Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four languages, I always feel as if I'm lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. I wish I only needed to speak one language, saving my mental capacity for other things. Constantly juggling languages doesn't help.
The main benefit of knowing multiple languages in everyday life is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.
Moreover, all my friends from my country also speak four languages. Unfortunately, I don't hear of people from Moldova faring much better than others.
*My mother tongue is Romanian, but everyone in Moldova also speaks Russian (due to the Soviet past). At school, I learned French and later studied in France. I picked up English mainly through computers and the internet. Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn. I don't feel any advantage in learning a new language either.
I would gladly trade Russian and French over knowing Dutch right now ;o) There are months when I don't speak those two so they are of little use for me anymore.
I would say there is a very mild advantage, even recognizing vaguely similar words in other languages when traveling. I find Russian to be very useful in a way that French and Romanian aren't.
English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish are the most "useful" as they each unlock a large part of the world that tends to prefer its own.
Edit: Spanish is probably on par with the others.
It's indeed still useful when traveling to those countries that speak these languages. But that's mere few weeks per year. English could have worked anyway as everyone is becoming proficient in English.
I always loved the Romanian joke where someone says "mersi" and then you reply "oh, I didn't know you were French" but I suppose that comes up with many words.
But you need to make a lot of assumptions as to what is really the "most useful".
This has been my experience as well. My native language is English, and I do just fine in it. But I've also studied a couple other languages, and when I try to put together sentences, whatever word is closest sometimes pops out.
I almost never find myself accidentally sticking English words into sentences, but I will frequently mix words from my second and third languages. It's brutal.
A friend of mine whose languages are Japanese, English, Spanish and Korean (in that order) told me that learning the third language is the hardest. Once you figure out how to stick to just one language at a time, learning more languages is a lot easier.
Which is perfectly valid english.
Entschuldigung, what time is it? Is that valid English?
Auteur, oeuvre, etc. are now English terms, but Remmidemmi?
My take is it is a gradient, and at some point you would be speaking broken English. Far from, mix words and it will be _perfectly_ valid English.
I believe your assertion is more of a rhetorical tool to make a point, and I agree with that point, though.
It will be if you use it enough.
Sort of like how schadenfreude got added to english.
I learned polish from my parents when growing up and English from living in Canada and cartoons. My native tongue is English but I can speak polish fairly well and read and write it. I don't ever feel like I accidentally reach for polish or English words when I need the other.
I agree with your interpretation though. My anecdotal experience tells me this happens with studied languages.
My girlfriend at the time natively spoke two languages (English and Hokkien) but was less proficient in both than many people who were only native speakers of one of them. She did, however, manage to pick up Mandarin a whole lot easier than I did.
I'm not sure if that relates directly to being able to connect deeply with the society of my upbringing, or that there is some hidden neural pattern there? For what it's worth, I've now been speaking English primarily longer than my mother tongue.
Perhaps in one's native tongue, the idioms and phrases that are fitting to an idea come to mind easily, whereas in a second language, you may need additional effort to find roughly equivalent phrases that are not exact translations.
That may or may not be relevant to the thinking pattern you were mentioning, though I figure the lack of direct translations can sometimes be a barrier to fluency. The idea of "untranslatability" (aka the lack of a direct translation) was also explored last week in an interesting HN discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35629354
"Peine" isn't just pain; it's also trouble. So I think "It's not worth the trouble" is a better rendition.
/me a native English speaker, who learned French by immersion aged about 6.
In English, my suggested translation would be that “It isn’t worth it.” But since this word-for-word translation would feel unnatural (that is, it’s typically better to introduce « la peine » even if the word trouble/pain wasn’t in the original sentence), there can be an extra cognitive load that interrupts fluency.
With enough conscious practice to train this, the translation of common idioms can become automatic. But meaningful translation instead of literal translation of idioms (especially of those more rarely used) can be a potential reason for someone to stop thinking in a target language, and revert to one’s native language to start thinking of the most natural translation for the phrase.
As another example, if I want to say “When pigs fly” in French, my instinct is to stop and use another phrase because the word-by-word translation is probably unnatural. In this case, my instinct is correct, as the proper meaningful translation is « Quand les poules ont les dents » (word-by-word translation: ‘When chicken have teeth’). So, dealing with idiom translation is an added mental effort to translate, which may cause thinking in one’s native language for some people.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/literal
See "As rare as hens' teeth". Similar to "as rare as rocking-horse shit".
My French is far from idiomatic; I hadn't come across "quand les poules ont les dents".
From Le Figaro [1]: « Précisons enfin que notre expression est un idiotisme et qu'elle ne possède pas, par conséquent, de stricts équivalents à l'étranger. Ainsi nos voisins anglais ont-ils l'habitude de dire «quand les cochons voleront», les Espagnols, de lancer «quand les grenouilles auront des poils» et les Allemands, de flanquer un «quand les poissons apprendront à voler». »
English translation: "Finally, let us specify that our expression is an idiom and that it does not, therefore, have strict equivalents abroad. Thus our English neighbors are used to saying "when the pigs fly", the Spaniards say "when the frogs have hair" and the Germans say "when the fish learn to fly."
[1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/expressions-francai...
The examples from Figaro all seem to have their verb as a subjunctive in French, so "When pigs would fly" - we usually say "If pigs had wings", or "Yeah, and pigs might fly". Your translations don't carry the doubt that words like "might" and "if" impart. There are hardly any/no verbs in English that still have a subjunctive distinct from the indicative, a fact that I regret.
There are some places in England (north east) where they pronounce the subjunctive of "to be", even though it isn't written distinctly; they say "If I wear a rich man". I think it's from the German, as in "Wenn ich wäre".
Hah, that's the least of benefits IMO. I'm not sure if you have no interest in the following or just forgot them, but these are things I enjoy: literature in the native language, comparing words and idioms and understanding how different languages influence each other and also how different cultures led to the creation of certain idioms. Conversations with people in their native tongue when I travel and the stories, adventures, and knowledge that unlocks.
To anyone reading this who only speaks English, while I agree with this person and the study that I don't necessarily feel smarter, learning another language is absolutely worth it for the advantages I stated above. My life is more rich because of it.
p.s. adrenalin from IRC?
* Access to more media
I regularly consume newspapers, subreddits and similar in other languages to get different points of view on things. Then there's literature and films (especially the ones that don't have translations)
* Ease of travel (this is highly dependent on the languages you know)
* Connecting with people.
Simply switching to someone's native tongue gives you a familiarity with someone that takes much longer to get if you're speaking their 2nd (or 3rd) language.
* Bragging
Especially in the US/UK you'll get a lot of positive comments from people because they think you're some kind of genius (which the study above disproves...)
Before I started working, I thought knowing this many languages would be helpful in the business world, turns out I have barely ever used them as the working language is always English.
Might not afford you IQ points but it does afford you diplomacy points.
I have a tiny bit of halting Spanish, but I feel much more comfortable communicating that way than trying drag an interaction along with just English.
Good luck!
https://archive.org/search?query=assimil
https://archive.org/details/dutchwithouttoil00cher
For as long as the dogs will let it exist.
You can also find it online, but be sure to find the audio files also. They are essential. Each of the 100+ lessons are like this: After rereading the lesson text with the notes until you can read it without assistance - you then listen to the audio until you can understand the audio without reading the text, then you say it out loud until you can say it at the same speed as the audio without difficulty. So half of the course length involves the audio.
Being able to live between cultures isn't necessarily something that is prized by many, but having been an outsider in every culture I've ever lived in, this ability has helped me become a chameleon and blend into new cultures (corporate cultures, community cultures etc.) in order to feel a sense of belonging.
So the benefits for me are purely sociological -- I agree that being multilingual confers little advantage in terms of performing executive tasks (which is what the linked article was testing).
As always, the real question we can't really test is: what could you have done with probably literal person-years of study/research/leisure time, instead?
It's not "learn a million languages or be a meth head".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of...
Remember, always attack the idea, not the person.
Why do you think that bolsters your idea?
I have also noticed by moving to a country which is hyper focused on everyone learning many languages that it creates a ton of resentment and loss of other abilities, for example reduced STEM skills.
So the opportunity cost is real.
I speak 5 and had gotten used to being the exception; then I moved to Brussels and it’s normal here to meet people who speak even more, far more fluently than I do.
I was at this board game Meetup and met this young Ukrainian kid the other day. 13 years old. She was speaking fluent Russian and would switch to perfect French to speak to us, while following the conversation we were having in English. Her mom mentioned she speaks Ukrainian, and that her lessons are in Dutch at school. 13 years old - damn.
Anyway yeah when you have a good technique and some experience, learning a new language can be much quicker, and very passive.
Children have a very limited vocabulary and tend to make a lot of mistakes (grammar, word usage and pronunciation mistakes) and those mistakes are easily overlooked, especially by adults, since we tend to try to encourage them. Not the case for adult learners.
The second difficulty level is <<cultured>> native speaker. This is massively more difficult since you need to advance from maybe a basic 5-10-15k words to probably 20-40-60k words.
The investment level for C2 (proficiency according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...) is in the thousands of hours per language, including a ton of deliberate study.
To give you an example of C2, for Romanian you need to be at least a well educated high school student and really understand finer details of Romanian grammar. A native Romanian speaker who hasn't finished at least high school at a good high school is probably a bad C2, despite being a native speaker (or more likely a decent C1).
Now, you obviously don't need to be at the highest level for every language you know, but the gap in effort between levels is huge and people underestimate that. Most people that speak multiple languages are probably somewhere around B1-B2 at most of them. Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.
This video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj5qPF_puU] by Olly Richards sums up my feelings on the definition of fluency. Personally, I believe even as early as B2 you can call yourself a fluent speaker, because it's roughly the level where you stop struggling to express your thoughts or to understand other people's. But it also depends how you have learned. B2 can look very different depending on whether it was leared in mostly academic vs literary vs spoken contexts.
> Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.
Those tend to be cultural. My native language is French, but I cannot browse /r/france without wondering wtf everyone's talking about. I'm extremely disconnected from French culture as I moved out when I was 14, so I never experienced adulthood in French and I had to learn things like what "Pôle emploi" is or some such. I'm still C2 in French,
I also do make mistakes in English, but I catch plenty of native English speakers make egregious mistakes or not know fairly basic things about their own language. Another commenter mentioned the their/they're your/you're distinction is one that natives tend to mess up more often than non-natives; anecdotally, that seems correct to me.
Language is culture. A large part of language learning is learning culture, expressions, idioms.
If I say"white as cheese" to a Frenchman he won't understand what I mean because the average cheese in France is not white, unlike in Romania.
Has anyone bothered to look at the tests that determine cognitive ability in this context? Here's one(or it's advanced version the double trouble test):
“assess the ability to inhibit cognitive interference that occurs when processing of a specific stimulus feature impedes the simultaneous processing of a second stimulus attribute.”[1]
What this test is basically saying is that being bilingual doesn't give you an edge at playing Lumosity, because as we have learned from past discussion these brain improvement apps don't actually "improve your brain"(whatever that may mean), they just train your performance on certain tasks. Why does measuring concentration relate to being bilingual?
What the personal comment below does in fact try to remind people of indirectly is that being natively multilingual actually makes it harder for a person to be controlled and directed and by extension give you access to vastly different perspectives on a lot of topics especially when those languages stem from different language families.
[1] https://lesley.edu/article/what-the-stroop-effect-reveals-ab...
Will it make you a better chess player? The simple answer appears to be: no.
It one my gripes with classical education. What benefit is there of learning Latin? Well, you can read Virgil in the original, and if that is your thing, power to you. Will it make you a better person? No, just no.
(Maybe, you'll have a slight, slight advantage when learning another Roman language. But surely, you would have been much better off to learn French to begin with, if that was the goal.)
I had to do 10 years of Latin; I hated it. I eventually scraped a bare pass on my second try at the exam.
I'm sure my knowledge of my mother-tongue, English, is much enhanced by having studied Latin. To the extent that cognition is verbal[0], knowing your own language better must improve cognition?
[0] I suspect the researchers' definition of cognition is carefully tuned to exclude verbal thinking.
Additionally, because of the way that Latin is taught, you learn a lot of classical history and philosophy through the process, which - given the impact of Rome on the world - is useful across a wide range of disciplines.
I put my hand up: I didn't read the paper (just the abstract). Their findings surprised me.
I speak (quite badly, nowadays) French and German, as well as my mother-tongue, English. I'm quite sure that my understanding of my own language is greatly enhanced by knowing French and German. And I'd be very surprised if a better knowledge of your native language doesn't enhance at least some aspects of cognition.
But this is a particular constellation of languages: if you exclude modern loanwords, it seems to me that the flow of vocabulary has been mainly from French and German into English, rather than vice-versa.
Decades ago, I did a class in Mandarin (now completely forgotten, except a few phrases). I don't think knowledge of Mandarin improved my understanding of my mother tongue at all.
So my surprise is that the researchers found no cognitive enhancement at all.
Perhaps their cognition test battery excludes those aspects of cognition that depend on thinking with words? It seems to me that I think mainly with words.
~~
To add context on how participants self-reported their bilingualism, the authors wrote: "To obtain information about the number of languages spoken, which languages were spoken, and demographic variables (such as age, country of origin, SES, and education), we asked participants to complete a detailed questionnaire. The questions used in the present study are available in Appendix S1 in the Supplemental Material available online."
From the downloaded supplementary material, the only questions asked related to language assessment were:
"5. What language(s) do you primarily speak at home?
"6. How many languages do you speak? Select one: 1-20"
I could not find any other questions related to language assessment.
~~
From the questionnaire, it looks like the researchers did not examine whether studying a second language as an adult to a very high level could confer cognitive advantages. The study possibly treated people who grew up bilingual and didn't acquire a second language as an adult, and also people who self-reported as bilingual but did not reach a high level in the language, into the same group.
The conclusions of the study would be stronger if the researchers examined how the cognitive abilities of monolingual people who undergo training in a second language and practice it to an advanced level, could change their cognitive abilities over time.
In fact, it remains plausible that adult language acquisition could still provide cognitive benefits. Another research paper with conflicting conclusions [1] studied the effect of language acquisition on older adults aged 59–79 years old. The authors of this different study concluded that "learning a foreign-language may represent a potentially helpful cognitive intervention for promoting healthy aging."
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.0042...
Please take this tongue in cheek, as in kind of like the other comment said: for lots of folks splitting that atte tion is detrimental at least in some regard.
Personally I think some diversification in language is good. It "keeps you on your toes". If you never use a muscle it will deteriorate. But you won't be able to exercise all of your muscles equally all the time.
That said I do get your point about viewpoints. It's so easy to just have exactly one if all you speak is one language. Plenty of places in the world today where that is the case. And it's not just the ones we see in the international news all the time.
For what it's worth, I counted 4 languages instead of 5, assuming the comment wasn't edited. The commenter wrote: "Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English."
Brazilian Portuguese is a single language as the dialect of Portuguese used in Brazil [1], versus the European Portuguese dialect used in Portugal [2].
The only time when I felt having to use more mental capacity was when I wasn't fluent in the language, the idea of languages being a constant cognitive load is as ridiculous as thinking that you are better off not knowing anything at all due to the toll knowledge takes on your mental capacity.
As objective evidence, I use a software app called Glossika to practice listening and speaking to some extent, where the software plays a spoken English audio phrase and pauses before playing the translated audio. When I see the English for the phrase "The computer crashed" in Spanish track, the Spanish equivalent only comes to mind, and I don't simultaneously think of the French translation—even though I'm later asked to translate the same English phrase in the French track. At the start of each track, I have a certain context in mind (to make responses in a particular language), so I don't personally struggle with having to consciously focus to avoid mixing up words. In my experience, after at most ~20 seconds or so working in the target language, I say the right translations without any extra conscious effort of avoiding the usage of the wrong language.
The same goes for conversation practice. At the very worst—sometimes at the very start of a conversation—I can mix up a basic word. But after about less than a minute or so of speech, I'm think and express only in the language I'm practicing; I don't continually struggle with interference with other languages.
For my personal experience, studying both French and Spanish has even been beneficial for vocabulary acquisition. Learning that "le public" means audience in French made it a lot easier to shortly after remember that "el público" also means audience in Spanish. The sounds in French and Spanish are different, along with the words that typically surround new vocabulary words, so I don't personally struggle with choosing between different word options from different languages.
Speaking French and Spanish also has a separation due to the way that pronunciation physically feels. The back-of-the-throat guttural R in French especially feels and sounds a lot different than the Spanish trilled R with a vibrating tongue near the front teeth—so there is a barrier to mixing up French and Spanish words with these different sounds, as they "feel" very different to say in the mouth and throat. Spanish words also have a "stress" on the second-last syllable or syllable with a certain accent (e.g. Le envió for "I sent it to you" with a stress on the accented ió), whereas French has roughly equal stresses as a "syllable-timed" language [1], so the feelings of speaking the languages are very different, even if the vocabulary can be similar at a first glance.
In summary, I just can't relate at all to the idea of "juggling" between languages from practice with audio programs and conversation practice each week, though I recognize that different people have different experiences.
Depending on how you define tested, yep, people who I know that know a lot are not slower answering questions that know only very little.
I do consider there are advantages to speaking several languages.
I learned from English that you can be very precise, but also economical in exposition of complex matter.
I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian. I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.
I learned from French that there are way more words for expressing feelings than I was using before, and also a certain way of having no-pressure intellectual, exploratory conversations, exchanging ideas among peers. It has a certain rhythm and many turns of phrases that work very well for this.
In Romanian you can be incredibly sophisticated (via modern French influence), but also stay close to the agricultural and pastoral roots. The language just has this great dynamic range. Romanian literature has examples of great works that are essentially collaborative, and have hundreds maybe thousands of authors (some likely illiterate), and that were passed along in oral form with various modifications that were finally recorded and published less than two centuries ago, and are very much readable by modern speakers.
===
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.
What makes you think French has a less "agricultural" root than Romanian. Both languages have existed since a time when industrialization was still far in the future... are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation?? This sounds kind of ridiculous to me.
Look up what the French Academy is doing :-)
Also Romania used to have 50% subsistence farmers until 2000.
I think it's true.
Modern French is derived from a form of French spoken among aristocrats; the Norman Conquest didn't bring to Britain a great influx of peasant French. For a long time, an educated Briton (a) spoke French, and (b) had lived in France, and even been educated there.
It's also that until the 19th century and compulsory education there were multiple dialects of French spoken throughout the country. "Royal French" is a descendant of Norman and was the language the bourgeoisie adopted after the revolution and that the rest of the country standardized on.
Same thing happened in the Americans French colonies in Canada and Louisiana; the settlers brought the "Royal" French with them because they were majorly from the north.
I speak English and another 3 languages. IMO this is not due to the language itself, it's 100% cultural. English has as much power as any language I know (Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish) to make exaggeration and generalization, it just seems to happen that most English speakers tend to use those less then, say, Brazilians (but probably more than Swedes, I think).
Nabakov didn't feel the same way.
That said, as someone with decent Russian, I do like the language in many ways. I agree that it's a nuanced and powerful language in ways that English isn't; English is so ambiguous and low-context that you can say anything but I love Russian in that I can state things like number, gender, if they go & come back / complete, and do so in a word or two.
See also: high context vs low context languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
Overall, I am fluent in 4 languages, 2 were acquired early from the environment, 1 in my childhood, and 1 as an adult. Only English proved to be truly useful in life and it is the only language that I actually enjoy using. I dream of living in an English-speaking country and never touching any other language again. I know, it's a weird sentiment.
Not all types of Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic, some are different enough to be considered a different language as different as Nigerian Pidgin and British English.
> I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere).
I don't find Russian to be particularly more expressive than any other bigger slavic language, like Polish or Yugoslavian. I would say that it's largely a myth propagated by Russians. It has a bunch of newer loan words from French, German and kept some of its' older synonyms, oh and a lot of archaics from Old Church Slavinic. In that sense it isn't more nuanced than English. One more con is that the convoluted sentence structure makes it an unfriendly language for non native speakers to learn. Phonetics are terrible, a bunch of my friends that had been studying Russian fairly well and still don't know how to pronounce those rarely used words.
How is Russian language used to scare people? If you live in EU and hear a lot of Russian you shouldn't be scared since a lot of them are Ukranian refugees from the East and South. There are very few Russians you should be scared of, except some angry and very drunk ones in tourist resorts, fortunately those aren't coming in droves anymore.
I speak a few different languages, knowledge of languages is overrated if you don't use them regularly. Actually I regret learning some of those, that time would have been better spent on acquiring some technical skills. I have met very few people that are truly bilingual, most of them say they are, but aren't actually equally as good in both. A lot of Ukranians are bilingual btw, but it's easier when two languages are that similar.
I've heard that there is an unusually high rate of mental illness among European Parliament translators.
At most, I found a systematic review article [1] with the conclusion that interpreters for refugees experience higher levels of emotional and work-related stress, but it seems like this is more of a result of the content being translated, versus the act of translation.
It seems plausible, too, that assuming the claim is true (though I couldn't source an article to confirm this), it may alternatively be a result of the content of the translation or the pressure of the job (e.g. there may be serious consequences if there are mistranslations), versus the act of translation itself.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.7107...
I also speak four languages and mostly agree with your take. I'm native in Spanish; English I learned gaming, and reading Tolkien as a kid. The other two, German and French due to a combination of self interest, education and travel. While I often fantasize about picking up a couple more (namely Norwegian and Japanese), I quickly become disappointed as I go through the motions all over again. It's a huge mental effort for a seemingly low _tangible_ ROI.
Sure, listening to music or reading in the target language and understanding most of it is quite the magical experience, probably similar to what cracking a secret code feels like; but there is no practical gain to it afterwards. It's a bit like reading/writing poetry: an intense but ephemeral enjoyment. More of an art form than anything else really. Unless, of course, you find yourself immersed in the language by way of relocation, then it truly does make sense to learn it. I do get your point with Dutch though: now you've got to figure out a fifth system for conveying an idea you're perfectly capable of saying in four other systems; it gets tiring.
I've been comparing it with programming languages lately. The question often pops up in HN: "what's the best programming language to build a backend in?" -- imagine you already can build a great backend in Python/Go/TS but you start picking up Rust only for the purposes of building said backend, what's the point? Just use whichever language you know best and build the damn thing already. Simple enough right? As is often the case though, this type of analysis is superficial; you may build a fantastic backend in say, Clojure, but then miss out on the opportunities a more popular language with a larger community may have to offer (e.g. Python). Writing Python may not necessarily provide general cognitive advantages over writing Clojure, but it will give you easier _access_ to the entire ML ecosystem, for instance. Does being capable of using more powerful tools help develop cognitive advantages?
I only read the abstract, but even if _Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages_, learning a second language, English specifically, has unquestionably changed my life.
I'm not sure if speaking more languages exhausts some kind of mental capacity -- that's not my experience at all. There was a time when I spoke nothing but English for years, a time when I spoke 4 languages, and now I speak both English and Chinese daily; I haven't really observed any differences in my proficiency. My Chinese proficiency has probably gone back up to native status after atrophying in my college years of not speaking a single word.
But Russian (former Soviet space) and French (Africa) have large population that often have no little English fluency.
Which opens up a lot more cultural doors.
I've heard people that speak many languages fluently claim that it gets easier after the fifth language - so keep at it.
One tip; try as much as possible to stick to switching only between your mother tongue and the new(est) language you're learning - or at least have as many full days as you can where you avoid switching to other foreign languages.
Until you become fluent in the new language (say about a year if living/working in the new language).
I didn't mean five or more "European dialects" I meant five or more different languages. Besides, between French and English there should be some overlap with Dutch - though I agree Dutch seems wierd on the surface:)
Sticking to your broken new language in the face of "helpful English" is hard - at least with friends and co-workers you can make an agreement (all Dutch Fridays, etc).
I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (and by knowing, I don't mean travelguide fluency). Such people are rare.
No, but Dutch, English and French are pretty close (hence the reference to Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy").
> I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (...) Such people are rare.
They certainly are! I didn't mean to say i know a lot of people that fit the definition - only that I have heard such people mention that it gets easier after the fifth.
I only know Norwegian/Swedish/Danish (close enough to count as one, one and a half), English, Japanese and some French (and marginal German, Spanish, Italian etc due to limited exposure and the intersection of Norwegian/English/French).
I would have to add something a little different, like Sami, Maori, Russian or possibly Farsi, Arabic to fit in the five languages boat.
I 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.).
There's also Bopomofo, as an alternative to pinyin input.[0]
"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.
In looking back over this, I stumbled over this study which seems to directly contradict the one in the original link:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612443836
"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.
Bilinguals are better than monolinguals in detecting manipulative discourse
Put another way, I think the discussion is probably at relevant as the study.
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.
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.
Maybe this is why authentic geniuses, or people capable of coming up with ideas not commonly in circulation, often have a hard time explaining their ideas (see https://kottke.org/13/05/the-three-types-of-specialist)
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.
"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 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.
What benchmark could you possibly have for this? You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like.
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.)
"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.
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.
It's all about the economic weight of those speakers and the desirability of living in the countries where the language is widely used.
There's a reason English is so far ahead of Mandarin or Hindi.
Yes
(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.)
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.
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.
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".
(Some call it "much more than just relevant".)
Double Trouble
Spatial Planning
Odd One Out
Grammatical Reasoning
Feature Match
Polygons
Digit Span
Rotations
Token Search
Paired Associates
Spatial Span
Monkey Ladder
Most of us don't have access to the paper, although our tax dollars surely paid for it.
Although somewhat ironically, the person who proposed 'g factor' was specifically reporting correlations between student performance in latin, french, english, maths and music.
Multilingualism is an enabler.
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.
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.
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).
Or could you be quite intelligent with above average memory and your existing cognitive advantage has helped you to become bilingual?
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
Most nations have an accessible hybrid native+English culture.
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.
For example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefi...?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-being-bilingual-make-you-s...
Although it seems that skepticism about this truism goes back a few years as well.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You get a wide range of responses if you search for comments of HN posters trying to estimate the politics of HN posters.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who learned English as a second language, I very much experienced this.
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.
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).
The weak examples also do not prove Sapir-Whorf. They can usually be explained from extra-linguistic learning that occurs while learning a language.
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).
Wikipedia, as always, has more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_effects_of_bilingual...
Would be surprised if knowing multiple spoken language didn't help at all!
She could understand both English and Italian, but would almost entirely speak Italian, not even realizing which language she was speaking. Is that a "cognitive advantage"? Maybe? I am not qualified to answer that.
But to me it suggests that perhaps more "real-estate" in the brain takes on language when one is bilingual.
It made treatment complex, because no one knew enough Lithuanian to communicate to the degree necesary
Perhaps additional "connections" are made in the brain that can be used when other "connections" are broken due to stroke.
Anecdotic-ally, my father also recovered quite well from his stroke and he knew Dutch, English and likely a bit of latin languages as well (had Italian and Chinese penfriends when he was young, often used Latin proverbs, ...).
*For completeness, according to current neurolinguistic models it's more complex than that, more brain regions are actually responsible for speech/understanding.
They're everywhere, and it seems they are the most common type of daycare, actually. (upper midwest, usa)
I live the mirror situation: french speaking young parent intending to make my child bilingual at a young age.
Here english is obviously seen as an edge and is studied a lot.
I'm a native English speaker/~B1 French speaker trying to very intentionally create a bilingual household environment. It's not pure immersion, but I can (and do) narrate what I'm doing for most daily activities in French, read aloud in French, consume French audio, etc. All much to the bemusement of my own French mentor, who's validated that I'm not instilling a terrible accent, but is also getting peppered with questions in my search for French children's literature.
- consuming all media in the original language instead of dubs
- kindergarten already does some bilingual exploration, she's a native English speaker
- Later on I intend to do an "English day" each week at home where we would only converse in English. From my personal experience, the best path to fluency is having no choice but to speak in a given language. I also want to create boundaries to prevent mixing the two languages.
About french children's book, I could send you a mail about it. Depending on the age of your kids "la courte échelle" has great stuff.
This is an awesome way to provide both an extra language when kids don't have much else to do and fit it easy to pick them up, _and_ it saves on costs? What could be better?
Back in the day when people had huge families and lived with their cousins, kids got this built in, but I think the idea of having a few kids that don’t get to see other kids every day with a stay at home mother is actually fairly unnatural.
You know what would be even better? If everyone got a pony and a puppy and a million dollars! But that's not really feasible to provide for everyone (at the moment).
Life is all about trade-offs.
In some countries everybody is convinced that you should send away your kids early so they learn to "socialize", whatever that is. If you don't do it you are insane and a threat to society.
In some countries everybody is convinced that you should wait years longer before you send away your kids, because they are not biologically developed enough yet to be away from the mother. If you send them early you are insane and a threat to society.
What seems to be the rule is that 99% will defend the status quo or what their government says, no matter what the status quo is and no matter what it is their government is actually saying. During the pandemic, this meant that literal science around the virus was different depending on where you lived and who ruled you - and few people thought that was strange.
As for caring for young children, I think it depends mostly on the mother. Some mothers think it's boring to take care of their kids after a while or even hate being with their children all the time. They should leave them with day care or a relative if they can. Some mothers love spending all their time with their kids. It's a shame if they have to leave them with day care because they have to work to pay more taxes and tributes.
I learned spanish at a young age and I find it pretty useless. The last time I used it in the past 20 years was watching Casa De Papiel
Really wished I learned something like German or Chinese instead
Chinese/Mandarin might be super useful if you're living in China or a nearby country, but a) why would you want to live in China if you're not Chinese? And b) the language of international business in China is still English.
- There are several countries with German as an official language, and a few other with German-speaking minorities. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium all have it as an official language (though the last few are not terribly significant). There are also around half a million native German speakers in Italy. It's also useful as approximately the root language of Germanic languages, and makes it faster to pick up e.g. Dutch and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian languages.
- All internationally minded Germans do not speak English. Large swaths of Germans speak no, or only basic travelers' English. That everyone speaks English in Germany is an illusion that English speakers experience in Germany because they largely mix with only one social class, and the non-English speakers are invisible to them.
(I'm a native English speaker and fluent German speaker who's lived in the US and Germany for equal amounts of my life. My girlfriend, for example, is not comfortable in English, nor are quite a few of my friends, particularly those that are blue collar, somewhat older, or from the east.)
But the social class thing you mentioned is kind of my point. I think it's pretty much true in all of those German speaking countries, that if you only want to interact with service workers in cities and professional, college educated, internationally minded people, you will have plenty of people to talk to and might not ever feel a need to know German.
Angela Merkel can definitely speak English.
That means they aren't internationally minded then.
It's also a pretty terrible thing to assume that everyone who wasn't born into the upper class isn't internationally minded. Again, my girlfriend doesn't speak English well because she's from a working class family from the east, but she's been to a couple dozen countries, and manages a team of people from several countries.
> It's the 3rd most spoken language in the US
That's interesting, but why would that influence your decision which language to learn? Almost all the Cantonese speakers in the US probably speak English, and there aren't that many in the grand scheme of things? (Especially compared to total number of Mandarin speakers.)
I had friends who went through the same language school for Chinese and German among other languages and they never used it. All the German linguists got reclassed into other languages like Spanish in the 90s. Last year I went on vacation to Puerto Vallarta and it was so useful even in a tourist heavy place like that. But I am sorry you do find it useless and I don't doubt it based on whatever your daily life is like and hobbies.
On a separate note it's not too late to learn Chinese or German!
I know quite a few of them. Comes with growing up in Germany.
But an average young nurse will probably only speak bad English and can maybe say a few broken sentences.
Paying better salaries to working people.
Randomly giving people more money, just because you happen to interact with them seems cruel and patronising.
Compare https://web.archive.org/web/20220705105128/https://blog.jaib...
(And in case you don't care about helping people, why do you bother?)
Without the actual Paper we are just reading a footnote.
*I apparently forgot what this footnote was for, like I said, I am a humanities sort
Absolutely. Outside some niche areas being bilingual is not going to make you better at general problem solving, will come in handy on occasion in that you will see the problem from a perspective that you would not have without a second language but generally will not add much. Like I said, I am a humanities sort so these sorts of things tend to trigger me. I think for the majority of people a second language should be a pragmatic choice, not about some vaguely suggestive idea of increased cognition but directly about what learning that language will offer them.
Linguistics is the academic study of languages.
My toddler is learning three languages growing up (English, Mandarin, German). She picks them up just fine, because she hears them spoken around her; I don't think she'd benefit from learning linguistics instead.
But I was mostly speaking of peers, the sort who would be posting on HN, don't think we have many toddlers on the site. Learning multiple languages from a very early age seems to result in the languages being a single language from the perspective of the speaker, they have different situations in which they speak in different ways much like the average monolingual will speak more formally in a job interview compared to when they are out at the bar. Second and third, and etc languages are very different things between those that learned them from the start and those that learn them later in life.
Huh? This is about as convincing to me as the claim that learning linguistics makes it easier to learn a human language. It's also sort of a non-sequitor.
Someone who understands python and C++ would be trivially able to understand a massive swath of modern programming languages. I see little that having some deeper theoretical background would help.
And in human languages, even more so than programming, theory is almost irrelevant to regular practice. As the upstream comment says, we learn by practice, not by memorizing and applying rules.
Yes, they will be able to quickly pickup related languages with relative ease just as someone who knows a romance language will be able to pickup other romance languages without much difficulty. But that person who knows C++ and Pynthon with nothing of the underlying workings will have a more difficult time learning assembly, Forth or Lisp than a related language just as the person who knows a romance language will have a more difficult time learning Swahili than another romance language. Not a non-sequitor at all. When you look at CS or linguistics and how they relate to the languages they deal with what they really are are the study of what those languages have in common and understanding that will decrease what you need to learn when learning new languages.
Understanding a language and using a language are very different things and this is why toddlers can pickup languages with more ease than others, they do not care so much about understanding, and this is the primary limitation of our first language(s) and why being bilingual offers little cognitive advantage for most people.
PhD graduates don't have magic in-depth knowledge about programming languages. PhD graduates (in any field, really, not just CS), choose to dive very deeply into a very specific topic in their field. They do not just "go to more CS classes". They spend time becoming an expert on a very narrow topic. And for a CS PhD, that very likely would not be "general principles of programming language design".
I would not expect your average CS PhD to be any better at picking up new programming languages than a CS undergraduate.
Also, you asserted downthread:
> Understanding a language and using a language are very different things and this is why toddlers can pickup languages with more ease than others
No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition. As people age, their brain's change to optimizes learning skills for other tasks, and language acquisition skills usually suffer.
No magic involved, they generally have a good understanding of how a computer functions which means they can relate a language directly 1:1 to what the computer is doing instead of relating it to what another language they already know does or by simple trial and error.
>No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition.
Toddlers are in the 12-36 month range, they primarily mimic and use language on simple cause and effect terms, if I say this than this is the result. They do not understand the concept of language or languages and if you teach them with multiple languages they do not see them as separate languages they see them as a sound and a result. We develop those distinctions and understanding of meaning during childhood and adolescence.
... have you ever actually met anyone who got a PhD in CS? Because first off, very few people will actually study the "mechanics of language" in doing a CS PhD. If you're studying compilers or formal methods or maybe software engineering, sure, you'll study up on programming language semantics; but if you're learning AI or operating systems or computer architecture, you're very unlikely to touch those semantics. But even assuming you have someone who has actually taken those graduate-level courses (and I have!), it's not actually helpful for learning new languages. Learning semantics is essentially learning how to give meaning to the expression "a + b" (there are many ways to do this, and they have different tradeoffs), but if you want to learn a language, all you really want to learn is that "a + b" adds two numbers together, let's move on.
There's a similar gap between learning languages and being a linguist. As I understand it, most linguists are not polyglots (actually, I think a majority of them may be monolingual!), and most polyglots are not linguists. The linguist is the person who will tell you that English doesn't have a future tense: instead, you indicate the future by using specific helping verbs in the present tense. Anyone instructing English as a second language will slap the linguist on the head for being an idiot and tell you that the future tense in English is the "will X" construction.
That's why analogies between the two are of limited use at best.
The rest of your comment isn't really wrong. I even agree with most of it. It's just not really relevant to your point.
> Learning multiple languages from a very early age seems to result in the languages being a single language from the perspective of the speaker, they have different situations in which they speak in different ways much like the average monolingual will speak more formally in a job interview compared to when they are out at the bar.
Last I checked the research was still open on that one. What you are saying might work as a gross simplification, though.
> Second and third, and etc languages are very different things between those that learned them from the start and those that learn them later in life.
Yes. And exactly when you learn them and in what context also seems to make some context.
Language and music have a lot in common in that respect, it's perfectly possible to be proficient at either without having a very deep understanding of the theory as long as you are willing to put in the hours, and having that deep understanding is - as far as I've been able to discern - absolutely no guarantee for being good at making music or communicating with other people. It may help some but I doubt that it is the kind of thing that works for everybody in the way that you assert. It's hard enough to get kids to learn a new language, even if it has some direct applicability. Getting them to learn an abstract science which lays a foundation that they then may be able to apply to learning another language may well be one demand too many.
Still, for whoever it works it may be worth the extra investment in time and effort.
Humanities sorts are terrible at communicating with those who are not humanities sorts, just as most doctors and lawyers are terrible at communicating their specialties to the laymen. I am not talking about studying linguistics to the ends of getting a degree in it but in a more pragmatic sense, if you want to learn a bunch of languages than it is very useful to learn what all those languages have in common so you do not have to relearn the same thing in new contexts, you just learn the contexts.
>Language and music have a lot in common in that respect, it's perfectly possible to be proficient at either without having a very deep understanding of the theory as long as you are willing to put in the hours
They do but becoming proficient is different than success. Satie and Bukowski were proficient but not at all ignorant but plenty have success while being ignorant. It is that pragmatism thing again, what are your goals, learning music theory will probably not help much if you want to become a success in a popular music genera but it could be very useful if you want to become a success across genres. Where do you want to shift the ignorance and the knowledge? what will be of most use to your goals.
And in my experience your CS degree example simply fails: CS does not prepare you at all for dealing with the various programming languages and their implementations of various concepts. The parts of CS that would apply to that bit you can pick up in a few weeks by reading some books and even then you're going to be dealing with implementation details most of the time by the time you want to apply that knowledge.
If you understand variables, assignment, control structures (if, for, while, pattern matching etc) and abstraction mechanisms (subroutines, functions) then you've got the bulk of it. But it isn't going to help you more than a little bit in tackling a mid sized Java, Rails or C++ project.
If you were going to design a new programming language or write a compiler for an existing one then it may well help, and also if you are going to be working on novel data structures or to try to improve what's already there.
Being a linguist or studying linguistics may well help me to read works in dead languages or maybe to analyze other people's writings. Because that's the kind of stuff that I see the linguists around me do that seems to actually use their skills.
If there would be a single bit of advice that I could give to someone that intends to study multiple languages then it would probably be: take a year or two of Latin. Even though it is a dead language that little bit of foundation will help you gain a much easier entrance into other languages all over Europe (if those are the languages you intend to learn).
If you are going to study in language areas outside of that region, say Asia then I have no idea what would help other than to move there an immerse yourself for a couple of years.
Second language acquisition research is a joke, you cannot transform your learning by deep diving on it.
And way too many linguists are barely capable of learning languages to fluency, it's not common for them to be polyglots. Being able to understand the hardest grammatical concepts in say Polish, Arabic, or Hungarian in a half hour doesn't imply one has any capacity to acquire those languages (producing output in real time involves none of the mental calculus done when grammar is consciously processed as a set of rules, except for a little editing after the fact in the "monitor" part of the brain, you can only fluently produce grammar, words, and prosody that have been acquired.).
So to me the claim is out there.
Who is that?
(It's a shame that Noam Chomsky is the most famous linguist, because he's so far from the best or most relevant one.)
See also eg https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/8ght5y/what_langua...
"He was once fluent in Hebrew, but told an Israeli journalist that he was now rusty, and conducted the interview in English."
There are other forms of intelligence. Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those. Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.
It obviously wasn't meant as an exhaustive list.
> Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those.
I've yet to have my other languages besides English help me with studying of other concepts unless they were strictly locally focused. Even my French didn't help in Canada where it is more used as a means of exclusivity than one of inclusivity and communications.
> Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.
It might be. But the vast amount of information in English is such that you'll never exhaust it. I read about France in French and about Germany in German mostly because I can, not necessarily because I have to, the same subjects (in the news) are usually also available in English. And as for texts that are only available in say Chinese, French or German: I am aware that I will have to forego anything only available in Chinese because the expected pay-off from learning Chinese at my age is so low that I will spend my time in some other way. But if I were much younger I might give it a go.
But I doubt if it would make me any more intelligent.
You can assert there's no value to you, but many assert otherwise. I'm not sure there's value in our individual assertions.
Also, there's a lot of evidence that language drives cognition; that how we perceive and think about the world is constrained and influence by our language, and that other languages enable us to see and understand the world in other ways.
I agree with programming's effect on natural languages, and I think it goes both ways. Programming makes me a more precise punctuator, while Shakespeare makes me comment in couplet.
That's a specific skill though, as distinct cognition generally
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.
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.
This sounds more like the Japanese being... Japanese. And not in the good sense of the word.
I hope they tackle "left-handed people are better at math" at some point. That's another one I'm tired of hearing about.
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.
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?
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.
But where I live (in San Francisco) speaking exactly 2 languages is usually a sign that you or your parents are immigrants.
India for instance -- A typical kid in many places here (especially southern part of the country) has 3 languages formally taught in school and consumed as popular media daily.
Having privilege in these regions usually translates to levels of literacy like having reading ability (in addition to just speaking for trade), reading literature, speaking fluency, broader vocabulary, "better" accent, etc. -- all of which, in thousand different ways, signal one's socio-economic status in every interaction.
For instance, immigrants will massively be bilingual in general. We could argue there are in a better financial and educational position than those who couldn't immigrate in the first place, but then relative to the country they live, they can be on bottom of the social ladder.
On the parrallel with studying other subjects, I think it rings true, the only difference would be that bilingualism can be "forced" upon children by circumstances or environment, where math or instruments usually come later and/or on a choice basis.
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.
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.
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 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.
Edit: pdf here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35682016&goto=item%3Fid...
I'm curious to know what were the tests were and corrected factors.
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
Whereas if one looks at basically monolingual societies (e.g. most of the countries in Europe) one find that not only is not everyone bilingual (and no, "everyone" does not speak English) -- multilingualism definitely correlates with class and education.
There is a semi-random 50% number thrown around, but just to take the two biggest countries, there's no way we get accurate data on people in India and China given their size and lack of reporting of the inner regions. In China in particular, no one will boast about being fluent in a non-official language in a survey.
I think the same thing happen at smaller scale in european countries. There will be one official language, and whether people are bilingual or not won't be assessed more than striclty needed. The only study I saw were for educational purpose for small kids, out of that there will be no specific tracking of a Georgian immigrant starting a family in Germany, or a Spanish businessman being fluent in Italian because of his girlfriend.
It's not "easy" to get the data but it's a well-studied topic. As attended to by people who presumably have thought about the matter and know what they're doing.
So I'll take their number (at around 60 percent for multilingualism) at face value. Seems to correlate with observations from traveling (through which one rapidly makes the amazing discovery that no, not "everyone" speaks English or is otherwise bilingual).
I kinda became sceptic of "trust us, it's ok" assumptions in many fields. I trust experts, but I also trust them to give insights on how they deal with the complexity, even if we don't look at the actual numbers etc.
For instance on this specific study all the research is based on Cambridge Brain Science/Creyos, and that gives me pause on how much the results are reliable (they are still valuable, way better than nothing, but might have huge flaws as well)
In that respect I'd like to know how they deal with "the gov might deport us in reeducation camp if we're too loud about our original culture" kind of situation, and wouldn't be surprised if the answer was "we pull numbers out of a magic hat", as it has been in many very prominent studies.
So I’m unsurprised by the conclusion of a rigorous and larger study.
Uh, no. According to statistics (and everyday observation), slightly less than half of "everyone" is.
English is not very widely spoken in Mexico overall, with only around 12% of the population speaking it, and only a small number of these being truly fluent.
Estimates are that only 5% of Brazilians can speak English, and most of those speakers are middle- and upper-class professionals living in larger cities.
etc.
But, like many other things in life, the access of even a second language in my opinion gives you another tool to use as intellectual leverage to gain greater or richer understanding to many specific domains that you would otherwise require someone else to digest the information for you.
That doesn't mean you can have the tool and immediately gain the benefits of having it. It just means that compared to someone who does not have the ability to speak a second language, you have less friction to access domains of knowledge locked behind languages other than your native tongue.
Having a second car doesn't automatically mean I travel more. But if I used that other one specifically for roadtrips, it puts me in a category of people that is far smaller than the general population or even the general population of drivers.
But then again I haven't met many super-geniuses to compare against.
If your not going to clarify, I'm going to move on.
But a Java developer won't become a better Java developer if they learn C#, which is basically Java with different capitalization conventions.
I guess something like that happens for natural languages. You get those benefits if you actively learn new concepts. The difference of course is that you are unlikely to have done that purely by being bilingual. Many bilingual people just picked up 2+ languages as they were growing up.
knowing english and german is not knowing two full languages imho. you’ll get more exposure to german culture but it’s not the same as knowing English and a slavic or asian language.
Some concept exist in one and not the other. Addressing someone in a formal way. Addressing a group a once ( “y’all” )
But I know bits and pieces of German, Latin and Polish… those have lots of grammatical differences that force you to think about the structure of your sentence. Recognize a datif from a ablatif. That type of things. It actually help with writing correct French.
But I’m not sure it would make me “better” like learning a functional language or ASM made me a “better” developer.
When you speak a language fluently you're able to speak and understand without thinking about it. Children can be fluent with no formal training in grammar. Meanwhile, for me at least, programming is the opposite: I have to learn all the rules on a formal level and my mind can't wander while I'm programming at all.
I think the benefits of knowing more natural languages are pretty clear: the ability to speak to and understand more people. Plus the art, entertainment, and other cultural productions you get access to.
But sometime I will use English turn of sentences in French and it sounds weird ( just did it a l’envers here, pretty sure “turn of sentence” does not exists in English )
I’m ok at Spanish too. My main motivation is to be able to talk to random peoples when traveling. English came de facto because of the internet and US soft power.
Not sure it makes me better at writing or speaking.
I grew to like English this way: massive corpus made of anglo-saxon plus French.
Just to give an example of why “Anglo-Saxon” might be too broad a term—surviving Old English texts like Beowulf are in what you might call Late West Saxon, and the differences between Saxon and Anglian dialects help explain why Chaucer, who spoke something you might call Anglo-Norman, is much more accessible to modern readers.
If you want more of that Saxon influence, listen to West Country English, where it survives today.
Presence of English in France and Germany might be more due to Americans.
It’s interesting to see French word in English from the William the conqueror period, too. ( like “phrase” from above or the tired example “sheep” vs “mutton” )
We do say "turn of phrase" in English, which means something similar. I wonder if both have the same origin.
It actually goes to show that my command of English is limited. I know both words but “phrase” did not occurs to me even so it’s the same damn word :)
Yeah, that jarred for me. We do say "turn of phrase".
IMO, your programming language comparison is somewhat similar in that even knowing multiple, similar languages allows you to differentiate between the syntax and the concepts expressed by the syntax. E.g. different ways of constructing classes and objects in different languages will make you understand the core of OOP better, similarly to different ways to loop, etc.
What are some of those domains, do you think?
- If you are interested in literature, history, philosophy or adjacent fields, reading sources in their original language is an advantage. Philosophers are more likely to be fluent in German, for instance.
- Reading news in foreign languages is often illuminating.
- Most translations are just extremely horrible. I can only understand a tiny amount of languages, but I'd rather put in the effort to read in a foreign language than suffer through bad translations.
If you only speak English you probably aren't lacking access to to many fields of study. If you a one of the few who only speak Koro, you probably feel differently about to volume of knowledge available to you.
I'd say the situation as an adult requires much more effort. The learning should help brain neuroplasticity or cause neuroplasticity? However it works.
I sure wouldn't. I'd much rather ask someone about relevant experience than put them through an IQ test, or similar set of abstract puzzles.
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.
I don't understand this.
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).
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.
I was very ignorant of this when I was younger, my first girlfriend was Korean , but couldn't really speak it since her parents( presumably) didn't put her in classes. On the other hand, if your parents have money for language classes, they probably can afford general tutoring. So your doing better in school than your classmates.
Before you mention public school language education, your lucky if your able to read attending a public high school. I went to one myself.
Only after getting exposed to the rest of the world (And people making a big deal out of it) did I realize that it was a "class" thing
If the bilinguals are mainly economic migrants, sure, I'd expect the correlation to be different
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
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.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/communicating-foreign-langua...
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-02935-000
https://www.languagemagazine.com/2023/04/21/bilinguals-react....
So the results may have been different if each participant was allowed to take the test in their mother tongue.
The list of things they tested is way too small to conclude that there are no general cognitive advantages. What is "general" anyway?
Things they didn't test:
- the ability to learn new languages
- the ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from context clues
- ability to communicate or get by in a brand new/unfamiliar environment
- ability to detect BS (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423309/)
- ability to improvise
- 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."
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.
Oh, this goes so, so, so much against both intuition and actual, lived experience with the topic.
But then again, it's social "science" so why even pay attention when even something like "cognitive advantages" is an ill-defined, murky concept.
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.
As a tool language is useful for many things. Gaining access to other culture(s) is one of the most amazing ones for me.
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
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.
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).