Bilinguals better at multitasking, researchers find | KurzweilAI
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kurzweilai.net
Firstly, I'm deeply envious of anyone who is genuinely bilingual. I've worked pretty hard, and still only have a smattering of other languages. I've never really had the chance or reason to develop fluency in anything other than my native tongue, so cherish your ability. You probably can't - from the inside - realise quite what advantages it bestows.
And that's my second point. Many of you are saying that you don't think it's significantly affected your ability to multi-task, but you can't know. This is why science demands proper double-blind randomized trials. You don't know what you would be like without your bilingualism, so you don't know how - or if - it's affected you. Maybe without your bilingualism you'd be a lot worse at multi-tasking. Or a lot better. You can't tell.
I have various skills, and I believe that some have helped, and perhaps some have hindered, my programming, but I certainly can't tell.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2244178 where there's a report that bilingualism seems to delay the onset of Alzheimer's.
In computer terms, it's more like a fetching a page on the swap on a page fault than accessing several contexts at the same time.
I guess translators would be more aligned on the model presented..But how common would it be?
For me the trickiest is switching fluently between the sound systems of several languages in a split second. Suppose I'm speaking in American English and mention a double-barreled word like "Stern-Brocot tree" which contains a German and a French name. In that context it's very difficult to maintain proper pronunciation even though I can pronounce the parts perfectly well individually.
I'm fastidious on this question because I hear most foreign names utterly mispronounced by English speakers, so I try to do my small part in rectifying it.
If anything it's something of a marker of non-native speakers; native English speakers who learn Greek as a foreign language will often slip back into English phonemes to "correctly" say the names of people or places from English-speaking countries rather than adapting them to Greek phonemes, whereas Greeks typically don't (not even Greeks who speak fluent English).
It's the difference between ignorance and knowledge, carelessness and respect. That still leaves room for pragmatism and plain speech.
For good measure one should pronounce it in words like psychology as well, but I suppose the pronunciation error there has been sufficiently fossilized that it's now an English word with a new pronunciation. Perhaps the Hermitian will suffer the same fate as the Ptolemies and psychologists?
To prove my dedication to pragmatism, when I first moved to the US many years ago, no-one was able to pronounce my one-syllable first name, to say nothing of my last name. After a week or so I gave up and started introducing myself as 'pair'. When I later lived in Korea, a country whose language is deficient in diphthongs, I introduced myself as 'pae-uh' and wrote my name accordingly in Hangul.
An alternative would be to do transliteration even when going from Latin->Latin languages, taking a French word and respelling it so it reads phonetically in English, but I suspect people would like that even less. I believe French actually does do a little bit of that when borrowing English words, but in that case there's an official language academy to invent the new spellings.
In my mind there is also a difference between fully adapted words like psychology and foreign technical words such as techne, gnosis and episteme the way you might use them in a class on Plato. This second class of words, along with names of people, should ideally have their sounds conform more closely to the originals. Of course, words will often start in the second class and drift into the first class. That's how language evolves.
I thought multi-tasking is a programmer/freelancer skill. There were times when I undertook 5 projects the same time. I was helped by the fact that not all clients were in the same timezone, though I still had to quickly shift between projects and I had no problem with that, I didn't feel that it was anything special.
About information filtering: I go trough HN's full RSS feed along with other news sources I have in my Google reader.
I think the mind manages to create some sort of independent representation of thoughts, sometimes I can't remember if I have seen a movie in English or Hungarian.
The ability to receive information about one subject and relate it to another has always set people above the common straight line thinker.
My favorite question to ask people who speak different languages is, "Which language do you dream in?"
Most of the time it is Haskell.
Now, that's a dream I'd be interested in seeing.
My question for you now, "Do you dream in colour or black and white?"
However I can't say this has beneficially affected my ability to multi-task. I certainly seem to try multi-tasking a lot and can't even not do it, but as to whether it's effective or not, I couldn't really say. People around me seem to dislike me doing it (especially when I hold multiple conversations with them at a time), but it's just the way my brain works. I can't not do it.
This makes achieving a state of flow somewhat hard, which sucks terribly.