Hacker News Reader

Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

"Parlez-vous francais? If you answered yes, then you’re well on your way to enjoying the many benefits of bilingualism."

Umm... wouldn't answering "oui" be a better indication of bilingualism than answering "yes"?

View on HN

No. As is, it demonstrates that you can understand the question in one language, and respond in another. Bilingual! :)

On the other hand, answering a question in a different language is a clear sign of dementia :)

What if you answered "Si!" but you couldn't read the article?

Not sure about the article, but you wouldn't have demonstrated a good mastery of French (the question wasn't in the negative).

No, you would have demonstrated that you understand French and speak Italian. Or nothing of the sort, as this subthread indicates.

I don't know about you, but I answer "yes" to a lot of questions I don't understand.

Very good.

Also, as with many other social sciences, p-significance through correlation can be mistaken for causation. What if the real reason is higher income or stronger combination of genetic factors that correlates with multilingualism

Or simply correlation of multilingualism with high education and a relatively long work life using brainwork rather than a short work life of exhausting physical labor and then less mental activity.

Also, need to take into account how Western-centric the study of linguistics and multilingualism is. There are many countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, where people are multilingual in everyday settings. This multilingualism might not include English, just 2 different languages in that country.

It would be good to study the effect multilingualism has in such cases.

Having said that, having learnt 3 languages to the point of fluency I felt very challenged and improved my analytical skills, where you understand how tense/grammar structures differ in the same languages and what effect this has on semantics

Very true, but I don't think it's exactly possible to do a properly controlled study here.

The author may be saying tabernac!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com