Comment by nwenzel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwenzel | Hacker News Reader

I realize the article is pro-multilingual, but I disagree with the notion that time spent learning a foreign language is time not spent learning another subject.

My son was in Spanish immersion preschool from age 2 until 3 years 4 months. He can speak and understand Spanish and understands that he speaks a language that my wife and I don't. Then we moved and put him in Mandarin/English bilingual school. He's 2.5 months into the program and can already count, follow basic instructions, and make basic requests.

Learning a language at that age has basically been a free layer of learning added on top of his education and growth. To him, it's not even "learning" it's just talking and playing and singing.

There's no opportunity cost at that age to stacking blocks with English instruction or some other language. Why wouldn't we take advantage of that time in our kids' lives by immersing them in another language?

Of course it could just be that my son is the smartest kid in the whole world. That's probably true, too.

To play the devil's advocate, there is an opportunity cost to your child learning a new language, which is he can't communicate and understand mildly complex things in preschool until he learns the language. During that time he could have read stories about things he never imagined, learned piano and understand music playing, learned to swim or discovered storytelling etc.

My son is right now in the transition phase in a new language, and it's mildly sad to see him struggling with very basic concepts ("can I have these pencils? What is the teacher telling me? why is everyone moving their arms ?") when he otherwise would be learning what's the conductor's role is in an ensemble.

Learning a second language lays the base for learning other things, as learning any of the above would also have oppened doors to to better understand other things. Time is finite and choices have to be made, not everyone might prioritize learning languages as much as other things.

I think the training you child recieves is an interesting combination and I don't want to criticize you on that. What I want to add are some observations I've made in the past about myself and others around me (so purely anecdotal).

I speak three languages fluently and a bunch of others to varying degree. I also hold a PhD in Physics. What I've noticed is that my brain manages very well if I have prolonged periods of intense "sciencing" and it also works well if I take some time to learn languages.

However, if I try to do half a day of thinking about algorithms and then half a day of language learning, I will get a headache and slight nausea! Might be that this only happens to me because of some "manufacturing error", but I've tried it repeatedly and it invariably happens.

This has lead me to form the following, highly unproven, high-level working heuristic about the brain: The brain might be just like the rest of our body. You can train to be a weightlifter, or you can train to be a marathon runner. If you do both over the course of your life, you can become good at both, but you'll probably never become the worlds best at any of the two.

If you do intense training on both without a resting period in between, you'll hurt yourself.

So that's my weird theory, for what it's worth.

That said, I think your child has a lot to gain from the broad knowledge he receives. I can tell you from experience that this is the age of interdisciplinarity, and it's a lot of fun.

Polymaths like Da Vinci and Bacon disagree with you (however rare they may be).

I've given this some thought. Sadly, it seems the most logical conclusion is just that I'm no Da Vinci or Bacon. :)

I also speak three languages, and I'm learning another two. I'm also a hacker. I find programming and foreign languages highly complimentary. In both cases I'm supposed to communicate ideas in a specific vocabulary and grammar.

Also, my two geeky pre-teen sons equally like learning Python and French (on Duolingo).

Of course, I learn languages because I'm interested in the culture of the people who speak those languages. In the same way, I learn programming languages to broaden my way of thinking about computing.

Again, it might very well be that my observations are specific to myself and my body/brain.

What I'd like to add to my previous post is that the effect appears when I do both things under heavy load. Especially the language learning method I have is much more strenuous than what most people use.

Here's what I do: Obviously there are times where I learn the basics of the language and basic vocabulary. The main part of my learning effort, however, consists of watching movies/television.

What makes this so hard, is that I start doing so when I have only a very basic grip on the language, so that I understand very little of the language I'm trying to absorb. While watching, I force myself to actively try and understand/infer as much as I can. By this I mean that I touch my cognitive load limit.

When I'm "fresh", this is realy exhausting. When I mix it with complementary strenuous work (say, designing a numerical algoritm), it causes headaches and slight nausea.

I want to stress that this method I use is not suitable for everybody and I'd really recommend against trying to do it for the first foreign language. The reason I resort to it is that I am more of a speech person than a written text person and I am also somewhat lazy regarding textbook language study.

It might also be useful to note that, while my method takes less learning time than using a book or working with a tandem partner, it requires much more reconvalescence. So my net learning speed might be on par or even slower than the speed of somebody using duolingo or doing an advanced university course.

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