The Mystery of People Who Speak Languages (2018)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Yeah, we get enough of those from the submissions.
The submitter can click "Edit" to restore their original title after the autoshortener has changed it; but there is no way to tell HN "Please use exactly this title in the first place."
(I remember this submission of mine being affected by the autoshortener, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114482 "How thumb indexes are cut" autoshortened to "Thumb indexes are cut".)
This is simply a UI issue. It would be totally fine if, when you went to submit a link to HN, the UI before posting said "I'm going to use this title; is that OK? [default is yes]". The only problem is that HN's UI doesn't do that confirmation step; instead it forces everyone to double-check their own post after posting. And then when someone innocently fails to do that double-check, we get these meta subthreads and the only recourse is to ask a mod to retitle the post. It's a silly aspect in a system that otherwise tends to "trust the user."
First of all, why had nobody mentioned linguistics as a field of study by the time I had finished school? I don't think I had learned anything at all in this area until after university, and it's so incredibly rich and fascinating. I reckon the kids lose a lot by having French/German/Spanish/etc without any form of linguistics involved, where they can have a little look at the language from a different perspective.
Second, I take issue with the idea that you can't learn a language to fluency in adulthood. Like the guy in the article. I think it's really all economics:
- When you're a kid, you have no opportunity cost. Taking the time to repeat something you pronounced wrong costs you nothing, because you're just playing.
- When you're a little bit older, you want to socialize. You can socialize with your friends without speaking perfectly, and they find it awkward to correct you.
- When you're an adult, you have to work. Most jobs don't require you to speak fluently, so you don't. Jobs that require native fluency will be taken by people who had low opp cost, aka natives or early learners.
The only people who consciously try to learn a language to native level are the people in this article, who seem to be able to do it. To me they are the evidence that this would work, if only you defied your economic incentives.
The obvious parallel is coding languages. You might have dabbled in Rust as a JS or cpp guy, but once someone is paying you to write it for a living, you take the time to actually learn the idiomatic ways to do things, the libraries to use, and so forth.
It also seems obviously true that everyone can learn a bunch of languages. The old people in my family speak three languages, plus the local language of where they ended up as refugees, plus English. Most of them are not university educated, they just grew up with a bunch of languages. People who grew up at a language border tend to speak a a couple as well, and people who met a spouse from another place, eg I have a friend who learned Swedish due to moving over the bridge, and Spanish having married a Mexican.
On the computer side, writing more than one language is probably by far the norm, who doesn't write python along with something else?
Similarly, the French Foreign Legion seems to be quite successful at teaching French.
The absolute hardest part (for me) about learning a language is listening comprehension. I can read, write, and speak French at a reasonable level, but I've never been able to understand a native speaker. It would take a lot of work and exposure to bring my mastery up to the level of my second-year written French. A large part of that is because spoken French is a hot mess compared to the written form, but I digress.
A written language without a spoken form is a lot easier to grok. Especially programming languages and their limited grammar. But I think there's more to it than that. One of the reasons I find it trivial to learn programming languages is that code is code is code, no matter which flavor of sugar you shovel on top. The language is simply an abstraction for a logical construct. Skilled programmers work on that logical construct directly, and the language is nothing more than a means to an end.
Also there's the fact that the written word is intransient. You have time to pause and search your memory or dictionary for a word. A spoken language requires extensive training to literally rewire your brain. You can't stop to ponder a word because it's gone before you can reconstruct a word from sounds. There's a very good reason that our brains have hardware to turn sounds into linguistic tokens. It's just too much processing to do at a conscious level at any reasonable speed.
Programming languages have a “vocabulary” of what, 20-50 keywords? And modern languages have extremely similar “grammar”…
Mastering 500 (even irregular) verbs and 500 nouns of a human language is fairly useless for interacting with other humans beyond very limited scopes.
When hearing about hyperpolyglots I always have some doubt. Some people believe they know a language when they have a vocabulary of a few dozen words. That might be enough to order food at a restaurant but I don't think is what most people would consider "speaking a language". How many of the 22 languages Rojas-Berscia "has command of" can he speak at a highly-proficient level like CEFR C2? I'm guessing not many.
The question of linguistic distance is also rarely touched upon in these articles despite being of critical importance. It's far easier to learn Italian when you already speak French, Spanish, and Portuguese. A quantitative analysis of hyperpolyglots ought to have some sort of "linguistic range" measure to capture the distance between the different languages you speak proficiently.
And the title should be “…who speak many languages.”
Speaking one language may be something of a mystery but to most of us it’s at least a familiar state.
Computer languages seemed a match for this facility (despite being the token graphic designer in the comparative programming languages course I was the only one who managed to do all of the Lisp problems successfully), but these days I find myself dragging blocks around to rough out designs using: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ rather than directly programming in OpenSCAD (or even the new Python variant: https://pythonscad.org/ ) and wonder if it is a consequence of my choosing to express myself through drawing rather than by words when I was young.
Most cases of people speaking 10+ languages lean heavily on speaking many closely related languages in a family, which most people already cope with pretty well.
Learning phrases is not learning a language. Again, you're doing nothing to explain the very real phenomenon of individual differences in second language acquisition.
Would you say they're wrong? When, according to you, has someone learned a language? You don't get a medal at some point, you learn a language when you can do things with it.
One reason is that many have two mother tongues, e.g. Russian and Ukrainian or Russian and Lithuania, or Spanish and Catalan or swiss German and Italian.
Another reason is that they have emigrated to a country where they had to learn the language.
Also, in most European, it's normal to learn two or three languages in secondary school, beside your native language, and at least one other. Combinations like English, Latin, and Spanish; English and French; or English, Spanish and German are common as secondary languages. By learning two or three languages in school, and already speaking one or two native languages, you know between two to five languages by the time you finish school.
Basically, you learn English at school everywhere. often even before that, because tv and other media are not translated into the local language. That's for example common in the Nederlands or Scandinavian Countries.
Now, if you like languages and have already learned a Romance language at a young age, for example, it is much easier to learn other Romance languages later. This means that if you already speak Spanish or Portuguese, it is easier to learn Italian.
English has 1 million words
College graduates have a 30,000 word vocabulary
High school graduates have a 10,000 word vocabulary
TV vocabulary is 2,000 words
What this means to me, is that I can get along in another language by learning only 2,000 words.
Read a transcript of the words used in a typical TV show. Then read a book written for adults (not the pulp fiction ones).
I sometimes discover that I mispronounce words. The problem is I'd only read them, and assumed they were phonetic.
> language requires much more than just vocabulary
The vocabulary is all you need to "get along". I did not claim that makes you a native speaker, or enables subtlety in word order. I've traveled in foreign countries, and make an effort to learn a few words. It's surprising how far you can get with just a handful. (P.S. making an effort to communicate in the local language wins lots of friend points! I highly recommend it.)
Pick up one of those phrase books for various languages. They aren't that deep, and they work.
Of course there will be a room for improvement ... but you will be able to get along in foreign language speaking environment and bootstrap from there.