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 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."
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.
> 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 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 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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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 see at least one subtle advantage in being multi-lingual: distinguishing concepts more clearly.
I see monolingual English speakers who confuse to/too/two, there/their/they're, etc. It's hard to blame them because these word triplets are pronounced the same, so why bother distinguishing them in writing.
Knowing how these words map to different languages reinforces their distinctions. There/their/they're in Chinese are 那裏 (na li) / 他們的 (ta men de) / 他們是 (ta men shi).
This goes deeper and works for homonyms like free, which maps to 免費 (no cost / gratuis) vs. 自由 (freedom / liberty). It makes you think harder about what you mean when you use the word free.
Learning different languages challenges your assumptions. An Euro-centric upbringing would assume that spaces are required to separate words. Chinese and Japanese disagree with this and work just fine. 26-letter alphabet vs. thousands of characters. Implicit tones vs. prescriptive tones. Context-dependent letter shapes (Sanskrit). Optional/implied vowels (Arabic). Word order (SVO etc.).
For people who are used to Indo-European languages, the biggest shock while learning Chinese will probably be that it's possible for a language to lack articles, plural forms, conjugation, tense, gender and case.
"I'm going to go buy three loaves of bread tomorrow morning at the bakery." -> "I tomorrow morning go bakery buy three loaf bread." The latter has no articles, tense, conjugation or plural forms, yet it's completely understandable.
Even if you learn all sorts of Indo-European languages, you'll still have a lot of assumptions about what sort of grammar a language should have that are not actually universal. Indo-European languages are quite grammatically complex.
Smartphones have changed this. You can write characters directly on a touchscreen. It's not as popular of an input method as pinyin, but it's not uncommon either.
There's also Bopomofo, as an alternative to pinyin input.[0]
You can write the most sloppy cursive Chinese character and your phone would recognize them just fine. Together with text prediction it's quite easy to get 40 characters per minute (probably equivalent of 80wpm in English), much faster than most people writing on paper.
Chinese doesn't have to use A-to-Z with Pinyin. There are input methods like Cangjie, Wubi, Bopomofo, 1-to-9 stroking on number pads, and handwriting. But yes, pinyin A-to-Z is the most pragmatic for many reasons.
Just a counter example: I live in a multi-lingual area with a big ex-pat population and see english speakers who became multi-lingual with reduced ability to distinguish homophones.
This study seems to focus on acquired languages and ignores mulitple languages learned in childhood. As someone who grew up speaking three languages (German, Hebrew and English) I feel as if this has expanded my ability to conceptualize and form abstractions because I know "what it is like" to think natively in languages with different vocabularies and syntactic structures. That comes naturally with no effort when you're young, but is nearly impossible to acquire later in life.
I agree with you. I once had an argument with a monolingual English-speaking person who was convinced that language is necessary for thinking, or that thinking somehow comes from language, which couldn't be further from my experience where I will have an abstract thought and then try to put it into words.
However it took years for me to be conscious of the abstract thinking. I started out by thinking in my native tongue, then thinking in my native tongue and mentally translating into English, then thinking in English, before finally not thinking in any language at all.
This. I know it has very little scientific merit, but Roger Penrose's argument that "consciousness is quantum" always rang that bell to me, the thought (or a solution to a problem) comes to me always entirely at once, not one word at a time.
The scientific method seems to me language-based. How to come up with hypotheses, however, seems to me exactly as you mention. They just pop out of nowhere, like a sudden inspiration that has been processing in the background and now just clicks.
I am not sure what you mean by the scientific method. The scientific method can be as simple as trial-and-error or observation, such as the idea that maybe you shouldn't eat a certain berry if you just watched someone eat one right before they passed out and started foaming at the mouth. Animals without highly developed language do this all the time.
There is no doubt that writing out or sounding out your reasoning can boost your ability to think and communicate. For example, it can promote a dialectic which can refine your ideas, and you can even have an inner dialogue using language. It can also help you form a representation of the thought process for communication.
But it can also muddle your thinking or leave you with blind spots if the language is not expressive enough or you rely on it too much. You do not need a linguistic representation of a concept in order to reason about it (well, I don't seem to and I doubt I'm special in that regard).
Just because an internally consistent language may be sufficient for basic reasoning doesn't mean it's necessary overall, or that it doesn't place a 'ceiling' on the types of thoughts you can think. I would argue that it cuts both ways.
It is definitely interesting that you seemingly get reasoning "for free" when you only optimize for language (e.g. large language models). But that is the way it would be if grammar was a more formal descendant of logic.
Thanks for the thoughtful post. I am a bit late, but I meant coming up with a Hypothesis and validating it through empirical evidence. Connecting these two explicitly needs logic (when I do x y happens) and, IMHO, logic needs language (or at least seems to have a relationship with language).
I guess if animals can do this, we have to options: either animals have language (even if basic) or the scientific method does not require language. I see merit in both arguments.
About thinking, I always think (hah) of this quote:
"Lo que solemos elevar a la categoría de meditaciones no es más que el ruido de un motor encendido." Ray Loriga
My idiomatic translation: "What we usually elevate to thinking/thoughts is only the noise of a running engine."
I also believe language is necessary for thinking. I would define thinking as following the scientific method, though. That is, thinking is not necessary to tie my shoelaces or go shopping or dance (that I consider more autopilot, maybe like system 1 and 2?). But to make a rigorous argument, IMO one needs language. Under this definition of thinking it seems logic is pretty important, and logic seems to me language-based.
> I also believe language is necessary for thinking.
I suspect that different people think verbally to different degrees. I mean, everyone uses words in their head to manipulate ideas, to some extent; but some people use pictures more than others, and some people are very abstract, and despite being super-bright, aren't very good at translating their ideas into clear language.
Do people not able to think without language normally? Does everyone have an internal sound for everything they think all the time? I don’t, I am bilingual but I don’t think this is true. I’m surprised to hear that.
I think the commenters here are focusing on acquired languages, but does the study? I don’t think so, since the bilingual cohort was 2x as likely to be low socioeconomic status.
Good point. I guess I assumed that the second language was acquired later in life because otherwise it's not really "acquiring a second language", it's "acquiring multiple languages at the same time."
In looking back over this, I stumbled over this study which seems to directly contradict the one in the original link:
"This study explores whether the cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism in executive functioning extends to young immigrant children challenged by poverty..."
which implies that there is a "cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism".
So maybe the original study is just bogus. Or maybe this one is. Who knows? Sociology doesn't have a stellar reputation for generating reproducible results.
The study was based on 'test your brain health!' type online surveys/games hosted by Cambridge Brain Sciences. The user portal is https://brainlabs.me/ . They just grabbed a sample of 40k people who played certain games and dumped it into some data processing software. It's absolutely par for the course for modern social science studies, but makes any conclusions of dubious value for countless reasons.
Put another way, I think the discussion is probably at relevant as the study.
That's not even remotely close to being true. I have no more trouble imagining what monolingual me would have been like than I have imagining what color-blind me would have been like, or deaf me, or paraplegic me.
Imagining a deficit in one's abilities is not hard. It's going the other way -- imagining what it would be like to be able to do something that you have never done -- that is difficult.
(In fact, I don't even have to imagine. I know what it is like to learn a language as an adult, and how different that is from learning one as a child, because I've done both.)
Of course. That is all anyone can do with respect to any counterfactual. So what? You were making a claim about the fidelity of my imagination:
"You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like."
And that's not true. I have several pretty good clues. Not only that, but what I imagine about the counterfactual me leads me to be able to formulate a testable hypothesis with respect to non-counterfactual situations, namely, that acquiring multiple languages in one's youth does afford some measurable cognitive advantages in general.
You can get a lot of leverage out of imagining things.
This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you.
If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people. Who cares if your IQ went up or down half a point on account of learning to speak mandarin- your understanding of the lives of billions of people just increased dramatically. That's why it's good to learn a language- culture, not cognition.
> This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you.
But that's not what the paper studied. It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't.
That's different from how enriched you will be as a person from learning about other people and culture - It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.
This is a recurring problem with science reporting. Falsifiability and reproducibility demand that good studies focus on very specific, well-defined effects. Then it gets reported as leading to much broader conclusions on the topic as a whole.
Counterintuitively, "missing the forest for the trees" is exactly what you want a study like this to do. You can let a later meta-analysis figure out how to make a forest out of the trees.
Excuse me, the Haruspicy community have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from social sciences, which they consider imprecise and subject to chance.
> It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.
Not really. Language and culture are inseparable. In my opinion, you cannot learn a language without learning at least a bit of the culture too. Idioms, expressions, and the way people use language say a lot about their culture.
Apart from my own culture, I have by far the best understanding of Anglo-American culture because I speak English. I have never lived in an English-speaking country though. As soon as you speak a language, you can expose yourself to the culture where the language is spoken pretty easily through the internet, movies, etc. HN is a good example. I see what (mostly) American people think, what things are important to them, and the way they approach life on a daily basis on this site.
> HN is a good example. I see what (mostly) American people think,
I like HN as much as the next critter but HN is an extremely small and biased sample of the US. The demographic is skewed towards young and liberal (even socialist at times) when the actual country is more like 50/50 liberal/conservative, to oversimplify a bit. On HN, you are also seeing comments from people who have both strong opinions and the free time to write about about them online. Most people in the US are not going to shower others with their criticisms of society until after at least a few drinks.
No worries. I am very aware that HN is heavily biased (actually, most places where discussion happens are biased). Also of course HN is not my only exposure to american culture (would be kinda absurd if it was though lol).
But your comment actually illustrates very well what I mean. I know it's normal for americans to call HN "socialist" and in my culture almost nobody would use that word to describe HN. Or another example is that liberal means left-leaning (like in your comment). In my culture liberal means economically liberal (no tax, no regulations), so the exact opposite of left-leaning. Those are things you have to learn in order to really understand the language. Just understanding the language by itself is not enough because the dictionary will not say that socialist or liberal actaully have a different meaning.
Is an HN/forum/human thing to ignore people with similar politics as "normal" background, and overestimate the prevalence of people with different politics.
You get a wide range of responses if you search for comments of HN posters trying to estimate the politics of HN posters.
> It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't.
The study is about "bilingualism", not about "learning". Bilingualism is a passive property, e.g. children born to parents speaking different languages will acquire those languages, but in adulthood no longer be in the process of learning them.
"learning" is an active mental process and those beneficial properties you mention are ascribed to this.
My main "issue" with the paper (which I really like just to be clear) is that I can't completely figure out how they grouped someone as bilingual (maybe that's on me but it doesn't seem very clear in the methods section). It seems they used self identification by the participants (18+ old). If that's the case someone that learned the language in school would be considered bilingual. For example, if the questionaire asked me which languages I'd feel confident speaking or something similar I'd certainly include Englisch even though I learned it in school/from books/TV and neither of my parents speak it. I'd find it much more interesting if they could somehow split between people raised in a bilingual environment vs. people that learned another language.
It's impressive that your comments reads like a well-educated native speaker of English, except for "Englisch".
Anyway, your English is far, far better than "learned it in school". Those books and TV(And fluent English users in school?) were an effective immersion. It's quite different from the common USA style of learning a non-English language: "5 years of classes but no immersit in culture"
Immersion in English is easy because there's so much quality content on the internet. It's often THE motivation to learn the language.
I'm learning German and there's a surprising lack of quality media. I don't want to throw shade on contemporary German culture, but it's just a very different level from the English-speaking world. My native language is Czech - which has a small cultural sphere - yet somehow the German-speaking cultural sphere does seem more similar in size to the Czech-speaking one than to the English-speaking one.
One could always ask additional and more specific questions, such as whether the subject learned more than one language as an infant. On the other hand, it is not clear to me from the abstract alone whether the authors were concerned with when their subjects learned their languages, though it may be clear enough to the intended audience.
> It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.
I've never set foot in the US and yet I know lots of things about the country and its people because I can speak and write in English, certainly I do know more about the US compared to my fellow countrymen who cannot speak and write English.
The same goes for French, even though I've been to France two or three times, I know a lot more about the country, its history, its moeurs as a result of me reading books directly in French (many of them never got translated, not even into English).
> that being bilingual gave you significant cognitive advantage?
Probably not in the "intelligence tests" kind of way, but, then again, as time passes I've tended to view those more and more as charlatanism.
> Or could you be quite intelligent with above average memory
I certainly used to have a much better memory when I was a kid (I'm now in my early 40s), that's when I basically put the basis for learning all the foreign languages that I now know: English (via the public education system here), French (via my dad and via school), Italian (by watching TV and because Italian is very close to Romanian), partially also Spanish by watching football matches commented in Spanish on TV.
Come to think of it, a study trying to explain how come kids and teenagers are much better at learning foreign languages compared to adults would be more interesting.
I'm pretty sure everybody can do it wherever the average is. It's a matter of wanting to do it, that's all. Foreign workers come and pick up whatever host country language yet they're not always the brightest and also don't have exactly ideal conditions to do it. Like a sibling comment touched, you can go to Berlin and complain the language is difficult, talk English with Berliners happy to practice their English, and you'll come back learning almost nothing while they'll polish their English without even needing to travel outside Berlin. Because of choices. Learning something new is a challenge and like with every challenge, can be accepted or not.
>It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.
sure, go to China for a year, only speak English, surround yourself with English speaking friends and going to English friendly restaurants and in the end come back with an increased understanding of Chinese culture and people and probably get jobs based on that understanding!
In short, speaking the language at least well enough to interact with the population is prerequisite for the increased understanding.
That's not totally true - in Berlin there are lots of English speakers (many/most English as a second language) and so people including myself live here with pretty basic German (A2 probably). Those people are certainly learning alot about a different culture from wherever they came from even if they aren't speaking the dominant language.
Obviously if I had B2 German it would be awesome and I would chat up more people ... but that's not an easy thing to do, even over a number of years. I hope to get there some day but in Berlin it's particularly difficult because so many people speak English (and sometimes better English than German).
Yes, every city and region is a bit different but Berlin as a whole has such a different culture, especially if you predominantly speak English.
Most of my colleagues are English speaking only and they sometimes complain that its hard to do certain things where I have no problem with it. Getting appointments, doctors and Bürgerbüro especially, they always seem to struggle with. You can certainly get by without or very little German in Berlin, but there are things that are significantly harder to do. I'd argue you're generally missing out on a lot of smaller aspects of the culture if you experience the English version of it.
Though I get its hard to learn German. Not an easy language and all the English in Berlin doesn't make it easier.
Yeah it's definitely hard to learn another language when there are a lot of people who speak your language and you don't necessarily need to learn it to get by. I have a tip if you want German to feel a bit easier though, hop over to Czech Republic for a bit and take a couple of Czech classes. German will suddenly seem an order of magnitude simpler by comparison :)
Note: I'm not trying to trivialise your efforts to learn German, rather to encourage you by saying it could be much worse. For me I glance every now and then at Hungarian and Finnish and think "ok I can handle Czech"
yes, not every specific example translates perfectly to every other scenario under the same class.
However, I'm in Denmark. And I've lived in Germany. And I have an Italian wife and family.
In my experience in Denmark basically everybody without a language learning disability or extremely advanced age speaks English to a far higher degree of competence than the average German in Berlin, in fact Danes almost speak English as well as they believe themselves to do, which is high praise indeed.
But let's cut to the chase - based on my experiences in these countries my example is a lot closer to correct in all three of these EU countries than the counterargument is.
on edit: changed to improve comprehensibility.
It's unlikely anyone will possess even a mediocre understanding of any of these countries' cultures - even with a decade of living there - without speaking the language.
Right on money. It's easier to delude yourself that you comprehended an European culture without knowing the language simply because everything is so superficially familiar and all nuances are comparatively fine.
Nobody's suggesting that speaking the local language isn't a major contributor to integrating in and understanding a local culture. It's just not the only contributor.
> But that's not what the paper studied. It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't.
I find that it's actually worse for my wordle performance.
Occasionally I'll have a set of clues that lead to obvious words in my second language, but all these obvious words displace any English word that fits the clue.
I have to consciously rearrange the clues by writing them down in order to get the answer.
That may be so, but if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much? I'm not saying the answers to these questions are obvious "nos" but the assumption could stand some scrutiny.
> if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much?
Do you have a reason to back that up? I'm far less sure.
(I mean, I think the advantage is that you are able to speak to more people easily and in their native tongue, which is a whole other advantage, but that's different than "expanding your mind" directly by learning another language.)
>Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much?
I went to high school in Ontario with anglophones who took French immersion, learned fluent conversational French, graduated high school legally credentialed a bilingual, but then proceeded to move to Toronto and never really leave the province. I don't like being judgmental about people's worldly experiences, but I don't think that those high school French classes really did much to colour their worldview, most of us just knew it as a reliable way to secure a 90+ average.
not only that but also the increased opportunities for new knowledge and experiences as well... it can open a lot of doors that would ordinarily be shut-off.
Having achieved a foreign language college major with minors in two others I find it hard not to be cynical about this unless the doors you’re talking about are things like vacations, entertainment, and similar amusements. From a work perspective it has not done much for me. Of course that could be different if my native language weren’t English or I didn’t work in the US, but then that’s just about the relative economic importance of various languages and not some inherent property of multilingualism.
for me the rewards to learning (basic) German have been more personal than professional - attempting to speak with a German speaker in their native language generally makes it easier to bond with them.
Yeah that's completely reasonable, but there are a lot of people trying to sell you on career success that is a mirage. And it can be frustrating the people you want to talk with often speak English better than you speak the language you're learning, though that's more of a problem with some languages than others.
Unsure what myth your referring to. The only thing I know about "false friends" in the context of learning languages are "false friend" words that sound similar but don't have similar meanings, like "embarrassed" in English and "embarazada" in Spanish (which means pregnant).
> ...you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people
And of American culture and its people. You might re-evaluate some ideas you'd grown up with, becoming a more cosmopolitan/adaptable/understanding person, capable of having deeper relationships with a larger proportion of the Earth's population.
But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity.
> But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity
How do you test «cognitive capacity»? The other day on these pages a newcomer came and wrote he "distrusts them <category>". Some call ignorance relevant to "cognitive capacity".
Although somewhat ironically, the person who proposed 'g factor' was specifically reporting correlations between student performance in latin, french, english, maths and music.
I don't think you really have to learn the destination country's language for that. At least it is unclear that the lack of language would be any kind of major roadblock.
Globally, a very small percentage of bilingual people fit the "I decided to learn a different language and then used it to temporarily live in another country very different from my own" model. Much more common is, "I speak my local regional language and also the official national language, and so does everyone else in my community."
Not necessarily living in another country, but a large part of the world, especially in industrialized countries, learns English. Neither regional nor national, but of course because it is the lingua franca.
"They forced us to learn it in school" is another one. E.g. what I heard about Lebanon: And by forced, I mean you don't just do a French lesson, you learn other non-language lessons in other languages.
It's still an important piece of information, first because it disagrees with what we previously thought, second because there are fringe cases in which learning a language doesn't open you to anything else.
I'm Spanish and live in the Basque Country. Everybody speaks Spanish here, but we are supposed to also speak Basque. The idea that it's advantageous to learning and such is one of the main arguments used to justify a push to learn the language. Basque language was the subject I invested the most time in through my whole compulsory education, so frankly, I do care.
Have started with English then learned Spanish (travelling through Latin America extensively), and now an Asian language, I have acquired all sorts of advantages and also new ways of thinking.
I really feel people on HN ARE sometimes missing the forest for the trees and I can't imagine how learning a new language could not be a good thing.
Learning a second language as an adult or adolescent makes it vastly easier to learn additional languages later. So your time learning Basque was not wasted.
Yeah, "Cognitive Advantages" is such a poor proxy for measuring a more enriched world view / life.
Let's say I live in a country of 3-4 million native language speakers, with next to zero speakers of my language internationally. Teaching a kid English at an early age opens them up to experiencing so much more than whatever happens to get produced / translated into my native lounge. When it comes to consuming information, would you rather your child was a great white shark or a bottom feeder?
Knowledge is a ladder, whose benefits compound over time, the end result is expertise. Also, understanding people from different nations is a good defence against parochialism, thinking that your people have al the answers.
It's an academic paper with an intentionally narrow focus.
> If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the _broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains_ that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals.
> If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people.
Less obvious, and IMNHO more significant is that you'll come back with a new perspective on culture; and as a result a new perspective on your own culture (now having a point of comparison).
I think you've missed the topic entirely. From the abstract: "There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children."
This seems to be aimed at debunking the urban (expat?) legend that raising your children to be billingual will somehow make them smarter.
In the end, this perception may end-up being just the adults' attempt to soothe their feelings of guilt for the inconveniences their children have to go through because of their international career.
There are advantages at the individual level to understand and communicate with multiple cultures. I would argue it’s more than an increase/decrease in IQ points. Did the individual increase in their free time and income is the only valid output worth measuring in bilingual advantages.
That is because it is considered wrong. There is no solid evidence, despite whole labs trying for decades. There are only very weak effects, and given the state of research in psychology, I'd be surprised to find one that has been consistently reproduced.
The weak examples also do not prove Sapir-Whorf. They can usually be explained from extra-linguistic learning that occurs while learning a language.
I suspect this is overblown. Clearly a Spaniard and a Swedish don't automatically start thinking like an Australian just because they are communicating in English.
What is more likely to happen is that when a Spaniard and a Swedish learn English they will over time be exposed to the culture of other English speakers. This will for the time being be dominated by American culture, but as English continues to be the lingua franca of the world, the balance will slowly shift and include more cultural elements from places with large populations like India.
Language barriers prevent the sharing of culture and being able to communicate with a wide array of people is something to celebrate.
I agree the effect is probably minimal but it is not likely to be zero.
The jury is still out, but there is certainly evidence that a person’s spoken language influences at least memory.
I don’t remember the details but there have been studies of speakers of languages where there are more names for colours (e.g. Russian with blue, Hungarian with red) are more accurately able to recall a colour that they have seen previously than a speaker of a language without such a distinction (e.g. English).
Dismissing an important skillset by pretending it could be magical is called clickbait. The advantage of knowing a second language is to be able to communicate and understand a new segment of humanity. This is like creating a paper: being able to pump gas into your car affords no general improvement in hair growth on your toes.
The paper is tapping on a long-standing debate about the effects of being bilingual. For a long time, it was thought that being bilingual was actively harmful, and indeed it's been shown in studies that babies with parents who speak different languages to them are slower to reach some linguistic milestones. Later research showed that this was just temporary, and not only was there no negative effect, but bilingual kids tended to do better on some tests of aptitude than monolinguals. And now this study is saying that no, maybe they're not better after all.
especially on a programming forum. Knowing Python, SQL, and R has been hugely beneficial. I can read Ruby scripts and colleagues can talk me through JS without me ever writing those.
Would be surprised if knowing multiple spoken language didn't help at all!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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)
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.
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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'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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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, 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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
There are different types of bilingualism. Making an active effort to learn a second language for no reason other than cultural interest is a totally different activity from being forced to learn the dominant language as a disadvantaged minority in a non-native land. The former is associated with genius, the latter is actually a crutch.
Probably a rubbish study. You can probably do the same with programming languages and show that knowing Lisp, Java and C won't give you any cognitive advantages. Just stick to Java and you'll have plenty of "cognition". We'll all know this is (as decaffjoe pointed out) completely missing the forest for the trees.
I feel that this study is making a very general conclusion based on very specific criteria. While I agree that knowing multiple languages often increases cognitive overhead, and probably doesn't make me superhuman smart or anything, it's a choice that does have real consequences on my abilities. Depending on the context I find myself in, it may be more useful or not. If I'm traveling around Europe, being conversational in five European languages is extremely beneficial. If I'm taking an IQ test in a lab in Iowa, knowing five European languages probably won't give me any benefit and might actually make me slower to recall the relevant things for the test.
We get good at the skills we practice, and there is absolutely a benefit from practicing the skills that are relevant to our lives.
Personally, one of the main benefits I get from knowing multiple languages is that it helps me to reason about abstract meaning and understand how to communicate clearly across cultural and linguistic lines. That's a very useful skill for developing apps that are used internationally and for living a lifestyle where I'm constantly context-switching into different cultures.
I'm a native English speaker, and one thing I've noticed is that people who only speak English are often the worst communicators because they don't realize how ambiguous their language is, how much slang they're using, and how difficult they are to understand for someone who grew up in a different context. Is it a cognitive advantage to be able to communicate better with a diverse group of people? I don't know. Not according to this study.
Here in Japan I often hear stories about kids raised bilingual being put into special needs classes because some schools consider it a cognitive impairment. Since my family lives abroad, I would like to teach my kids english at home and only use it in private settings, but feels weird having to hide something like that (also, half kids are sort of "expected" to speak english anyway).
Sounds like you may need to find a school that does not consider it a cognitive impairment, but you really should speak your native tongue to your children regardless.
> Here in Japan I often hear stories about kids raised bilingual being put into special needs classes because some schools consider it a cognitive impairment.
This sounds more like the Japanese being... Japanese. And not in the good sense of the word.
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.
I think this and a greater aspect of any deliberate, learned task making people "smarter" needs to be addressed.
The thing is, beyond critical developmental stages in early childhood, and barring significant environmental factors like lead poisoning or brain trauma, one's general cognitive abilities are largely a genetic phenomenon.
Next you'll tell me there are no learning styles, that whole language instruction doesn't work and that college doesn't teach critical thinking /s
I wonder how we end up with these "myths" in the first place. Bad research? Great marketing? How many more educational holy cows will come apart in the next decades?
Remind me of an article where three anthropologists were debating what does mean to be civilized. "Knowing one language makes us human, knowing more than one language make us civilised." is the only thing I now remember from that reading.
Does knowing more than one languages make you more reflective/liberal?
> Does knowing more than one languages make you more reflective/liberal?
I believe some society traits leak through the language and you see a little bit more context when you learn a new language. (Especially with idioms, but separate words too) The in-your-face examples I remember now are the many polite ways to say "no" without saying "no" in Japanese, and Australian tribes using absolute directions (NESW) instead of relative. But there are more subtle ones too and I think they give you a better chance to be more open.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only in US there's this strange obsession with counting how many languages one knows. If I count, everyone in my family is at least bilingual, and most are >= trilingual. It's not unusual for someone to speak 4 languages (2 regional languages, nationally common language, english).
If you really want to look into effects on cognition, it's better to count language families rather than individual languages. Two dravidian languages might be so similar (one to one mapping of linguistic concepts) that cognitively it might not change anything.
In india, the poorest people often speak the most number of languages and their cognition is affected by a number of other factors related to poverty. I'm not sure how one can properly control for such factors.
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.
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.
One thing I find interesting about being multilingual is you can 'unlock' your different personalities and disrupt mental inertia a bit when speaking another language. It's like having one part of the brain take a break while activating other parts. But I also feel awkward speaking a different language in front of close friends when you are so used to speaking the 'default' language with them. It feels like you are exposing your other personality.
That is very true. It does seem to me there's a subtle "personality shift" among some people when they speak a separate language.
Sometimes you see people become warmer and more affectionate because either they know how to be that way in their native language or it's more common in their culture (e.g. seeing a native Spanish speaker speak Spanish after knowing them only speak English).
There was also an interesting study about asking people solve trolley problems in their second language vs their first. Whe. Solving in their second language, the solution tended to be more utilitarian and logical.
I'm from a Hispanic family which is by and large bilingual and uses quite a lot of Spanglish at family events. However, I was raised monolingual, with English. My parents say they sometimes regret not teaching me Spanish. But, on they other hand, they recognize that my English rhetorical skills are significantly better than they might otherwise have been. Given that English is a language with a wide vocabulary and quite expressive specificity, this confers all sorts of advantages to me, especially in technical applications.
I am most definitely a programming polyglot, however, and that was of my own doing. Learning many programming languages has most definitely had a profound effect on how I think about problems and break down sub-problems. I don't think it's made me smarter or more intelligent generally, but it has opened doors to solutions I would not have been able to consider otherwise, which is probably a good analogy for what this study is suggesting.
I have definitely settled in a nice generally-optimal zone of functional-procedural: Isolate state to referentially transparent procedures, and mutate all the state you want within those procedures, but the overall program structure should be a functional pyramid of value-returning calls.
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 ?
multilingualism was self-reported so they don't differentiate between someone who slept through 2 years of HS spanish and someone who grew up speaking both English and Chinese
The study was also done in a single geographical location. terrible
For those experts in the field, curious how this study relates to this one : https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-17952-001 , I'm absolutely no expert in any of this, but I am bilingual and did encourage my kids to explore and learn new language(s).
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.
Highlights more the absurdity of "general cognitive advantages" than anything else. In situations where you need a language, whether you're able to speak it or not trumps everything else. I can't perform even the simplest of tasks if the instructions are given in Chinese and I can't access a translation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
- 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.
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
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 see two different situations for bilingualism. One is to be raised from birth speaking two languages or as an adult learn a new language.
I'd say the situation as an adult requires much more effort. The learning should help brain neuroplasticity or cause neuroplasticity? However it works.
A counterfactual is that higher IQ correlates with reading ability and language use. Those people are far more likely to know more than one language (because it's easier) and gain access to the deeper, more expansive pool of opportunities that comes with bilingualism.
I think the real question is: does this battery of 12 tests of executive function really measure intelligence? If so, why don't we use these when hiring engineers, CEOs, or any other valuable asset? I'm pessimistic that these tests measure intelligence in a meaningful way.
They're looking at people who likely grew up as bilingual, who they say are not generally smarter than those who only know one language. There should still be cognitive benefits to learning new languages as an adult, just as learning any new skill.
Being able to think in multiple languages frees the mind from thinking in language altogether. This is easy to deduce with reasoning and I can confirm it (to myself) from experience. What psychological "science" has to say about it makes me question their study than anything.
It is important to remember however that not all bilinguals are equal. The languages have to be different enough. English, German and Swedish (all Germanic languages with very similar grammer) doesn't give you much freedom in comparision to German and Mandarin.
Find people who are fluent (i.e. they can think in different languages) in two languages that are far apart in the language tree and run the study again.
Aside from that, don't underestimate the amount of thinking we do without language. What do we call that - raw braincode? So in that sense, we're all bilingual, even those only speaking English. I.e. you can think "I'm going down to the post office to post a letter with a stamp on it" without language.
True. But for single-language speakers (and even some bilinguals who haven't thought about this), it is easier to conflate the raw thinking and the language they associate with it (which we know happens after the fact)... because they only have one language to work with. A bilingual on the other hand will understand the concept instantly if they were to think about something as themselves in one language and the same thing as themselves in another language... and they don't have to rely on poorly designed studies to know these things.
Also, depending on how integrated the different language personalities are (probably depends on whether they learnt the language as a child or as an adult), they should also easily be able to see that they are not one personality but at least two personalities embodied in one being (which can then be taken further into understanding that what we think of our "self" is made up of many different personalities based on different contexts... which is all acquired from upbringing).
It really depends on where the languages are from. I find learning languages from different worldviews helps me with judging other cultures less.
Someone on this thread said something about being able to consume content in other cultures. That's totally true. There's such a large delta between the knowledge base in each language that you get to cross pollinate ideas in your daily life.
There are some "feelings" and deep layers of nuance when speaking in one language that really can't be transferred to another unless you really immerse yourself in the media and literature.
Also to all my fellow multilingual people making sick puns that you laugh about to yourself inside, I see you.
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
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
It's pretty obvious to people who speak 2+ language that there are trade-offs between "going deep" in one language and having "surface-level" knowledge of many languages.
The one thing they found which bilinguals might be better at has to do with digit recall, which actually agrees with previous research that bilinguals are 'more logical' in their second tongue and 'more emotional' in their native tongue.
- abstract thinking (not being limited by a linear inner voice)
- etc...
There are many confounding factors they didn't test for. e.g., what if the bilinguals are more logical, but have weaker comprehension of the question? do those things cancel out? Or, if being multilingual makes you "overthink" prompts and maybe you get penalized on time in standardized tests, etc...
According to their questionnaire, the "bilingualness" of participants was self-reported, all you had to do was enter a number between 1 and 20 for the number of languages you speak.. It would have been better if written and spoken proficiency in each of the second languages had been tested and used to correlate with the results.
I could go on. I think this is actually one of the worst studies I've ever read in terms of "confidence of the title" vs. "what they actually tested."
How good is independent variable control in this study? The most common reason for bilingualism is things going very wrong in the birth country for either you or your parents. In which case, cognitive disadvantage is expected due to malnutrition, preventable childhood diseases, parents not being best adjusted to host country culture and education system and so on.
On the other hand, voluntary bilingualism is a sign of opposite things. Even if it doesn't have an intrinsic cognitive advantage, your parents were thoughtful enough to provide that for you, which comes with a slew of both cultural and heritable factors. Your schools being able to offer successful foreign language programs is a sign of relative affluence. Plus, say if your mother tongue is English and your learn Mandarin. You are now able to better communicate with a billion people and have access to their opportunities. It's hard to imagine how this is not a practical advantage in life, any artificial benchmarks notwithstanding.
I would allow that becoming bilingual in English, Spanish or Mandarin is preferable to learning something that gives you less additional reach compared to just speaking your mother tongue, where benefits are harder to quantify.
I have long been suspicious when people tell me that learning multiple languages is "good for brain development". Primarily because, through most of human history, I believe the only situation where you would learn multiple (really exactly 2) languages is when your tribe was conquered.
An observational study with controls chosen at the whim of the PI is not the same as an RCT. Presumably you could implement different controls and observe the opposite conclusion. What scientists end up doing will be driven by the incentive to publish something novel, rather than a genuine search for truth.
To me second language added ability to express something better. I also noticed that depending on a subject I subconsciously pick one or another language when thinking about the subject. Perhaps that's not what measured in this paper, but it is certainly an advantage for me.
„The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.“ — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Being bilingual increases the limits of your world. And by that you increase the amount of training data for your neural network which will e.g. avoiding overfitting to specific topics.
The weak argument in favour was the ability to apply two (or more) linguistic models to rationalisations about things, and potentially uncover more in the distinctions between them. So on the abstraction/synthesis side of things.
I've felt that being multi lingual, a virtual form of world travel, usually benefits people socially, and society in general, but have always figured there was zero cognitive "edge" it gave me others.
Oh no! What arbitrary signifier will I use now to gatekeep education level and define a class based in-group. Please, I need an answer quickly, my whole identity is based on hasty judgemental heuristics!
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?
I speak two languages (English and Japanese). I've never thought of it as a cognitive advantage but rather a broader degree of experience and, perhaps, wisdom.
“ and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors”
I would be interested to know how they managed to remove the potentially confounding factors.
To me, it seems clear: bilinguals whose language isn’t a major language of the country often come from immigrant families. Immigrants have a great work ethic and teach their kids in the foreign language. Then the kids work hard to fit in and learn the other language, too. They tend to be less interested in “decadent” activities and end up overachieving. This is especially true for immigrants from formerly Communist countries that prioritized STEM.
In the past, people learned Latin or German to access scientific literature etc.
Not to mention that learning two DISPARATE languages enables people to triangulate better on other languages and ways of thinking
First of all, as someone form a completely different field I like the style of the paper. Abstract and motivation are very consise and to the point with good references and it's very clear to me what they want to show and why.
The method seems ok to me as well, internet based test taking with tests that sound reasonable to me (as a lay person, I have not idea what the typical tests in these studies look like). Statistics and control make sense to me. Overall, it's an interesting study.
There were a couple of things I found interesting:
1) "the matched samples were constructed from individuals only in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia" which was due to the fact they didn't want to bias against people not understanding the instructions well (which were in Englisch). I'd be curious if it would be possible to find a large enough sample to reproduce the test with another base language for the instructions. Maybe French or German, Swiss citizen, parts of Italy (Südtirol), Luxembourg come to mind as natural bi- or multilinguals.
2) Going back to #1, I'm not entirely sure what criterion they used for bilingual (my understanding is just self identified by participant) but given that they used 18+ age due to ethical considerations this could be problematic. Maybe I'm wrong and they actually did it that way but I'd have prefered if they selected only people who learned the language from the parents because there's many people who speak Englisch as a second language but learned it in school/later in life but before 18. It might be interesting to redo the study with children before they are exposed to languages in school, maybe age <=10 or try to correct for this by removing the most likely "school language" Englisch. At least I suppose it's possible that there is a difference between growing up with a language and "learning" it more actively.
3) They removed outliers. However, it may be the case that bilinguals are more likely to be outliers ("gifted") than monolinguals. I don't know but I'd like to see just the outliers (140+32 if you use both 4+6 standard deviations).
4) Maybe someone with expertise in the area of neuroplasticity can chime in but the baseline takeaway from the paper is "there's no cognitive advantage to being bilingual". However, my layperson's understanding is that learning a language later in life will "reshape the brain" and possibly even use unused parts and so on which would indicate that there has to be some benefit vs. "just doing nothing". It would be interesting to know if learning a language is more beneficial vs. say taking up pottery. Alas this seems almost impossible to analyze in a meaningful way.
> Luxembourg come to mind as natural bi- or multilinguals.
Speaking from experience with Luxembourg, their school results (PISA) are average despite sky high teacher salaries and a ton of investment into education. Especially STEM results. The more languages Luxembourg adds the worse results become (Portuguese immigrants fare worse than locals).
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.