The Benefits of Bilingualism | Hacker News Reader

The Benefits of Bilingualism

nytimes.com

106 pointsColinWright44 comments

I wonder what degree of bilingualism is necessary. When I speak English, I think in English. When I speak Chinese, I think in Chinese. When I speak French, I think in English.

Moreover, when I speak to my parents, I can weave together English and Chinese to speak in the most efficient and accurate way. Those of you who have two native languages will probably understand what I mean. Some languages lack words to describe certain situations, and other languages are much more direct in describing them. Do we call this amalgamation of languages a third language, then?

I think there needs to be a distinction based on varying levels of fluency; I see it as a major contributing factor.

I agree the issue is more nuanced than it’s made out to be. I’m still not sure there is a useful, clear-cut distinction between native and second language, at least not for everybody.

I speak English and French natively, but I don’t think in either. I just think; in words sometimes, but mostly in spatial terms, colours, images, sounds, that sort of thing. I only started studying Chinese a few years ago, but I’ve never had the oft-bemoaned second-language problem of thinking in one tongue and mentally translating to another. Sure, there are words you don’t know, but you can always just talk around them, right?

This has been my experience as well. Grew up speaking English and French, am 100% bilingual, could not tell you which I think in. I think thoughts occur at a level of abstraction one step above language.

When I started learning Chinese I also wasn't constantly translating, I just had a limited breadth and depth of topics in which could express my thoughts through Chinese.

I'm not talking about basic thoughts. I mean, when you trace logic in your head, one language or another appears.

I disagree. I have complex, multiple-step wordless thoughts.

You never think in words?

This is a useful test: do a multiplication, say... 12*15, in your head. In what language did you do it?

Usually we tend to revert to the primary language for math.

You are like me, but most people think in words, not abstract micro-fast videos & kinetics.

It made learning French hard for me because people focused on English <=> French. After years of struggling I learned French in about 4 weeks actually in Quebec (northern part) where I was surrounded by actual poulets rôtis and no English translator around and everything clicked.

I don't think in any language either, but I often have trouble translating my wordless thoughts into any words at all, even if it's my native language.

"Some languages lack words to describe certain situations, and other languages are much more direct in describing them."

It's called code-switching in linguistic terms.

What you are doing is called code-switching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

I speak English/Spanish once you learn another language you have the ability of learning others easier. For example because I learned Spanish I can understand much of Italian and Portuguese without having to study them. Think of it like learning C and then switching to something like Php yes it's different but you can make your way around.

You make a fair point, but learning Italian or Portugese after Spanish is easy because they all share the same root language Latin.

An eastern language such as mandarin won't be much easier because you have learnt a second European language.

Computer languages have much more in common and have often copied earlier programming languages.

IIRC, studies show that if you learn a second language as an adult, learning a third one becomes easier (even if it is a completely different one) because you learned to learn a language. So yes, of course it is much easier to learn a similar language, but there is also an effect with completely different ones.

I used to think along mcdaid's lines, that because I speak English and French natively German and Spanish were no problem, and because I'd learned Spanish, Italian was easy.

Then I learned Turkish, and later Arabic. Now I'm with danmaz74: Learning any language makes learning any other language easier.

Sure, knowing French made Spanish more accessible, but there is large gap between all of the languages I knew then and Turkish, and I picked it up pretty quickly. Same with Arabic some time later.

I attribute this to the mental "faculty" or "faculties" involved being flexible and responsive due to frequent use, rather than to the degree of similarity between the languages.

On the flip side, "use it or lose it" is definitely also true. I'm back to being native in two languages with a pretty decent third, because I don't use the other 4-5 at all.

They'd each come back pretty quickly with suitable immersion.

Which has a lot more to do with learning how to learn another language.

>These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind

I'm trilingual and I can assure you it doesn't help with the ADD problem

My wife would concur with you. Of course, her German is nonstandard enough that her extended family in Germany calls it AnnaMariaDeutsch.

For an immigrant such as myself, the interesting turning point is when [one] stops dreaming in one's mother tongue and begins dreaming in the adopted land's e.g. (American) English language.

I started dreaming in English while I was still learning the language. Same when thinking about a hard problem. It's in your mind even, or especially, when you're asleep.

I'm quadrilingual and recently I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine about other types of languages such as programming languages. I do think that these count as a form of expression and ultimately improve the brain's executive function as the article states. Furthermore, they develop critical and logic thinking.

I'm currently in a business program, but I'm fluent with several programming languages. I can't be sure that programming languages are the reason, but I feel a lot of people around me lack the logical thought process.

Many of them seem to lack the ability to think recursively, and I find myself having to draw flowcharts, even to explain the most basic if-else thought processes.

maybe you can program because you can think logically, not the other way around?

In human languages, I'm strictly monolingual, but I have retained enough French that I can read (easy) French articles, some Spanish writing, and some Italian writing. I recently went to the Dominican Republic and did OK with the Spanish that I had to use there (which, granted, was minimal); a longer trip to Italy required more knowledge of Italian, but I picked up enough to be able to order dinner and ask directions while there.

On the programming language side, however, I've learned ~25 programming languages and dialects (ksh, bash, and zsh are IMO dialects of sh) and probably use ~6 of them regularly. I suspect that your intuition about how programming languages can affect people this way is correct, but because (as radicalbyte said http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3720212) programming languages have simpler grammars, one need be fluent in more than one programming language to get the benefit of being human-language multilingual.

I do know that knowing more programming languages has made me a better programmer—I can think about the problems that I solve differently, and can adapt the idioms from one language (such as an Enumerable#any? from Ruby) to another language (implementing something similar for anonymous delegates in C#). I've also found that, by and large, I learn new programming languages and idioms faster now than when I first started and only knew a couple of languages.

I've been programming for quite some time, and I find it fascinating how quickly I can learn, understand, and use the syntax of a new programming language.

I think there are similar mechanisms going on as compared to linguistics, particularly neurologically. Maybe all of us programmers are smarter, too, huh?

Programming languages are much easier to learn than natural languages. The grammars are smaller and they don't rely on learning a massive list of exceptions like certain language do (such as Dutch, my second language).

Counterexample: C++. The “exceptions” are different, but they’re still there: inconsistencies and complexities in syntax, API design, and so on. These are systems designed by humans, subject to the human understanding of language.

Learning a programming language and learning a natural language are very similar, even if the languages themselves differ greatly in their structure and purpose. The only way to get good at programming is to do a lot of it, so that the basics become second-nature. It’s the same with natural languages: you practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and gradually improve as you repeatedly encounter common terms and structures.

You watched too much James Bond.

Learning any sufficiently foreign natural language (i.e. any that you can't understand simply if a speaker of it talks slowly enough) is significantly more time-consuming than for anyone who already knows one programming language to learn, say, C++ sufficiently to be productive in it.

You're comparing learning a natural language until fluency with learning a programming language entirely. These are very different things. Most people make mistakes speaking and writing their native language.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I agree with you. Natural languages are typically larger and more involved than programming languages, so it takes longer to attain fluency. But they do exist on the same axis. A programming language can be complex enough to take as long as a natural language to learn to speak fluently and idiomatically.

I'm curious if there is a higher percentage of programmers than the population in general who are bilinguals. After all programming requires us to learn new languages for talking to the machine, there could be a correlation in ability to learn machine languages.

Could someone make a poll here?

I speak norwegian and english fluently and dont translate in my head when using english, but I'm currently in and around central/south america and learning spanish, and when speaking spanish I at the moment translate from english so probably a long way to go before I could consider me trilingual. Whats interesting about languages is that just like programming languages two different languages are not equally adept for explaining the same situations.

I have started the slow road of learning Norwegian now that I live in Norway. I too have found myself wondering if a link exists between programmers and desire and ease to learn a new language.

My Norwegian, is not good, yet daily as I discover I have remembered the "methods" or the "function names" to piece together sentences it becomes easier and allows me to focus on the code.

I don't feel the analogy is entirely accurate. Imagine having to learn 5 "if" statements, or 10 ways to say "++". In a spoken conversation, you don't get to look up the API docs if you forgot something. However, most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

However, I do feel there's some similarities between constructing a possibly-correct sentence and seeing if it actually works, and constructing some possibly-correct code and seeing if it compiles.

> most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

Reading English is a smallish subset of fluency in English, i.e. being able to also speak, listen to, and write English. Technical specs often use simple written English, relying on example code. So I'm not sure if what non-English programmers do can be called "bilingualism".

I grew up bilingually (Dutch and German, quite similar languages, but still). Did that make me smarter? I am not sure.

I do fell I have a natural talent to learn languages - I just don't make use of it. In school I was always too lazy to learn vocabulary. However, I feel like I just assimilated the grammatical rules of the English language, without ever having to do much exercises or making typical grammatical errors that other students made. Once I was past a curtain point I could just read a text with new words in it and subconsciously derive their meaning from the context, without even noticing them. (This can also be annoying from time to time, because sometimes I'd make wrong assumptions about the meaning.)

So, I would say I was able to learn English more like a native speaker learns a language. Is this, because I grew up bilingually? Maybe. It is certainly an interesting theory. Part of it might also be hanging around the internet and exposing myself to English more then other students.

EDIT: Maybe it's also because I started programming quite early. I started to program before I learned English, so I had to learn words like WHILE, IF, INPUT by hard (QBasic, eh). Do other early programmers among you feel like it had an impact on your abilities to learn natural languages?

I'm bilingual too. I found this abstract interesting:

"bilinguals typically have lower formal language proficiency than monolinguals do; for example, they have smaller vocabularies and weaker access to lexical items. The benefits, however, are that bilinguals exhibit enhanced executive control in nonverbal tasks requiring conflict resolution, such as the Stroop and Simon tasks. These patterns and their consequences are illustrated and discussed. We also propose some suggestions regarding underlying mechanisms for these effects. "

http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/19/1/19.short

Studies on this, meditation, TDCS, bright lights (the no brainer heh) and musical training on brain development in young children and brain activity in adults (written in my 2nd language)

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-w...

I grew up with Hindi and English, learned Spanish in school and now am teaching myself German. It seems that I can switch easily between Hindi and English, but while I am learning German and try to speak Spanish, I confuse Spanish words for German ones. I am not sure of the neurology that is going on here, but I am sure that it is the process of building these neural connections to new languages is what keeps your brain active and perhaps conditions your brain to make new connections elsewhere as well. Just a guess.

I'd be curious to find out how performance varies by the age in which someone learns that new language. It's possible that the harmful effects affecting development only happen in childhood, whereas in later years the benefits may be more pronounced.

When discussing attention and multitasking, the experts are the ones who are able to switch tasks in the least amount of time and get going on something completely different. Perhaps bilingualism helps in this analogous situation as well.

Here is a major benefit that bilingualism has given me -- I am able to converse directly with my developers in Russia and the Ukraine, so I can connect with them and motivate them better. As a result of the culture fit, I was able to find good developers more quickly, and save money. The stuff we've built with the team at http://qbix.com/about would have taken half a million dollars otherwise.

I was sufficiently bilingual with English and Chinese at the age of nine or ten. I've always mostly think in the abstract and images, even before I was bilingual. I have exceptional spatial IQ so I guess it overrides everything else. The article is true in the sense it has probably improved my mental agility.

Is there any research about learning speech and sign language simultaneously?

I would be interested to read such research as well. I attend Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), which is also the location of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). Anecdotally, the majority of deaf folks here report thinking in ASL. This is even the case with many English-speaking people who are hard-of-hearing or have cochlear implants.

You literally stole the words right out of my mouth fellow RIT student... I'm amazed at how often I find us on the interet…

"I thought English is the only language in the world?" </sarcasm off>

Disclaimer: My primary language is not English.

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