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Comment by softg | Hacker News Reader

> Its similar to how high verbal IQ people can easily master multiple languages, but normal people are only good at their main language.

How? Are you implying "high verbal IQ people" have bigger "models" in their heads somehow?

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There's a lot that goes into verbal intelligence, and we don't really know all of the what and how. It'd be cool if we did, but for now we can only really draw some correlations to physical areas of the brain, which are nevertheless fluid and unique in each individual, and some genetic links. Even then it isn't enough to account for half the stuff we observe humans doing – in Europe learning between 2-4 languages as a child is considered pretty much entirely normal.

Yeah as far as I understand NNs do mimic neurons in a simplistic way but any parallel between them and human brains beyond that is bound to fail because we don't know how human brains work that well. We do not learn by scouring millions of tokens. And regular children can learn a language faster than a high IQ adult.

I think learning multiple languages is normal for children in most places, especially if different social contexts require different languages. Lots of North Africans speak Arabic, French and English for example and some of them speak berber languages on top of that.

That quote sounds like made up nonsense. I'll wait some evidence and ignore it in the meantime.

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