Ask HN: Did knowing or learning a not-so-famous natural language benefit you?
I'm speaking about human languages, not Programming
It benefited me in the sense that I ended up making some new friends out of it and had a lot of fun just learning (or trying to learn) a second language. I think learning a new language like this can open up some doors and can help you meet a lot of new interesting people you'd perhaps not have met otherwise. I'd love to pick it up again next year. So we'll see.
I can absolutely relate to your experience. At least in casual settings it's very difficult to speak Dutch because everybody will default to English upon realising you're not a native speaker.
I like Dutch culture and I'm in the Netherlands several times a year. In terms of benefits, knowing the local language helps with both navigating everyday life more easily and better understanding society.
Best thing is to pretend you are Finnish or Macedonian or something and say you don't speak English at all!
Your point is certainly valid for many people in many places, but in France I find it to be mostly false. Most people, even in computer science, will rather have me butcher French than switch to butchering English themselves.
Ach, ar aon nós, táim an-shásta bheith ag léamh faoi Ghaeilge ar hn. N'fheadar liom cé mhéad atá anseo a bhfuil in ann sí a labhairt.
I've wanted to learn it properly since I took classes in Paris, but never really dedicated enough resources to it. I still enjoy watching TG4 and listening to RnaG/Failté from time to time but never went the distance. Swedish and French, being so closely related to English, they came much faster :)
I can just about hack my way through the national anthem, for no good reason other than it's a cracking song. Maybe when all my free time isn't spent on 'asset building' I'll get back into some of the fun stuff!
Tell me, how do you get on with (Scottish) Gaelic? I understand there's a large degree of mutual intelligibility between certain dialects and it'd be a fascinating area to study, like Welsh/Cornish/Breton also. I've seen some BBC Alba programming aimed at music-lovers/youth where an Irish performer was interviewed in Scottish Gaelic, replying in Irish. How set-up it was, I don't know.
There has been talk of an "Idir-Ghaeilge" reunified language. The Irish online magazine Nós had a nice article on this recently http://nos.ie/gniomhaiochas/teanga/idir-ghaeilge/ (in Irish).
Could become a reality in the unlikely but beautiful event of a post-Brexit Scotland uniting with Ireland in the "Celtic Union".
The example I thought of for mutual-intelligibility btw was Swedish/Norwegian/Danish - but perhaps it's not that close? With Swedish as a third language I can still understand most Norwegian TV in general use or those subject areas I'm more familiar with.
Over the past year my wife and I have learned Esperanto to near-fluency. However contrary to the goals of the language, it is a quite effective "secret language" when we don't wish to be understood.
The thing with the machines, as far as I see it to date, is that they rely on good, professional human input, which is limited. So until everything that needs to be said is said, and translated professionally, current models are stuck just behind in the creativity stakes.
But when it comes to boiler-plate and repetitious texts, computers can absolutely automate that. Particularly if overseen by competent homo sapiens. It's just a crying shame that the dream of the babelfish dissuades people from translating their literature and business offers today, as we all wait on and on for that point in time. A wait that could be a very long time, while human translators sit waiting for the middle-man agency to send another highly marked up project. (You may have guessed; I'm working on a related thing.)
Now, neural networks and massively parallel machine learning, that's a different story... If the machine manages to infer meaning and work within the confines of acceptable grammar use, it's game, set and match to the singularity.
And Malta is another EU state with English as an official language.
https://ec.europa.eu/ireland/news/statement-on-behalf-of-the...
I would say that, to some extent, knowing several languages helps you with learning the next one. Not just if it has features that I already know from other languages, but also if it has new "WTF" aspects. Those become easier to accept.
What I mean is this. My last relocation was to France, for which I had to learn French. French has a bunch of things that make me go "WTF", but knowing that every language has such things makes it easier for me to shrug them off, accept that French is weird, and carry on. On the other hand, some other expats I know, who know fewer languages, question everything: Why does French do this or that? I have the feeling that some people get caught up in such issues and develop (or reinforce) an internal resistance to learning.
TLDR: Learning languages may make it easier to learn others by making you more accepting of weirdness.
Learning it has indeed brought me amazing benefits, chief among them a Hungarian wife. :-) Seriously though, all human languages have qualities unique to them, and once you speak a second language fluently you realize that there are entire ways of seeing the world that are only possible to describe in that language -- indeed, I believe that for every single natural language there are things it's only possible to think or conceive in that language.
This is probably less significant if the language is closely related to your own, but one of the thrills of learning a very very different language is that it opens your mind to concepts you realize you'd never have remotely understood beforehand.
As an added bonus, Hungarian is quite beautiful, and the Hungarian capital city of Budapest is a fantastic town.
So, if you're asking because you are thinking of learning a not-so-famous language then I encourage you to go for it. But understand that without immersion you'll never get far, so make a plan to go live in a place where they speak that language, at least for a year. And once you get there, don't slack off: some great places with unusual languages can easily accommodate you in some more common idiom.
What is interesting about learning a conlang, especially one with such an interest in being unambiguous, is that it aggressively points out how weird language actually is. I'm a native English speaker and the sort of person who just shrugged by all of public school English via the "it sounds good" argument. I really have no conception of what the structure of English is except in my own ability to use it.
Learning even just a small amount of Lojban helped connect my ideas of natural language to similar ones in logic and semantics. It did so even more effectively than learning Mandarin has even though I've learned far more Mandarin.
I think if you're interested in turning your analytical eye toward your own use of language in order to better understand what does and does not make any sense about it then learning a bit of a conlang is probably a good bet. It's the next best thing to having a linguist friend.
But, because it's not one of the earliest languages, and because it's a reconstruction, it is as simple as it can be.
It can make it difficult to express some ideas, like "innovation".
But it does allow you to understand the function of grammar, and the way we are limited by the words we have. If you can't express it, then though you may be able to think it, you can never truly convey it to anyone else. You can give endless analogies and stories, but no one can grasp the idea until it becomes a word that they also think.
One last analogy of the journey this opened up for me: imagine that the word 'colour' never existed.
Describe the Northern Lights.
I think it benefitted me, even if I didn't learn much.
It let me look a bit deeper into Japanese culture. The politeness is baked deeply into the language and the sheer amount of Kanji told me that a Japanese person has to constantly be on track to not forget even the most important ones.
On the other hand Japanese seemed antiquated. 3 sets of symbols and one of them has thousands of items. The gramma seems kina straight forward, but the sentences simply get too long fast.
I speak German and English, which aren't drastically different. But while learning Japanese I found out how different languages really can be.
English is a bit compacter than German, no "der/die/das", just "the". Most words are not capitalized, no compound words, etc. but English is A LOT compacter than Japanese.
Japanese syllables are often shorter than English syllables, and a native speaker can articulate then quickly and fluently, but it seems to take much more linguistic "mass" to say a thing in Japanese compared to its English equivalent, unless you use a blunt direct form.
Listen to some spoken Japanese; you might find it sounds a lot like Finnish.
Also in college every single one of my Japanese friends had a business keigo book they were constantly studying in their senior years to prep them for communicating in the working world.
German: Was ist das? (3)
Japanese: Are wa nan desu ka. (5)
And this is just a simple example. Often the sentences get even longer when set in past tense or in some of the "politeness forms".
Maybe that's the reason they use these symbols, they allow for compact writing of even long sentences.
On the other hand, the Japanese I met didn't really "talk" the way I learned it at university. Noone said stuff like "Are wa nan desu ka", they just said "Are wa?"
"Avez-vous du coin?"
Caught the plane with 3 minutes to spare.
As for knowing it fluently, my Mum and various of her friends are all Dutch living in the UK. Many of them earned some money from it in some way, including:
- doing translations
- getting jobs in the local port because they were bilingual
- teaching night classes in the language
- emergency translator for customs
My friend's wife is a US Bulgarian who speaks French and got a grant from her uni to go to Bulgaria this summer to interview Bulgarian software companies (I think including Chaos/XCom maker Julian Gollop who lives there now).
Then again I know others who never use their 2nd or 3rd language.
Basically, it opens doors to experiences if you want to leverage it.
I had some Latin in school, and yes, from time to time it comes to mind when encountering a new French or Italian word. But even if you want to learn several Romance languages, I'd guess that just learning them and recognizing/exploiting relationships is easier than also learning Latin. It does add a common denominator, but it also adds a lot of cruft.
I believe growing up as a bilingual with two completely different languages gave me an edge in learning other languages when compared to my monolingual peers. When we started learning a foreign language in school, my monolingual peers didn't seem to grasp just how different the languages can be. All through school they tried to apply the grammar and phonology of their native language to the language they were learning. For me it was always a given that even similar sounds like consonants are often vastly different, that words can be in whatever position they have to, not just where I'd like them to be. Though, truth be told, I had no preferences in that matter to begin with since I was constantly switching in my mind from one language to another with a different word order. I am quadrilingual today, and I am not even a big fan of learning languages per se.
This might be far fetched, but I think it also made me more organized and disciplined, or at least it helped to do so early on. This mental context switching forces you to pay attention to the details for one thing. For another, it also gives a sense of "protocol" early on. You understand that you should speak one language to some people and another to the rest. In process you see that this thing is even more subtle because you have to choose styles withing the same language to match the social situation.
Last but not least, knowing the languages gave an early access to two different and often clashing cultures. This, I believe, made me less judgmental and more accepting of other people, at least when it comes to cultures. Not because it was the moral thing to do, but because noticing all the commonalities and differences between people became an exploration on itself for me as a kid. I am genuinely curious about people that are different from me, either by origins or mindsets. Being a typical white nerd and health-junky, I am easily bored by other nerds and health-junkies, but give me an alcoholic and I can talk to him for hours straight despite never being drunk myself.
This lead to my first software development position at a large international bank.
I worked as an RPG developer for three years then I pivoted to SQL Server/C#.
So yes knowing a not so famous language benefited me.
But honestly it doesn't benefit me currently other than some trivia knowledge.
But that being said, I find that there's never a good reason not to learn a new language if you are in a situation where you're going to be exposed to it on a semi-regular basis. So if that's why you're considering learning Catalan, I would recommend you to go for it. Even though it's by far the least useful language I know, I still think it's been a rewarding investment.
Some reasons why I consider it was rewarding, in no particular order: - It sometimes helps me infer the meaning of a word I've never heard/read before. - I've read a some good books from Catalan authors. - I sometimes enjoy playing a game where I try to find words that share the same root in most of the latin languages I know but not in one of them (e.g.: for 'window', it's 'finestra' in italian and catalan, 'fenêtre' in french but 'ventana' in spanish !). This seems dumb, but it's actually my favorite reason for learning new languages.