powerful tools help develop cognitive advantages?
I only read the abstract, but even if _Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages_, learning a second language, English specifically, has unquestionably changed my life.
The good (?) thing is that you can absolutely forget languages -- I used to, as a small child, speak both Cantonese and Hokkien fluently; after more than a decade and half of not speaking or hearing a single word, I have now completely lost the ability to do so. I was in Hong Kong right before COVID and was flabbergasted that I literally couldn't understand most of what I was hearing and was completely stuck when trying to speak Cantonese.
I'm not sure if speaking more languages exhausts some kind of mental capacity -- that's not my experience at all. There was a time when I spoke nothing but English for years, a time when I spoke 4 languages, and now I speak both English and Chinese daily; I haven't really observed any differences in my proficiency. My Chinese proficiency has probably gone back up to native status after atrophying in my college years of not speaking a single word.
> Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn.
I've heard people that speak many languages fluently claim that it gets easier after the fifth language - so keep at it.
One tip; try as much as possible to stick to switching only between your mother tongue and the new(est) language you're learning - or at least have as many full days as you can where you avoid switching to other foreign languages.
Until you become fluent in the new language (say about a year if living/working in the new language).
Except Dutch doesn't resemble the other languages. The fact that my proudly unpatriotic countrymen (who secretly still believe that The Netherlands is the best place in the world) will start speaking in (broken) English as soon as they pick up a trace of a foreign accent, doesn't help either.
> Except Dutch doesn't resemble the other languages.
I didn't mean five or more "European dialects" I meant five or more different languages. Besides, between French and English there should be some overlap with Dutch - though I agree Dutch seems wierd on the surface:)
Sticking to your broken new language in the face of "helpful English" is hard - at least with friends and co-workers you can make an agreement (all Dutch Fridays, etc).
So here we've got someone who considers Romanian and Dutch dialects, while elsewhere we have someone who considers Brazilian Portugese and Portugese Portugese two languages.
I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (and by knowing, I don't mean travelguide fluency). Such people are rare.
> So here we've got someone who considers Romanian and Dutch dialects
No, but Dutch, English and French are pretty close (hence the reference to Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy").
> I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (...) Such people are rare.
They certainly are! I didn't mean to say i know a lot of people that fit the definition - only that I have heard such people mention that it gets easier after the fifth.
I only know Norwegian/Swedish/Danish (close enough to count as one, one and a half), English, Japanese and some French (and marginal German, Spanish, Italian etc due to limited exposure and the intersection of Norwegian/English/French).
I would have to add something a little different, like Sami, Maori, Russian or possibly Farsi, Arabic to fit in the five languages boat.
I'm not too surprised. The advantage of learning another language is a social one. You increase the number of people you can speak with, thereby increasing your opportunities in life. Compare someone living in the US who can speak English versus someone who can't.
I hope they tackle "left-handed people are better at math" at some point. That's another one I'm tired of hearing about.
My theory: in the United States, speaking multiple languages can be a sign of coming from a more financially sound household. I wouldn’t expect a second language to be any better for the brain than studying math or learning to play an instrument. As always, the most important factor is money.
India for instance -- A typical kid in many places here (especially southern part of the country) has 3 languages formally taught in school and consumed as popular media daily.
Having privilege in these regions usually translates to levels of literacy like having reading ability (in addition to just speaking for trade), reading literature, speaking fluency, broader vocabulary, "better" accent, etc. -- all of which, in thousand different ways, signal one's socio-economic status in every interaction.
I would be surprised if the majority of bilingual speakers in the US aren't first/second gen immigrants. Not exactly known to be "a sign of coming from" wealth
Second generation immigrants struggle to speak the language of their parents, however. This happens at least with immigrants from my country to the U.S.
I think this it. In Michigan public schools at least there are mandatory language courses for 2 years but these do not get most people anywhere close to fluency. Apparently I'm qualified enough to get a 4 on AP German but at my peak I could only get about 60% of your typical Der Spiegel headline. Everyone I know that knows another language at at least roughly a C1 level knows it because of family. But I imagine there are some people with tutors or better schools who start early with a language and probably end up pretty good at it.
On the finance part, I think it's complex, in particular relative to who.
For instance, immigrants will massively be bilingual in general. We could argue there are in a better financial and educational position than those who couldn't immigrate in the first place, but then relative to the country they live, they can be on bottom of the social ladder.
On the parrallel with studying other subjects, I think it rings true, the only difference would be that bilingualism can be "forced" upon children by circumstances or environment, where math or instruments usually come later and/or on a choice basis.
The interesting part being it's done on children still in their learning phase. The current article targeting 11000 makes me think it's done in a similar setting (catching 11000 adult working people for a study is just complicated).
In general when people are arguing about side effects of bilingualism, I think they care more about adults who more or less reached their full potential.
At least in the US this is often a sign of affluence, you need to have money to attend language school after your normal classwork.
I was very ignorant of this when I was younger, my first girlfriend was Korean , but couldn't really speak it since her parents( presumably) didn't put her in classes. On the other hand, if your parents have money for language classes, they probably can afford general tutoring. So your doing better in school than your classmates.
Before you mention public school language education, your lucky if your able to read attending a public high school. I went to one myself.
The linked study shows the opposite. Bilingual cohort was twice as likely to be low socioeconomic status. This is likely dominated by lower income immigrants.
As with most things it depends, I went to basically the most expensive school in my state (Not in the US), and never realized that it wasn't normal for everyone to actually learn the second language everyone has to take
Only after getting exposed to the rest of the world (And people making a big deal out of it) did I realize that it was a "class" thing
If the bilinguals are mainly economic migrants, sure, I'd expect the correlation to be different
Aren't there studies in Linguistics that show that the Chinese have an advantage in mathematics due to the nature of their numerical system? and conversely the French have a disadvantage?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] thread*I apparently forgot what this footnote was for, like I said, I am a humanities sort
Absolutely. Outside some niche areas being bilingual is not going to make you better at general problem solving, will come in handy on occasion in that you will see the problem from a perspective that you would not have without a second language but generally will not add much. Like I said, I am a humanities sort so these sorts of things tend to trigger me. I think for the majority of people a second language should be a pragmatic choice, not about some vaguely suggestive idea of increased cognition but directly about what learning that language will offer them.
Linguistics is the academic study of languages.
My toddler is learning three languages growing up (English, Mandarin, German). She picks them up just fine, because she hears them spoken around her; I don't think she'd benefit from learning linguistics instead.
But I was mostly speaking of peers, the sort who would be posting on HN, don't think we have many toddlers on the site. Learning multiple languages from a very early age seems to result in the languages being a single language from the perspective of the speaker, they have different situations in which they speak in different ways much like the average monolingual will speak more formally in a job interview compared to when they are out at the bar. Second and third, and etc languages are very different things between those that learned them from the start and those that learn them later in life.
Huh? This is about as convincing to me as the claim that learning linguistics makes it easier to learn a human language. It's also sort of a non-sequitor.
Someone who understands python and C++ would be trivially able to understand a massive swath of modern programming languages. I see little that having some deeper theoretical background would help.
And in human languages, even more so than programming, theory is almost irrelevant to regular practice. As the upstream comment says, we learn by practice, not by memorizing and applying rules.
Yes, they will be able to quickly pickup related languages with relative ease just as someone who knows a romance language will be able to pickup other romance languages without much difficulty. But that person who knows C++ and Pynthon with nothing of the underlying workings will have a more difficult time learning assembly, Forth or Lisp than a related language just as the person who knows a romance language will have a more difficult time learning Swahili than another romance language. Not a non-sequitor at all. When you look at CS or linguistics and how they relate to the languages they deal with what they really are are the study of what those languages have in common and understanding that will decrease what you need to learn when learning new languages.
Understanding a language and using a language are very different things and this is why toddlers can pickup languages with more ease than others, they do not care so much about understanding, and this is the primary limitation of our first language(s) and why being bilingual offers little cognitive advantage for most people.
PhD graduates don't have magic in-depth knowledge about programming languages. PhD graduates (in any field, really, not just CS), choose to dive very deeply into a very specific topic in their field. They do not just "go to more CS classes". They spend time becoming an expert on a very narrow topic. And for a CS PhD, that very likely would not be "general principles of programming language design".
I would not expect your average CS PhD to be any better at picking up new programming languages than a CS undergraduate.
Also, you asserted downthread:
> Understanding a language and using a language are very different things and this is why toddlers can pickup languages with more ease than others
No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition. As people age, their brain's change to optimizes learning skills for other tasks, and language acquisition skills usually suffer.
No magic involved, they generally have a good understanding of how a computer functions which means they can relate a language directly 1:1 to what the computer is doing instead of relating it to what another language they already know does or by simple trial and error.
>No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition.
Toddlers are in the 12-36 month range, they primarily mimic and use language on simple cause and effect terms, if I say this than this is the result. They do not understand the concept of language or languages and if you teach them with multiple languages they do not see them as separate languages they see them as a sound and a result. We develop those distinctions and understanding of meaning during childhood and adolescence.
... have you ever actually met anyone who got a PhD in CS? Because first off, very few people will actually study the "mechanics of language" in doing a CS PhD. If you're studying compilers or formal methods or maybe software engineering, sure, you'll study up on programming language semantics; but if you're learning AI or operating systems or computer architecture, you're very unlikely to touch those semantics. But even assuming you have someone who has actually taken those graduate-level courses (and I have!), it's not actually helpful for learning new languages. Learning semantics is essentially learning how to give meaning to the expression "a + b" (there are many ways to do this, and they have different tradeoffs), but if you want to learn a language, all you really want to learn is that "a + b" adds two numbers together, let's move on.
There's a similar gap between learning languages and being a linguist. As I understand it, most linguists are not polyglots (actually, I think a majority of them may be monolingual!), and most polyglots are not linguists. The linguist is the person who will tell you that English doesn't have a future tense: instead, you indicate the future by using specific helping verbs in the present tense. Anyone instructing English as a second language will slap the linguist on the head for being an idiot and tell you that the future tense in English is the "will X" construction.
That's why analogies between the two are of limited use at best.
The rest of your comment isn't really wrong. I even agree with most of it. It's just not really relevant to your point.
> Learning multiple languages from a very early age seems to result in the languages being a single language from the perspective of the speaker, they have different situations in which they speak in different ways much like the average monolingual will speak more formally in a job interview compared to when they are out at the bar.
Last I checked the research was still open on that one. What you are saying might work as a gross simplification, though.
> Second and third, and etc languages are very different things between those that learned them from the start and those that learn them later in life.
Yes. And exactly when you learn them and in what context also seems to make some context.
Language and music have a lot in common in that respect, it's perfectly possible to be proficient at either without having a very deep understanding of the theory as long as you are willing to put in the hours, and having that deep understanding is - as far as I've been able to discern - absolutely no guarantee for being good at making music or communicating with other people. It may help some but I doubt that it is the kind of thing that works for everybody in the way that you assert. It's hard enough to get kids to learn a new language, even if it has some direct applicability. Getting them to learn an abstract science which lays a foundation that they then may be able to apply to learning another language may well be one demand too many.
Still, for whoever it works it may be worth the extra investment in time and effort.
Humanities sorts are terrible at communicating with those who are not humanities sorts, just as most doctors and lawyers are terrible at communicating their specialties to the laymen. I am not talking about studying linguistics to the ends of getting a degree in it but in a more pragmatic sense, if you want to learn a bunch of languages than it is very useful to learn what all those languages have in common so you do not have to relearn the same thing in new contexts, you just learn the contexts.
>Language and music have a lot in common in that respect, it's perfectly possible to be proficient at either without having a very deep understanding of the theory as long as you are willing to put in the hours
They do but becoming proficient is different than success. Satie and Bukowski were proficient but not at all ignorant but plenty have success while being ignorant. It is that pragmatism thing again, what are your goals, learning music theory will probably not help much if you want to become a success in a popular music genera but it could be very useful if you want to become a success across genres. Where do you want to shift the ignorance and the knowledge? what will be of most use to your goals.
And in my experience your CS degree example simply fails: CS does not prepare you at all for dealing with the various programming languages and their implementations of various concepts. The parts of CS that would apply to that bit you can pick up in a few weeks by reading some books and even then you're going to be dealing with implementation details most of the time by the time you want to apply that knowledge.
If you understand variables, assignment, control structures (if, for, while, pattern matching etc) and abstraction mechanisms (subroutines, functions) then you've got the bulk of it. But it isn't going to help you more than a little bit in tackling a mid sized Java, Rails or C++ project.
If you were going to design a new programming language or write a compiler for an existing one then it may well help, and also if you are going to be working on novel data structures or to try to improve what's already there.
Being a linguist or studying linguistics may well help me to read works in dead languages or maybe to analyze other people's writings. Because that's the kind of stuff that I see the linguists around me do that seems to actually use their skills.
If there would be a single bit of advice that I could give to someone that intends to study multiple languages then it would probably be: take a year or two of Latin. Even though it is a dead language that little bit of foundation will help you gain a much easier entrance into other languages all over Europe (if those are the languages you intend to learn).
If you are going to study in language areas outside of that region, say Asia then I have no idea what would help other than to move there an immerse yourself for a couple of years.
Second language acquisition research is a joke, you cannot transform your learning by deep diving on it.
And way too many linguists are barely capable of learning languages to fluency, it's not common for them to be polyglots. Being able to understand the hardest grammatical concepts in say Polish, Arabic, or Hungarian in a half hour doesn't imply one has any capacity to acquire those languages (producing output in real time involves none of the mental calculus done when grammar is consciously processed as a set of rules, except for a little editing after the fact in the "monitor" part of the brain, you can only fluently produce grammar, words, and prosody that have been acquired.).
So to me the claim is out there.
Who is that?
(It's a shame that Noam Chomsky is the most famous linguist, because he's so far from the best or most relevant one.)
See also eg https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/8ght5y/what_langua...
"He was once fluent in Hebrew, but told an Israeli journalist that he was now rusty, and conducted the interview in English."
There are other forms of intelligence. Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those. Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.
It obviously wasn't meant as an exhaustive list.
> Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those.
I've yet to have my other languages besides English help me with studying of other concepts unless they were strictly locally focused. Even my French didn't help in Canada where it is more used as a means of exclusivity than one of inclusivity and communications.
> Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.
It might be. But the vast amount of information in English is such that you'll never exhaust it. I read about France in French and about Germany in German mostly because I can, not necessarily because I have to, the same subjects (in the news) are usually also available in English. And as for texts that are only available in say Chinese, French or German: I am aware that I will have to forego anything only available in Chinese because the expected pay-off from learning Chinese at my age is so low that I will spend my time in some other way. But if I were much younger I might give it a go.
But I doubt if it would make me any more intelligent.
You can assert there's no value to you, but many assert otherwise. I'm not sure there's value in our individual assertions.
Also, there's a lot of evidence that language drives cognition; that how we perceive and think about the world is constrained and influence by our language, and that other languages enable us to see and understand the world in other ways.
I agree with programming's effect on natural languages, and I think it goes both ways. Programming makes me a more precise punctuator, while Shakespeare makes me comment in couplet.
That's a specific skill though, as distinct cognition generally
I'm curious to know what were the tests were and corrected factors.
Without the actual Paper we are just reading a footnote.
But, like many other things in life, the access of even a second language in my opinion gives you another tool to use as intellectual leverage to gain greater or richer understanding to many specific domains that you would otherwise require someone else to digest the information for you.
That doesn't mean you can have the tool and immediately gain the benefits of having it. It just means that compared to someone who does not have the ability to speak a second language, you have less friction to access domains of knowledge locked behind languages other than your native tongue.
Having a second car doesn't automatically mean I travel more. But if I used that other one specifically for roadtrips, it puts me in a category of people that is far smaller than the general population or even the general population of drivers.
But then again I haven't met many super-geniuses to compare against.
If your not going to clarify, I'm going to move on.
But a Java developer won't become a better Java developer if they learn C#, which is basically Java with different capitalization conventions.
I guess something like that happens for natural languages. You get those benefits if you actively learn new concepts. The difference of course is that you are unlikely to have done that purely by being bilingual. Many bilingual people just picked up 2+ languages as they were growing up.
knowing english and german is not knowing two full languages imho. you’ll get more exposure to german culture but it’s not the same as knowing English and a slavic or asian language.
Some concept exist in one and not the other. Addressing someone in a formal way. Addressing a group a once ( “y’all” )
But I know bits and pieces of German, Latin and Polish… those have lots of grammatical differences that force you to think about the structure of your sentence. Recognize a datif from a ablatif. That type of things. It actually help with writing correct French.
But I’m not sure it would make me “better” like learning a functional language or ASM made me a “better” developer.
When you speak a language fluently you're able to speak and understand without thinking about it. Children can be fluent with no formal training in grammar. Meanwhile, for me at least, programming is the opposite: I have to learn all the rules on a formal level and my mind can't wander while I'm programming at all.
I think the benefits of knowing more natural languages are pretty clear: the ability to speak to and understand more people. Plus the art, entertainment, and other cultural productions you get access to.
But sometime I will use English turn of sentences in French and it sounds weird ( just did it a l’envers here, pretty sure “turn of sentence” does not exists in English )
I’m ok at Spanish too. My main motivation is to be able to talk to random peoples when traveling. English came de facto because of the internet and US soft power.
Not sure it makes me better at writing or speaking.
I grew to like English this way: massive corpus made of anglo-saxon plus French.
Just to give an example of why “Anglo-Saxon” might be too broad a term—surviving Old English texts like Beowulf are in what you might call Late West Saxon, and the differences between Saxon and Anglian dialects help explain why Chaucer, who spoke something you might call Anglo-Norman, is much more accessible to modern readers.
If you want more of that Saxon influence, listen to West Country English, where it survives today.
Presence of English in France and Germany might be more due to Americans.
It’s interesting to see French word in English from the William the conqueror period, too. ( like “phrase” from above or the tired example “sheep” vs “mutton” )
We do say "turn of phrase" in English, which means something similar. I wonder if both have the same origin.
It actually goes to show that my command of English is limited. I know both words but “phrase” did not occurs to me even so it’s the same damn word :)
Yeah, that jarred for me. We do say "turn of phrase".
IMO, your programming language comparison is somewhat similar in that even knowing multiple, similar languages allows you to differentiate between the syntax and the concepts expressed by the syntax. E.g. different ways of constructing classes and objects in different languages will make you understand the core of OOP better, similarly to different ways to loop, etc.
What are some of those domains, do you think?
- If you are interested in literature, history, philosophy or adjacent fields, reading sources in their original language is an advantage. Philosophers are more likely to be fluent in German, for instance.
- Reading news in foreign languages is often illuminating.
- Most translations are just extremely horrible. I can only understand a tiny amount of languages, but I'd rather put in the effort to read in a foreign language than suffer through bad translations.
If you only speak English you probably aren't lacking access to to many fields of study. If you a one of the few who only speak Koro, you probably feel differently about to volume of knowledge available to you.
They're everywhere, and it seems they are the most common type of daycare, actually. (upper midwest, usa)
I live the mirror situation: french speaking young parent intending to make my child bilingual at a young age.
Here english is obviously seen as an edge and is studied a lot.
I'm a native English speaker/~B1 French speaker trying to very intentionally create a bilingual household environment. It's not pure immersion, but I can (and do) narrate what I'm doing for most daily activities in French, read aloud in French, consume French audio, etc. All much to the bemusement of my own French mentor, who's validated that I'm not instilling a terrible accent, but is also getting peppered with questions in my search for French children's literature.
- consuming all media in the original language instead of dubs
- kindergarten already does some bilingual exploration, she's a native English speaker
- Later on I intend to do an "English day" each week at home where we would only converse in English. From my personal experience, the best path to fluency is having no choice but to speak in a given language. I also want to create boundaries to prevent mixing the two languages.
About french children's book, I could send you a mail about it. Depending on the age of your kids "la courte échelle" has great stuff.
This is an awesome way to provide both an extra language when kids don't have much else to do and fit it easy to pick them up, _and_ it saves on costs? What could be better?
Back in the day when people had huge families and lived with their cousins, kids got this built in, but I think the idea of having a few kids that don’t get to see other kids every day with a stay at home mother is actually fairly unnatural.
You know what would be even better? If everyone got a pony and a puppy and a million dollars! But that's not really feasible to provide for everyone (at the moment).
Life is all about trade-offs.
In some countries everybody is convinced that you should send away your kids early so they learn to "socialize", whatever that is. If you don't do it you are insane and a threat to society.
In some countries everybody is convinced that you should wait years longer before you send away your kids, because they are not biologically developed enough yet to be away from the mother. If you send them early you are insane and a threat to society.
What seems to be the rule is that 99% will defend the status quo or what their government says, no matter what the status quo is and no matter what it is their government is actually saying. During the pandemic, this meant that literal science around the virus was different depending on where you lived and who ruled you - and few people thought that was strange.
As for caring for young children, I think it depends mostly on the mother. Some mothers think it's boring to take care of their kids after a while or even hate being with their children all the time. They should leave them with day care or a relative if they can. Some mothers love spending all their time with their kids. It's a shame if they have to leave them with day care because they have to work to pay more taxes and tributes.
I learned spanish at a young age and I find it pretty useless. The last time I used it in the past 20 years was watching Casa De Papiel
Really wished I learned something like German or Chinese instead
Chinese/Mandarin might be super useful if you're living in China or a nearby country, but a) why would you want to live in China if you're not Chinese? And b) the language of international business in China is still English.
- There are several countries with German as an official language, and a few other with German-speaking minorities. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium all have it as an official language (though the last few are not terribly significant). There are also around half a million native German speakers in Italy. It's also useful as approximately the root language of Germanic languages, and makes it faster to pick up e.g. Dutch and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian languages.
- All internationally minded Germans do not speak English. Large swaths of Germans speak no, or only basic travelers' English. That everyone speaks English in Germany is an illusion that English speakers experience in Germany because they largely mix with only one social class, and the non-English speakers are invisible to them.
(I'm a native English speaker and fluent German speaker who's lived in the US and Germany for equal amounts of my life. My girlfriend, for example, is not comfortable in English, nor are quite a few of my friends, particularly those that are blue collar, somewhat older, or from the east.)
But the social class thing you mentioned is kind of my point. I think it's pretty much true in all of those German speaking countries, that if you only want to interact with service workers in cities and professional, college educated, internationally minded people, you will have plenty of people to talk to and might not ever feel a need to know German.
Angela Merkel can definitely speak English.
That means they aren't internationally minded then.
It's also a pretty terrible thing to assume that everyone who wasn't born into the upper class isn't internationally minded. Again, my girlfriend doesn't speak English well because she's from a working class family from the east, but she's been to a couple dozen countries, and manages a team of people from several countries.
> It's the 3rd most spoken language in the US
That's interesting, but why would that influence your decision which language to learn? Almost all the Cantonese speakers in the US probably speak English, and there aren't that many in the grand scheme of things? (Especially compared to total number of Mandarin speakers.)
I had friends who went through the same language school for Chinese and German among other languages and they never used it. All the German linguists got reclassed into other languages like Spanish in the 90s. Last year I went on vacation to Puerto Vallarta and it was so useful even in a tourist heavy place like that. But I am sorry you do find it useless and I don't doubt it based on whatever your daily life is like and hobbies.
On a separate note it's not too late to learn Chinese or German!
https://i.imgur.com/g5atMOs.png
I know quite a few of them. Comes with growing up in Germany.
But an average young nurse will probably only speak bad English and can maybe say a few broken sentences.
Paying better salaries to working people.
Randomly giving people more money, just because you happen to interact with them seems cruel and patronising.
Compare https://web.archive.org/web/20220705105128/https://blog.jaib...
(And in case you don't care about helping people, why do you bother?)
So I’m unsurprised by the conclusion of a rigorous and larger study.
Looks like the “controlled for” socioeconomic status, but I doubt this fully captures the difference in populations between bilingual and non-bilingual people.
It could be that the population of bilingual people, had they not been bilingual, might have scored lower on these tests, and therefore being bilingual brought them up to par. Impossible to tell.
Whereas if one looks at basically monolingual societies (e.g. most of the countries in Europe) one find that not only is not everyone bilingual (and no, "everyone" does not speak English) -- multilingualism definitely correlates with class and education.
There is a semi-random 50% number thrown around, but just to take the two biggest countries, there's no way we get accurate data on people in India and China given their size and lack of reporting of the inner regions. In China in particular, no one will boast about being fluent in a non-official language in a survey.
I think the same thing happen at smaller scale in european countries. There will be one official language, and whether people are bilingual or not won't be assessed more than striclty needed. The only study I saw were for educational purpose for small kids, out of that there will be no specific tracking of a Georgian immigrant starting a family in Germany, or a Spanish businessman being fluent in Italian because of his girlfriend.
It's not "easy" to get the data but it's a well-studied topic. As attended to by people who presumably have thought about the matter and know what they're doing.
So I'll take their number (at around 60 percent for multilingualism) at face value. Seems to correlate with observations from traveling (through which one rapidly makes the amazing discovery that no, not "everyone" speaks English or is otherwise bilingual).
I kinda became sceptic of "trust us, it's ok" assumptions in many fields. I trust experts, but I also trust them to give insights on how they deal with the complexity, even if we don't look at the actual numbers etc.
For instance on this specific study all the research is based on Cambridge Brain Science/Creyos, and that gives me pause on how much the results are reliable (they are still valuable, way better than nothing, but might have huge flaws as well)
In that respect I'd like to know how they deal with "the gov might deport us in reeducation camp if we're too loud about our original culture" kind of situation, and wouldn't be surprised if the answer was "we pull numbers out of a magic hat", as it has been in many very prominent studies.
Like any time you see an article about how intelligent people drink more coffee, or swear more, or wear hats more often than others. So people start cursing into their mugs while adjusting their caps.
And, it might be true. It probably is true. But none of those things made them intelligent. So intelligent people might have been more likely to have learned and spoke a second language. But that didn't make them intelligent. So aping the trappings of intelligence won't make you intelligent.
She could understand both English and Italian, but would almost entirely speak Italian, not even realizing which language she was speaking. Is that a "cognitive advantage"? Maybe? I am not qualified to answer that.
But to me it suggests that perhaps more "real-estate" in the brain takes on language when one is bilingual.
It made treatment complex, because no one knew enough Lithuanian to communicate to the degree necesary
Perhaps additional "connections" are made in the brain that can be used when other "connections" are broken due to stroke.
Anecdotic-ally, my father also recovered quite well from his stroke and he knew Dutch, English and likely a bit of latin languages as well (had Italian and Chinese penfriends when he was young, often used Latin proverbs, ...).
*For completeness, according to current neurolinguistic models it's more complex than that, more brain regions are actually responsible for speech/understanding.
[1] http://www.nature.com/articles/40623
Uh, no. According to statistics (and everyday observation), slightly less than half of "everyone" is.
English is not very widely spoken in Mexico overall, with only around 12% of the population speaking it, and only a small number of these being truly fluent.
Estimates are that only 5% of Brazilians can speak English, and most of those speakers are middle- and upper-class professionals living in larger cities.
etc.
For example, folks who learn programming languages early and intensively have a certain analytical advantage. But this is not a positive in all situations. We all have limited energy/time/focus, so each area we learn necessarily costs us in other areas.
And that’s great. We should develop strengths and build on them. Our lives are short and our attention is limited
Edit: pdf here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35682016&goto=item%3Fid...
I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four languages, I always feel as if I'm lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. I wish I only needed to speak one language, saving my mental capacity for other things. Constantly juggling languages doesn't help.
The main benefit of knowing multiple languages in everyday life is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.
Moreover, all my friends from my country also speak four languages. Unfortunately, I don't hear of people from Moldova faring much better than others.
*My mother tongue is Romanian, but everyone in Moldova also speaks Russian (due to the Soviet past). At school, I learned French and later studied in France. I picked up English mainly through computers and the internet. Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn. I don't feel any advantage in learning a new language either.
I would gladly trade Russian and French over knowing Dutch right now ;o) There are months when I don't speak those two so they are of little use for me anymore.
I would say there is a very mild advantage, even recognizing vaguely similar words in other languages when traveling. I find Russian to be very useful in a way that French and Romanian aren't.
English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish are the most "useful" as they each unlock a large part of the world that tends to prefer its own.
Edit: Spanish is probably on par with the others.
It's indeed still useful when traveling to those countries that speak these languages. But that's mere few weeks per year. English could have worked anyway as everyone is becoming proficient in English.
I always loved the Romanian joke where someone says "mersi" and then you reply "oh, I didn't know you were French" but I suppose that comes up with many words.
But you need to make a lot of assumptions as to what is really the "most useful".
This has been my experience as well. My native language is English, and I do just fine in it. But I've also studied a couple other languages, and when I try to put together sentences, whatever word is closest sometimes pops out.
I almost never find myself accidentally sticking English words into sentences, but I will frequently mix words from my second and third languages. It's brutal.
A friend of mine whose languages are Japanese, English, Spanish and Korean (in that order) told me that learning the third language is the hardest. Once you figure out how to stick to just one language at a time, learning more languages is a lot easier.
Which is perfectly valid english.
Entschuldigung, what time is it? Is that valid English?
Auteur, oeuvre, etc. are now English terms, but Remmidemmi?
My take is it is a gradient, and at some point you would be speaking broken English. Far from, mix words and it will be _perfectly_ valid English.
I believe your assertion is more of a rhetorical tool to make a point, and I agree with that point, though.
It will be if you use it enough.
Sort of like how schadenfreude got added to english.
I learned polish from my parents when growing up and English from living in Canada and cartoons. My native tongue is English but I can speak polish fairly well and read and write it. I don't ever feel like I accidentally reach for polish or English words when I need the other.
I agree with your interpretation though. My anecdotal experience tells me this happens with studied languages.
My girlfriend at the time natively spoke two languages (English and Hokkien) but was less proficient in both than many people who were only native speakers of one of them. She did, however, manage to pick up Mandarin a whole lot easier than I did.
I'm not sure if that relates directly to being able to connect deeply with the society of my upbringing, or that there is some hidden neural pattern there? For what it's worth, I've now been speaking English primarily longer than my mother tongue.
Perhaps in one's native tongue, the idioms and phrases that are fitting to an idea come to mind easily, whereas in a second language, you may need additional effort to find roughly equivalent phrases that are not exact translations.
That may or may not be relevant to the thinking pattern you were mentioning, though I figure the lack of direct translations can sometimes be a barrier to fluency. The idea of "untranslatability" (aka the lack of a direct translation) was also explored last week in an interesting HN discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35629354
"Peine" isn't just pain; it's also trouble. So I think "It's not worth the trouble" is a better rendition.
/me a native English speaker, who learned French by immersion aged about 6.
In English, my suggested translation would be that “It isn’t worth it.” But since this word-for-word translation would feel unnatural (that is, it’s typically better to introduce « la peine » even if the word trouble/pain wasn’t in the original sentence), there can be an extra cognitive load that interrupts fluency.
With enough conscious practice to train this, the translation of common idioms can become automatic. But meaningful translation instead of literal translation of idioms (especially of those more rarely used) can be a potential reason for someone to stop thinking in a target language, and revert to one’s native language to start thinking of the most natural translation for the phrase.
As another example, if I want to say “When pigs fly” in French, my instinct is to stop and use another phrase because the word-by-word translation is probably unnatural. In this case, my instinct is correct, as the proper meaningful translation is « Quand les poules ont les dents » (word-by-word translation: ‘When chicken have teeth’). So, dealing with idiom translation is an added mental effort to translate, which may cause thinking in one’s native language for some people.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/literal
See "As rare as hens' teeth". Similar to "as rare as rocking-horse shit".
My French is far from idiomatic; I hadn't come across "quand les poules ont les dents".
From Le Figaro [1]: « Précisons enfin que notre expression est un idiotisme et qu'elle ne possède pas, par conséquent, de stricts équivalents à l'étranger. Ainsi nos voisins anglais ont-ils l'habitude de dire «quand les cochons voleront», les Espagnols, de lancer «quand les grenouilles auront des poils» et les Allemands, de flanquer un «quand les poissons apprendront à voler». »
English translation: "Finally, let us specify that our expression is an idiom and that it does not, therefore, have strict equivalents abroad. Thus our English neighbors are used to saying "when the pigs fly", the Spaniards say "when the frogs have hair" and the Germans say "when the fish learn to fly."
[1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/expressions-francai...
The examples from Figaro all seem to have their verb as a subjunctive in French, so "When pigs would fly" - we usually say "If pigs had wings", or "Yeah, and pigs might fly". Your translations don't carry the doubt that words like "might" and "if" impart. There are hardly any/no verbs in English that still have a subjunctive distinct from the indicative, a fact that I regret.
There are some places in England (north east) where they pronounce the subjunctive of "to be", even though it isn't written distinctly; they say "If I wear a rich man". I think it's from the German, as in "Wenn ich wäre".
Hah, that's the least of benefits IMO. I'm not sure if you have no interest in the following or just forgot them, but these are things I enjoy: literature in the native language, comparing words and idioms and understanding how different languages influence each other and also how different cultures led to the creation of certain idioms. Conversations with people in their native tongue when I travel and the stories, adventures, and knowledge that unlocks.
To anyone reading this who only speaks English, while I agree with this person and the study that I don't necessarily feel smarter, learning another language is absolutely worth it for the advantages I stated above. My life is more rich because of it.
p.s. adrenalin from IRC?
* Access to more media
I regularly consume newspapers, subreddits and similar in other languages to get different points of view on things. Then there's literature and films (especially the ones that don't have translations)
* Ease of travel (this is highly dependent on the languages you know)
* Connecting with people.
Simply switching to someone's native tongue gives you a familiarity with someone that takes much longer to get if you're speaking their 2nd (or 3rd) language.
* Bragging
Especially in the US/UK you'll get a lot of positive comments from people because they think you're some kind of genius (which the study above disproves...)
Before I started working, I thought knowing this many languages would be helpful in the business world, turns out I have barely ever used them as the working language is always English.
Might not afford you IQ points but it does afford you diplomacy points.
I have a tiny bit of halting Spanish, but I feel much more comfortable communicating that way than trying drag an interaction along with just English.
Good luck!
https://archive.org/search?query=assimil
https://archive.org/details/dutchwithouttoil00cher
For as long as the dogs will let it exist.
You can also find it online, but be sure to find the audio files also. They are essential. Each of the 100+ lessons are like this: After rereading the lesson text with the notes until you can read it without assistance - you then listen to the audio until you can understand the audio without reading the text, then you say it out loud until you can say it at the same speed as the audio without difficulty. So half of the course length involves the audio.
Being able to live between cultures isn't necessarily something that is prized by many, but having been an outsider in every culture I've ever lived in, this ability has helped me become a chameleon and blend into new cultures (corporate cultures, community cultures etc.) in order to feel a sense of belonging.
So the benefits for me are purely sociological -- I agree that being multilingual confers little advantage in terms of performing executive tasks (which is what the linked article was testing).
As always, the real question we can't really test is: what could you have done with probably literal person-years of study/research/leisure time, instead?
It's not "learn a million languages or be a meth head".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of...
Remember, always attack the idea, not the person.
Why do you think that bolsters your idea?
I have also noticed by moving to a country which is hyper focused on everyone learning many languages that it creates a ton of resentment and loss of other abilities, for example reduced STEM skills.
So the opportunity cost is real.
I speak 5 and had gotten used to being the exception; then I moved to Brussels and it’s normal here to meet people who speak even more, far more fluently than I do.
I was at this board game Meetup and met this young Ukrainian kid the other day. 13 years old. She was speaking fluent Russian and would switch to perfect French to speak to us, while following the conversation we were having in English. Her mom mentioned she speaks Ukrainian, and that her lessons are in Dutch at school. 13 years old - damn.
Anyway yeah when you have a good technique and some experience, learning a new language can be much quicker, and very passive.
Children have a very limited vocabulary and tend to make a lot of mistakes (grammar, word usage and pronunciation mistakes) and those mistakes are easily overlooked, especially by adults, since we tend to try to encourage them. Not the case for adult learners.
The second difficulty level is <<cultured>> native speaker. This is massively more difficult since you need to advance from maybe a basic 5-10-15k words to probably 20-40-60k words.
The investment level for C2 (proficiency according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...) is in the thousands of hours per language, including a ton of deliberate study.
To give you an example of C2, for Romanian you need to be at least a well educated high school student and really understand finer details of Romanian grammar. A native Romanian speaker who hasn't finished at least high school at a good high school is probably a bad C2, despite being a native speaker (or more likely a decent C1).
Now, you obviously don't need to be at the highest level for every language you know, but the gap in effort between levels is huge and people underestimate that. Most people that speak multiple languages are probably somewhere around B1-B2 at most of them. Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.
This video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj5qPF_puU] by Olly Richards sums up my feelings on the definition of fluency. Personally, I believe even as early as B2 you can call yourself a fluent speaker, because it's roughly the level where you stop struggling to express your thoughts or to understand other people's. But it also depends how you have learned. B2 can look very different depending on whether it was leared in mostly academic vs literary vs spoken contexts.
> Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.
Those tend to be cultural. My native language is French, but I cannot browse /r/france without wondering wtf everyone's talking about. I'm extremely disconnected from French culture as I moved out when I was 14, so I never experienced adulthood in French and I had to learn things like what "Pôle emploi" is or some such. I'm still C2 in French,
I also do make mistakes in English, but I catch plenty of native English speakers make egregious mistakes or not know fairly basic things about their own language. Another commenter mentioned the their/they're your/you're distinction is one that natives tend to mess up more often than non-natives; anecdotally, that seems correct to me.
Language is culture. A large part of language learning is learning culture, expressions, idioms.
If I say"white as cheese" to a Frenchman he won't understand what I mean because the average cheese in France is not white, unlike in Romania.
Has anyone bothered to look at the tests that determine cognitive ability in this context? Here's one(or it's advanced version the double trouble test):
“assess the ability to inhibit cognitive interference that occurs when processing of a specific stimulus feature impedes the simultaneous processing of a second stimulus attribute.”[1]
What this test is basically saying is that being bilingual doesn't give you an edge at playing Lumosity, because as we have learned from past discussion these brain improvement apps don't actually "improve your brain"(whatever that may mean), they just train your performance on certain tasks. Why does measuring concentration relate to being bilingual?
What the personal comment below does in fact try to remind people of indirectly is that being natively multilingual actually makes it harder for a person to be controlled and directed and by extension give you access to vastly different perspectives on a lot of topics especially when those languages stem from different language families.
[1] https://lesley.edu/article/what-the-stroop-effect-reveals-ab...
Will it make you a better chess player? The simple answer appears to be: no.
It one my gripes with classical education. What benefit is there of learning Latin? Well, you can read Virgil in the original, and if that is your thing, power to you. Will it make you a better person? No, just no.
(Maybe, you'll have a slight, slight advantage when learning another Roman language. But surely, you would have been much better off to learn French to begin with, if that was the goal.)
I had to do 10 years of Latin; I hated it. I eventually scraped a bare pass on my second try at the exam.
I'm sure my knowledge of my mother-tongue, English, is much enhanced by having studied Latin. To the extent that cognition is verbal[0], knowing your own language better must improve cognition?
[0] I suspect the researchers' definition of cognition is carefully tuned to exclude verbal thinking.
Additionally, because of the way that Latin is taught, you learn a lot of classical history and philosophy through the process, which - given the impact of Rome on the world - is useful across a wide range of disciplines.
I put my hand up: I didn't read the paper (just the abstract). Their findings surprised me.
I speak (quite badly, nowadays) French and German, as well as my mother-tongue, English. I'm quite sure that my understanding of my own language is greatly enhanced by knowing French and German. And I'd be very surprised if a better knowledge of your native language doesn't enhance at least some aspects of cognition.
But this is a particular constellation of languages: if you exclude modern loanwords, it seems to me that the flow of vocabulary has been mainly from French and German into English, rather than vice-versa.
Decades ago, I did a class in Mandarin (now completely forgotten, except a few phrases). I don't think knowledge of Mandarin improved my understanding of my mother tongue at all.
So my surprise is that the researchers found no cognitive enhancement at all.
Perhaps their cognition test battery excludes those aspects of cognition that depend on thinking with words? It seems to me that I think mainly with words.
~~
To add context on how participants self-reported their bilingualism, the authors wrote: "To obtain information about the number of languages spoken, which languages were spoken, and demographic variables (such as age, country of origin, SES, and education), we asked participants to complete a detailed questionnaire. The questions used in the present study are available in Appendix S1 in the Supplemental Material available online."
From the downloaded supplementary material, the only questions asked related to language assessment were:
"5. What language(s) do you primarily speak at home?
"6. How many languages do you speak? Select one: 1-20"
I could not find any other questions related to language assessment.
~~
From the questionnaire, it looks like the researchers did not examine whether studying a second language as an adult to a very high level could confer cognitive advantages. The study possibly treated people who grew up bilingual and didn't acquire a second language as an adult, and also people who self-reported as bilingual but did not reach a high level in the language, into the same group.
The conclusions of the study would be stronger if the researchers examined how the cognitive abilities of monolingual people who undergo training in a second language and practice it to an advanced level, could change their cognitive abilities over time.
In fact, it remains plausible that adult language acquisition could still provide cognitive benefits. Another research paper with conflicting conclusions [1] studied the effect of language acquisition on older adults aged 59–79 years old. The authors of this different study concluded that "learning a foreign-language may represent a potentially helpful cognitive intervention for promoting healthy aging."
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.0042...
Please take this tongue in cheek, as in kind of like the other comment said: for lots of folks splitting that atte tion is detrimental at least in some regard.
Personally I think some diversification in language is good. It "keeps you on your toes". If you never use a muscle it will deteriorate. But you won't be able to exercise all of your muscles equally all the time.
That said I do get your point about viewpoints. It's so easy to just have exactly one if all you speak is one language. Plenty of places in the world today where that is the case. And it's not just the ones we see in the international news all the time.
For what it's worth, I counted 4 languages instead of 5, assuming the comment wasn't edited. The commenter wrote: "Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English."
Brazilian Portuguese is a single language as the dialect of Portuguese used in Brazil [1], versus the European Portuguese dialect used in Portugal [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Portuguese
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Portuguese
The only time when I felt having to use more mental capacity was when I wasn't fluent in the language, the idea of languages being a constant cognitive load is as ridiculous as thinking that you are better off not knowing anything at all due to the toll knowledge takes on your mental capacity.
As objective evidence, I use a software app called Glossika to practice listening and speaking to some extent, where the software plays a spoken English audio phrase and pauses before playing the translated audio. When I see the English for the phrase "The computer crashed" in Spanish track, the Spanish equivalent only comes to mind, and I don't simultaneously think of the French translation—even though I'm later asked to translate the same English phrase in the French track. At the start of each track, I have a certain context in mind (to make responses in a particular language), so I don't personally struggle with having to consciously focus to avoid mixing up words. In my experience, after at most ~20 seconds or so working in the target language, I say the right translations without any extra conscious effort of avoiding the usage of the wrong language.
The same goes for conversation practice. At the very worst—sometimes at the very start of a conversation—I can mix up a basic word. But after about less than a minute or so of speech, I'm think and express only in the language I'm practicing; I don't continually struggle with interference with other languages.
For my personal experience, studying both French and Spanish has even been beneficial for vocabulary acquisition. Learning that "le public" means audience in French made it a lot easier to shortly after remember that "el público" also means audience in Spanish. The sounds in French and Spanish are different, along with the words that typically surround new vocabulary words, so I don't personally struggle with choosing between different word options from different languages.
Speaking French and Spanish also has a separation due to the way that pronunciation physically feels. The back-of-the-throat guttural R in French especially feels and sounds a lot different than the Spanish trilled R with a vibrating tongue near the front teeth—so there is a barrier to mixing up French and Spanish words with these different sounds, as they "feel" very different to say in the mouth and throat. Spanish words also have a "stress" on the second-last syllable or syllable with a certain accent (e.g. Le envió for "I sent it to you" with a stress on the accented ió), whereas French has roughly equal stresses as a "syllable-timed" language [1], so the feelings of speaking the languages are very different, even if the vocabulary can be similar at a first glance.
In summary, I just can't relate at all to the idea of "juggling" between languages from practice with audio programs and conversation practice each week, though I recognize that different people have different experiences.
[1] https://ielanguages.com/french-stress.html
Depending on how you define tested, yep, people who I know that know a lot are not slower answering questions that know only very little.
I do consider there are advantages to speaking several languages.
I learned from English that you can be very precise, but also economical in exposition of complex matter.
I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian. I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.
I learned from French that there are way more words for expressing feelings than I was using before, and also a certain way of having no-pressure intellectual, exploratory conversations, exchanging ideas among peers. It has a certain rhythm and many turns of phrases that work very well for this.
In Romanian you can be incredibly sophisticated (via modern French influence), but also stay close to the agricultural and pastoral roots. The language just has this great dynamic range. Romanian literature has examples of great works that are essentially collaborative, and have hundreds maybe thousands of authors (some likely illiterate), and that were passed along in oral form with various modifications that were finally recorded and published less than two centuries ago, and are very much readable by modern speakers.
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Bonus: More things that I learned from English are certain expressions that guide you into a (I think) pragmatic world view, e.g.:
Having your sensibilities hurt from thinking this somehow detracts from the human condition is quaint but doesn't make the statement any less appropriate.
What makes you think French has a less "agricultural" root than Romanian. Both languages have existed since a time when industrialization was still far in the future... are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation?? This sounds kind of ridiculous to me.
Look up what the French Academy is doing :-)
Also Romania used to have 50% subsistence farmers until 2000.
I think it's true.
Modern French is derived from a form of French spoken among aristocrats; the Norman Conquest didn't bring to Britain a great influx of peasant French. For a long time, an educated Briton (a) spoke French, and (b) had lived in France, and even been educated there.
It's also that until the 19th century and compulsory education there were multiple dialects of French spoken throughout the country. "Royal French" is a descendant of Norman and was the language the bourgeoisie adopted after the revolution and that the rest of the country standardized on.
Same thing happened in the Americans French colonies in Canada and Louisiana; the settlers brought the "Royal" French with them because they were majorly from the north.
I speak English and another 3 languages. IMO this is not due to the language itself, it's 100% cultural. English has as much power as any language I know (Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish) to make exaggeration and generalization, it just seems to happen that most English speakers tend to use those less then, say, Brazilians (but probably more than Swedes, I think).
Nabakov didn't feel the same way.
That said, as someone with decent Russian, I do like the language in many ways. I agree that it's a nuanced and powerful language in ways that English isn't; English is so ambiguous and low-context that you can say anything but I love Russian in that I can state things like number, gender, if they go & come back / complete, and do so in a word or two.
See also: high context vs low context languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
Overall, I am fluent in 4 languages, 2 were acquired early from the environment, 1 in my childhood, and 1 as an adult. Only English proved to be truly useful in life and it is the only language that I actually enjoy using. I dream of living in an English-speaking country and never touching any other language again. I know, it's a weird sentiment.
Not all types of Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic, some are different enough to be considered a different language as different as Nigerian Pidgin and British English.
> I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere).
I don't find Russian to be particularly more expressive than any other bigger slavic language, like Polish or Yugoslavian. I would say that it's largely a myth propagated by Russians. It has a bunch of newer loan words from French, German and kept some of its' older synonyms, oh and a lot of archaics from Old Church Slavinic. In that sense it isn't more nuanced than English. One more con is that the convoluted sentence structure makes it an unfriendly language for non native speakers to learn. Phonetics are terrible, a bunch of my friends that had been studying Russian fairly well and still don't know how to pronounce those rarely used words.
How is Russian language used to scare people? If you live in EU and hear a lot of Russian you shouldn't be scared since a lot of them are Ukranian refugees from the East and South. There are very few Russians you should be scared of, except some angry and very drunk ones in tourist resorts, fortunately those aren't coming in droves anymore.
I speak a few different languages, knowledge of languages is overrated if you don't use them regularly. Actually I regret learning some of those, that time would have been better spent on acquiring some technical skills. I have met very few people that are truly bilingual, most of them say they are, but aren't actually equally as good in both. A lot of Ukranians are bilingual btw, but it's easier when two languages are that similar.
I've heard that there is an unusually high rate of mental illness among European Parliament translators.
At most, I found a systematic review article [1] with the conclusion that interpreters for refugees experience higher levels of emotional and work-related stress, but it seems like this is more of a result of the content being translated, versus the act of translation.
It seems plausible, too, that assuming the claim is true (though I couldn't source an article to confirm this), it may alternatively be a result of the content of the translation or the pressure of the job (e.g. there may be serious consequences if there are mistranslations), versus the act of translation itself.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.7107...
I also speak four languages and mostly agree with your take. I'm native in Spanish; English I learned gaming, and reading Tolkien as a kid. The other two, German and French due to a combination of self interest, education and travel. While I often fantasize about picking up a couple more (namely Norwegian and Japanese), I quickly become disappointed as I go through the motions all over again. It's a huge mental effort for a seemingly low _tangible_ ROI.
Sure, listening to music or reading in the target language and understanding most of it is quite the magical experience, probably similar to what cracking a secret code feels like; but there is no practical gain to it afterwards. It's a bit like reading/writing poetry: an intense but ephemeral enjoyment. More of an art form than anything else really. Unless, of course, you find yourself immersed in the language by way of relocation, then it truly does make sense to learn it. I do get your point with Dutch though: now you've got to figure out a fifth system for conveying an idea you're perfectly capable of saying in four other systems; it gets tiring.
I've been comparing it with programming languages lately. The question often pops up in HN: "what's the best programming language to build a backend in?" -- imagine you already can build a great backend in Python/Go/TS but you start picking up Rust only for the purposes of building said backend, what's the point? Just use whichever language you know best and build the damn thing already. Simple enough right? As is often the case though, this type of analysis is superficial; you may build a fantastic backend in say, Clojure, but then miss out on the opportunities a more popular language with a larger community may have to offer (e.g. Python). Writing Python may not necessarily provide general cognitive advantages over writing Clojure, but it will give you easier _access_ to the entire ML ecosystem, for instance. Does being capable of using more powerful tools help develop cognitive advantages?
I only read the abstract, but even if _Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages_, learning a second language, English specifically, has unquestionably changed my life.
I'm not sure if speaking more languages exhausts some kind of mental capacity -- that's not my experience at all. There was a time when I spoke nothing but English for years, a time when I spoke 4 languages, and now I speak both English and Chinese daily; I haven't really observed any differences in my proficiency. My Chinese proficiency has probably gone back up to native status after atrophying in my college years of not speaking a single word.
But Russian (former Soviet space) and French (Africa) have large population that often have no little English fluency.
Which opens up a lot more cultural doors.
I've heard people that speak many languages fluently claim that it gets easier after the fifth language - so keep at it.
One tip; try as much as possible to stick to switching only between your mother tongue and the new(est) language you're learning - or at least have as many full days as you can where you avoid switching to other foreign languages.
Until you become fluent in the new language (say about a year if living/working in the new language).
I didn't mean five or more "European dialects" I meant five or more different languages. Besides, between French and English there should be some overlap with Dutch - though I agree Dutch seems wierd on the surface:)
Sticking to your broken new language in the face of "helpful English" is hard - at least with friends and co-workers you can make an agreement (all Dutch Fridays, etc).
I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (and by knowing, I don't mean travelguide fluency). Such people are rare.
No, but Dutch, English and French are pretty close (hence the reference to Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy").
> I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (...) Such people are rare.
They certainly are! I didn't mean to say i know a lot of people that fit the definition - only that I have heard such people mention that it gets easier after the fifth.
I only know Norwegian/Swedish/Danish (close enough to count as one, one and a half), English, Japanese and some French (and marginal German, Spanish, Italian etc due to limited exposure and the intersection of Norwegian/English/French).
I would have to add something a little different, like Sami, Maori, Russian or possibly Farsi, Arabic to fit in the five languages boat.
I hope they tackle "left-handed people are better at math" at some point. That's another one I'm tired of hearing about.
But where I live (in San Francisco) speaking exactly 2 languages is usually a sign that you or your parents are immigrants.
India for instance -- A typical kid in many places here (especially southern part of the country) has 3 languages formally taught in school and consumed as popular media daily.
Having privilege in these regions usually translates to levels of literacy like having reading ability (in addition to just speaking for trade), reading literature, speaking fluency, broader vocabulary, "better" accent, etc. -- all of which, in thousand different ways, signal one's socio-economic status in every interaction.
For instance, immigrants will massively be bilingual in general. We could argue there are in a better financial and educational position than those who couldn't immigrate in the first place, but then relative to the country they live, they can be on bottom of the social ladder.
On the parrallel with studying other subjects, I think it rings true, the only difference would be that bilingualism can be "forced" upon children by circumstances or environment, where math or instruments usually come later and/or on a choice basis.
The interesting part being it's done on children still in their learning phase. The current article targeting 11000 makes me think it's done in a similar setting (catching 11000 adult working people for a study is just complicated).
In general when people are arguing about side effects of bilingualism, I think they care more about adults who more or less reached their full potential.
I was very ignorant of this when I was younger, my first girlfriend was Korean , but couldn't really speak it since her parents( presumably) didn't put her in classes. On the other hand, if your parents have money for language classes, they probably can afford general tutoring. So your doing better in school than your classmates.
Before you mention public school language education, your lucky if your able to read attending a public high school. I went to one myself.
Only after getting exposed to the rest of the world (And people making a big deal out of it) did I realize that it was a "class" thing
If the bilinguals are mainly economic migrants, sure, I'd expect the correlation to be different