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Comment by decaffjoe | Hacker News Reader

This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you.

If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people. Who cares if your IQ went up or down half a point on account of learning to speak mandarin- your understanding of the lives of billions of people just increased dramatically. That's why it's good to learn a language- culture, not cognition.

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> This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you.

But that's not what the paper studied. It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't.

That's different from how enriched you will be as a person from learning about other people and culture - It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.

> 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).

I see your point, although do you think that being bilingual gave you significant cognitive advantage?

Or could you be quite intelligent with above average memory and your existing cognitive advantage has helped you to become bilingual?

I'm pretty sure everybody can do it wherever the average is. It's a matter of wanting to do it, that's all. Foreign workers come and pick up whatever host country language yet they're not always the brightest and also don't have exactly ideal conditions to do it. Like a sibling comment touched, you can go to Berlin and complain the language is difficult, talk English with Berliners happy to practice their English, and you'll come back learning almost nothing while they'll polish their English without even needing to travel outside Berlin. Because of choices. Learning something new is a challenge and like with every challenge, can be accepted or not.

> that being bilingual gave you significant cognitive advantage?

Probably not in the "intelligence tests" kind of way, but, then again, as time passes I've tended to view those more and more as charlatanism.

> Or could you be quite intelligent with above average memory

I certainly used to have a much better memory when I was a kid (I'm now in my early 40s), that's when I basically put the basis for learning all the foreign languages that I now know: English (via the public education system here), French (via my dad and via school), Italian (by watching TV and because Italian is very close to Romanian), partially also Spanish by watching football matches commented in Spanish on TV.

Come to think of it, a study trying to explain how come kids and teenagers are much better at learning foreign languages compared to adults would be more interesting.

>It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.

sure, go to China for a year, only speak English, surround yourself with English speaking friends and going to English friendly restaurants and in the end come back with an increased understanding of Chinese culture and people and probably get jobs based on that understanding!

In short, speaking the language at least well enough to interact with the population is prerequisite for the increased understanding.

That's not totally true - in Berlin there are lots of English speakers (many/most English as a second language) and so people including myself live here with pretty basic German (A2 probably). Those people are certainly learning alot about a different culture from wherever they came from even if they aren't speaking the dominant language.

Obviously if I had B2 German it would be awesome and I would chat up more people ... but that's not an easy thing to do, even over a number of years. I hope to get there some day but in Berlin it's particularly difficult because so many people speak English (and sometimes better English than German).

Berlin is not Germany.

Yes, every city and region is a bit different but Berlin as a whole has such a different culture, especially if you predominantly speak English.

Most of my colleagues are English speaking only and they sometimes complain that its hard to do certain things where I have no problem with it. Getting appointments, doctors and Bürgerbüro especially, they always seem to struggle with. You can certainly get by without or very little German in Berlin, but there are things that are significantly harder to do. I'd argue you're generally missing out on a lot of smaller aspects of the culture if you experience the English version of it.

Though I get its hard to learn German. Not an easy language and all the English in Berlin doesn't make it easier.

Yeah it's definitely hard to learn another language when there are a lot of people who speak your language and you don't necessarily need to learn it to get by. I have a tip if you want German to feel a bit easier though, hop over to Czech Republic for a bit and take a couple of Czech classes. German will suddenly seem an order of magnitude simpler by comparison :)

Note: I'm not trying to trivialise your efforts to learn German, rather to encourage you by saying it could be much worse. For me I glance every now and then at Hungarian and Finnish and think "ok I can handle Czech"

yes, not every specific example translates perfectly to every other scenario under the same class.

However, I'm in Denmark. And I've lived in Germany. And I have an Italian wife and family.

In my experience in Denmark basically everybody without a language learning disability or extremely advanced age speaks English to a far higher degree of competence than the average German in Berlin, in fact Danes almost speak English as well as they believe themselves to do, which is high praise indeed.

But let's cut to the chase - based on my experiences in these countries my example is a lot closer to correct in all three of these EU countries than the counterargument is.

on edit: changed to improve comprehensibility.

It's unlikely anyone will possess even a mediocre understanding of any of these countries' cultures - even with a decade of living there - without speaking the language.

Right on money. It's easier to delude yourself that you comprehended an European culture without knowing the language simply because everything is so superficially familiar and all nuances are comparatively fine.

Nobody's suggesting that speaking the local language isn't a major contributor to integrating in and understanding a local culture. It's just not the only contributor.

English is extremely special as the modern Language Franca of the western world.

Most nations have an accessible hybrid native+English culture.

> It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't.

The study is about "bilingualism", not about "learning". Bilingualism is a passive property, e.g. children born to parents speaking different languages will acquire those languages, but in adulthood no longer be in the process of learning them.

"learning" is an active mental process and those beneficial properties you mention are ascribed to this.

On the contrary the beneficial properties are popularly ascribed to bilingualism itself.

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.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614557866

My main "issue" with the paper (which I really like just to be clear) is that I can't completely figure out how they grouped someone as bilingual (maybe that's on me but it doesn't seem very clear in the methods section). It seems they used self identification by the participants (18+ old). If that's the case someone that learned the language in school would be considered bilingual. For example, if the questionaire asked me which languages I'd feel confident speaking or something similar I'd certainly include Englisch even though I learned it in school/from books/TV and neither of my parents speak it. I'd find it much more interesting if they could somehow split between people raised in a bilingual environment vs. people that learned another language.

One could always ask additional and more specific questions, such as whether the subject learned more than one language as an infant. On the other hand, it is not clear to me from the abstract alone whether the authors were concerned with when their subjects learned their languages, though it may be clear enough to the intended audience.

It's impressive that your comments reads like a well-educated native speaker of English, except for "Englisch".

Anyway, your English is far, far better than "learned it in school". Those books and TV(And fluent English users in school?) were an effective immersion. It's quite different from the common USA style of learning a non-English language: "5 years of classes but no immersit in culture"

Immersion in English is easy because there's so much quality content on the internet. It's often THE motivation to learn the language.

I'm learning German and there's a surprising lack of quality media. I don't want to throw shade on contemporary German culture, but it's just a very different level from the English-speaking world. My native language is Czech - which has a small cultural sphere - yet somehow the German-speaking cultural sphere does seem more similar in size to the Czech-speaking one than to the English-speaking one.

> But that's not what the paper studied.

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.

> It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.

Not really. Language and culture are inseparable. In my opinion, you cannot learn a language without learning at least a bit of the culture too. Idioms, expressions, and the way people use language say a lot about their culture.

Apart from my own culture, I have by far the best understanding of Anglo-American culture because I speak English. I have never lived in an English-speaking country though. As soon as you speak a language, you can expose yourself to the culture where the language is spoken pretty easily through the internet, movies, etc. HN is a good example. I see what (mostly) American people think, what things are important to them, and the way they approach life on a daily basis on this site.

> HN is a good example. I see what (mostly) American people think,

I like HN as much as the next critter but HN is an extremely small and biased sample of the US. The demographic is skewed towards young and liberal (even socialist at times) when the actual country is more like 50/50 liberal/conservative, to oversimplify a bit. On HN, you are also seeing comments from people who have both strong opinions and the free time to write about about them online. Most people in the US are not going to shower others with their criticisms of society until after at least a few drinks.

No worries. I am very aware that HN is heavily biased (actually, most places where discussion happens are biased). Also of course HN is not my only exposure to american culture (would be kinda absurd if it was though lol).

But your comment actually illustrates very well what I mean. I know it's normal for americans to call HN "socialist" and in my culture almost nobody would use that word to describe HN. Or another example is that liberal means left-leaning (like in your comment). In my culture liberal means economically liberal (no tax, no regulations), so the exact opposite of left-leaning. Those are things you have to learn in order to really understand the language. Just understanding the language by itself is not enough because the dictionary will not say that socialist or liberal actaully have a different meaning.

Is an HN/forum/human thing to ignore people with similar politics as "normal" background, and overestimate the prevalence of people with different politics.

You get a wide range of responses if you search for comments of HN posters trying to estimate the politics of HN posters.

> But that's not what the paper studied. It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't.

I find that it's actually worse for my wordle performance.

Occasionally I'll have a set of clues that lead to obvious words in my second language, but all these obvious words displace any English word that fits the clue.

I have to consciously rearrange the clues by writing them down in order to get the answer.

That may be so, but if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much? I'm not saying the answers to these questions are obvious "nos" but the assumption could stand some scrutiny.

I think the missing piece is engagement with the culture that is unlocked by being bilingual.

not only that but also the increased opportunities for new knowledge and experiences as well... it can open a lot of doors that would ordinarily be shut-off.

Having achieved a foreign language college major with minors in two others I find it hard not to be cynical about this unless the doors you’re talking about are things like vacations, entertainment, and similar amusements. From a work perspective it has not done much for me. Of course that could be different if my native language weren’t English or I didn’t work in the US, but then that’s just about the relative economic importance of various languages and not some inherent property of multilingualism.

Yeah. That's why the argument about number of speakers is total bunk,for example.

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.

for me the rewards to learning (basic) German have been more personal than professional - attempting to speak with a German speaker in their native language generally makes it easier to bond with them.

Yeah that's completely reasonable, but there are a lot of people trying to sell you on career success that is a mirage. And it can be frustrating the people you want to talk with often speak English better than you speak the language you're learning, though that's more of a problem with some languages than others.

I think it may debunk the myth about ability to fix all false friends that some americans seemingly believe in.

Unsure what myth your referring to. The only thing I know about "false friends" in the context of learning languages are "false friend" words that sound similar but don't have similar meanings, like "embarrassed" in English and "embarazada" in Spanish (which means pregnant).

> if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much?

Yes

Do you have a reason to back that up? I'm far less sure.

(I mean, I think the advantage is that you are able to speak to more people easily and in their native tongue, which is a whole other advantage, but that's different than "expanding your mind" directly by learning another language.)

>Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much?

I went to high school in Ontario with anglophones who took French immersion, learned fluent conversational French, graduated high school legally credentialed a bilingual, but then proceeded to move to Toronto and never really leave the province. I don't like being judgmental about people's worldly experiences, but I don't think that those high school French classes really did much to colour their worldview, most of us just knew it as a reliable way to secure a 90+ average.

> ...you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people

And of American culture and its people. You might re-evaluate some ideas you'd grown up with, becoming a more cosmopolitan/adaptable/understanding person, capable of having deeper relationships with a larger proportion of the Earth's population.

But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity.

I don't think you really have to learn the destination country's language for that. At least it is unclear that the lack of language would be any kind of major roadblock.

> 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".)

It's in the paper. You present a battery of tasks, and see how well you do. In this case, twelve cognitive tests were included:

Double Trouble

Spatial Planning

Odd One Out

Grammatical Reasoning

Feature Match

Polygons

Digit Span

Rotations

Token Search

Paired Associates

Spatial Span

Monkey Ladder

> It's in the paper.

Most of us don't have access to the paper, although our tax dollars surely paid for it.

Most of us use scihub to retrieve papers.

Presumably they mean 'g factor' [1]

Although somewhat ironically, the person who proposed 'g factor' was specifically reporting correlations between student performance in latin, french, english, maths and music.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Globally, a very small percentage of bilingual people fit the "I decided to learn a different language and then used it to temporarily live in another country very different from my own" model. Much more common is, "I speak my local regional language and also the official national language, and so does everyone else in my community."

True but many people also use that ability to travel to the local large city.

Thank happiness that we have the World Wide Web (literally suggestive) and global publishing trade then, if some people do not move much physically.

Multilingualism is an enabler.

Not necessarily living in another country, but a large part of the world, especially in industrialized countries, learns English. Neither regional nor national, but of course because it is the lingua franca.

"They forced us to learn it in school" is another one. E.g. what I heard about Lebanon: And by forced, I mean you don't just do a French lesson, you learn other non-language lessons in other languages.

It's still an important piece of information, first because it disagrees with what we previously thought, second because there are fringe cases in which learning a language doesn't open you to anything else.

I'm Spanish and live in the Basque Country. Everybody speaks Spanish here, but we are supposed to also speak Basque. The idea that it's advantageous to learning and such is one of the main arguments used to justify a push to learn the language. Basque language was the subject I invested the most time in through my whole compulsory education, so frankly, I do care.

Learning a second language as an adult or adolescent makes it vastly easier to learn additional languages later. So your time learning Basque was not wasted.

Have started with English then learned Spanish (travelling through Latin America extensively), and now an Asian language, I have acquired all sorts of advantages and also new ways of thinking.

I really feel people on HN ARE sometimes missing the forest for the trees and I can't imagine how learning a new language could not be a good thing.

Yeah, "Cognitive Advantages" is such a poor proxy for measuring a more enriched world view / life.

Let's say I live in a country of 3-4 million native language speakers, with next to zero speakers of my language internationally. Teaching a kid English at an early age opens them up to experiencing so much more than whatever happens to get produced / translated into my native lounge. When it comes to consuming information, would you rather your child was a great white shark or a bottom feeder?

Knowledge is a ladder, whose benefits compound over time, the end result is expertise. Also, understanding people from different nations is a good defence against parochialism, thinking that your people have al the answers.

It's an academic paper with an intentionally narrow focus.

> If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the _broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains_ that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals.

> If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people.

Less obvious, and IMNHO more significant is that you'll come back with a new perspective on culture; and as a result a new perspective on your own culture (now having a point of comparison).

I think you've missed the topic entirely. From the abstract: "There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children."

This seems to be aimed at debunking the urban (expat?) legend that raising your children to be billingual will somehow make them smarter.

In the end, this perception may end-up being just the adults' attempt to soothe their feelings of guilt for the inconveniences their children have to go through because of their international career.

There are advantages at the individual level to understand and communicate with multiple cultures. I would argue it’s more than an increase/decrease in IQ points. Did the individual increase in their free time and income is the only valid output worth measuring in bilingual advantages.

I find it weird that no one even spoke of understanding linguistic determinism and how using one or the other language influences how you think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism

As someone who learned English as a second language, I very much experienced this.

I suspect this is overblown. Clearly a Spaniard and a Swedish don't automatically start thinking like an Australian just because they are communicating in English.

What is more likely to happen is that when a Spaniard and a Swedish learn English they will over time be exposed to the culture of other English speakers. This will for the time being be dominated by American culture, but as English continues to be the lingua franca of the world, the balance will slowly shift and include more cultural elements from places with large populations like India.

Language barriers prevent the sharing of culture and being able to communicate with a wide array of people is something to celebrate.

I agree the effect is probably minimal but it is not likely to be zero.

The jury is still out, but there is certainly evidence that a person’s spoken language influences at least memory.

I don’t remember the details but there have been studies of speakers of languages where there are more names for colours (e.g. Russian with blue, Hungarian with red) are more accurately able to recall a colour that they have seen previously than a speaker of a language without such a distinction (e.g. English).

That is because it is considered wrong. There is no solid evidence, despite whole labs trying for decades. There are only very weak effects, and given the state of research in psychology, I'd be surprised to find one that has been consistently reproduced.

The weak examples also do not prove Sapir-Whorf. They can usually be explained from extra-linguistic learning that occurs while learning a language.

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