A powerful, precise language aptitude test is entering civilian life | Hacker News Reader

A powerful, precise language aptitude test is entering civilian life

nautil.us

142 pointsdang60 comments

I thought I was terrible at learning foreign languages -- French was the only course I flunked in high school, and I only barely passed Chinese in college.

Then I moved to Brazil and was speaking Portuguese fluently in about 6 months. Nobody was more surprised than I was.

Then, after spending a few years teaching English as a foreign language, I realized a few things.

First of all, pretty much anybody can pick up a new language, since pretty much everyone speaks a native tongue. Learning a second language really isn't any different. I was shocked at how natural it felt, picking up Portuguese -- I just felt like I was 3 years old again.

But second, unless you move to a foreign country and spend all day in the language, very few people have the time or exposure to learn a second language this way. It's just not realistic.

So third, this is why traditional language-learning classes fail for most people, because the teaching style bears so little resemblance to the natural way our brain picks up language. (This is not a criticism, it's just the reality of what you can do with a very limited amount of time and the classroom format -- and believe me, I know!)

But fourth, a few students thrive in the classroom format and pick up the language anyway. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily that they have better innate language aptitude -- they just seem to be the lucky few who are more compatible with the classroom format.

So I wonder, is the test described in this article identifying people who are actually better at learning languages "naturally", or people who are better at learning them in the very different environment of the language-learning classroom?

I see the classroom format as a much more inefficient way to learn a language than in an immersive environment. If you can become fluent in a language in the classroom, then you should be able to do so even faster in an immersive environment, though the converse isn't true, as in your case.

The traditional American Spanish classroom is probably at least 80% English, and students are in it perhaps 5 hours a week. = 1 hr/week total

Compare this with the experience of a Spanish native speaker dropped into first grade in America, and not knowing a word of English. They have school for 6 hours a day, every weekday. = 30 hr/week total

These are not comparable, even by volume.

When you account for the burden of code-switching among languages, and the disconnection from what interests them of what little Spanish the Americans hear, it’s even more obvious why we Americans don’t end up learning Spanish, and Hispanic immigrants who go to school in the US speak English with fluency and ease, even when they first encounter it only late in life.

For reasons I'll skip, I've watched a fair number of contemporary Swedish mystery shows in the past couple of years. I came to them with no training in Swedish, and I'm not living in Sweden nor with any Swedish speakers.

For a LONG time, I didn't have a single Swedish reference text nor other book, although I recently acquired a few by chance at a second-hand bookstore.

Adjusting to some of the spelling requires some conscious effort, but otherwise, I pretty much "just know" how the words are pronounced.

So much of language acquisition is not a conscious exercise in memorization. Whether simply listening, speaking, or both, language acquisition occurs through ongoing exposure and use.

This is one more event in my own life that pits me more and more against over-reaching and, I increasingly find, counter-productive IP law. Many of these shows I cannot even purchase through "normal" channels. I am viewing them legally, but through what is something of a fluke -- chance -- of my Internet connection and associated -- along for the ride -- basic cable subscription.

(And I suppose I'd better shut up about this, as the cable provider seems bent on consciously eliminating anything and everything from that basic service that I actually enjoy.)

If this kind of exposure had been available to me "back in the day", when I was learning my first couple of foreign languages, the process would have gone a lot quicker and smoother. Instead of struggling to remember what I heard once or three times, I could simple "soak it in".

Artificial scarcity... It is a large, open question whether this is going to be allowed to dictate and constrain our capabilities to educate and learn.

Do we really want a more capable society, overall? Perhaps implying a smaller slice of a larger pie? Or do we simply want to be king of the hill, however much smaller that may be?

I’d echo your intuitions about learning, drawing on my experience learning a second language (German) to fluency in my late teens, and comparing them to my half-hearted, dead-ended attempts with a few others (Chinese, French, Ancient Greek) afterward.

To me, it seems the most important factor in learning a language is exposure (à la Gladwell’s 10k hours, and 1 hr in classroom counts far, far less than 1 hr of watching a trashy soap opera). Related and also important is motivation.

Excelling at the classroom model might provide a foundational excitement or make talking with natives less humiliating or help with grammatical minutiae (in German, irregular verb stems and modifier declension, which just take more hours to get intuitively), but has nothing directly to do with how fluent you end up.

I’d guess this test serves more to reinforce an already prevalent, toxic fatalism about learning languages (in particular as adults) than to teach us about our selves.

Could this have any implications when it comes to learning new programming languages?

For example, is it better to just dive into existing code in the language and play around with it, as opposed to picking up a book on the language and first understanding the theory and the idioms behind it end-to-end?

Yes. As I mention above, I find motivation to be extraordinarily important in learning languages of all kinds. Diving in implies you start with some task you’re already motivated by.

A crucial, well understood advantage with PLs is that they are well documented (both officially and on Stack Overflow), making minor successes with little previous exposure more likely, which can provide constant reinforcement.

In fact, natural languages are far better documented than people believe. Armed with a few electronic unabridged dictionaries, translation corpora, and conjugation tools, you can make text chatting with a native speaker motivating in the same way as diving into a new programming language, even without having ever composed a sentence before.

>Could this have any implications when it comes to learning new programming languages?

I doubt it. Even programming languages with very large 'vocabularies' are tiny compared to natural languages and the grammatical rules of any natural language are much more complex than the syntax of any programming language.

Realistically, when you learn a new PL, how much time goes into learning syntax versus other things?

Came here to say this, and also add that this entire effort rests on the assumption that "natural" ability or "talent", in this case predisposition to language learning, actually exists. While certain people are no doubt born with enhanced cognitive abilities and all of us have genetic predispositions, the validity of this idea that people are naturally predisposed to acquire certain concrete skills is tenuous at best.

At least to me, a much better approach would be to test changes in your SYSTEM for teaching languages, rather than trying to select the inputs most predisposed to your system. Selecting "better" inputs might improve your success rate, but is it the most effective method of achieving the outcome you're looking for? Probably not. Most likely, the main failure is in the method of teaching languages, not the people being taught.

Well said. To take things one step further, I’d suggest the main failure may be the claim that we desire to learn languages in the first place, when we’re not willing to integrate a language into the things in our lives that motivate us.

With the exception of Japanese (with Anime‎ etc.) I can’t think of a single door that a foreign language opens, which we can truly expect the representative American high school student to be interested in.

What is the "representative American high school student"?

Your last statement assumes that no high school student has ever left the country. Actually going abroad, using what little of the language I knew and having an amazing time were huge motivators. But the biggest was the frustration I felt when I realized how little I knew. In my case I studied Japanese, but by the time I got to high school my interest in anime was already fading and most of it was way too hard for a high schooler to get much if anything out of it. My high school held trips And home stays to most of the languages that taught and nearly everyone I knew that went came back with a huge desire to learn more.

I learned French in my 30s, through a mix of immersion and an overly large Amazon.fr bill, and I speak it a bit below a "professional" level. I agree that if you "burn your ships", language learning can be surprisingly easy and natural. If your brain can't retreat into an English bubble, it will suck it up and internalize the new language.

One other interesting wrinkle: I know quite a few bilingual families. It turns out that kids are only amazing language learners when they have no choice. Kids will master the languages used on the playground and in school. But they don't always learn their home language to an especially high level.

So both children and adults seem to best when they don't have much choice. Or when all the cool books and TV shows are in another language.

Great way of thinking of it. Adults may have different brains for learning languages than kids, but I’d argue the problem adults have is more that they have more "ships to burn" (and are more hesitant with the torch).

> It turns out that kids are only amazing language learners when they have no choice. Kids will master the languages used on the playground and in school. But they don't always learn their home language to an especially high level.

Two additional factors: 1) Language aptitude is a continuous range, not discrete and 2) unused/unpracticed skills can atrophy. This is particularly evident in very young immigrants who exhibit "receptive" skill in their mother tongue even though they may have had fluency in earlier years. Immerse them in the native language, and they'll often pick up much much faster.

> This is particularly evident in very young immigrants who exhibit "receptive" skill in their mother tongue even though they may have had fluency in earlier years. Immerse them in the native language, and they'll often pick up much much faster.

Do you have any cites for this?

I suspected it might be true, and tried actually putting together a paper on this for a class in the early 90's, but pretty much ran into a dead end looking for literature to review at the time.

Mother tongues are special. Generally immigrants will do better at foreign language(s), if also getting proper education in their mother tongue. There's also been studies with brain scans showing that even "bilingual" people usually have one mother tongue, and treat all other languages as "foreign" (separate parts of the brain deal with the two "groups" of languages).

On a more anecdotal level, I had a funny experience when I went to Japan -- I was somewhat passable in French before I went, and after about half a year of being in Japan (before I had really become fluent in Japanese) I tried speaking some simple French with a French teacher. It was impossible -- every sentence started in French, and ended in Japanese :) After I got better at Japanese, my French started coming back too -- but I'm still hoping to spend a month or two in France to really get it up to a usable level. Interestingly, I didn't have any problems with my English while there -- probably because I was already fluent in English (my mother tongue is Norwegian).

I, too, was starting mixing up French with Japanese. I learned French in school and Japanese on my own.

I agree that if you "burn your ships", language learning can be surprisingly easy and natural.

This is one reason I think there's a relatively low level of Danish proficiency in adult immigrants: it is virtually impossible to burn your ships in that manner, because ~all Danes speak fluent English, and generally prefer to speak English to foreigners vs. attempt to understand poor Danish. If someone explicitly asks to keep the conversation in Danish, then people will typically oblige and attempt to understand the learner's Danish, but as soon as the person goes to a restaurant or even a government office, it'll be immediately English again unless they ask each time this happens (and even then the person may just honestly not understand them, because Danes are not good at understanding mispronounced Danish).

The hypothesis I've heard that supports this point of view is that your language center is single threaded. You can either comprehend in your native language or you can comprehend in a different language, but not both. That said, the value bindings are arbitrary. So when you are naturally a single language person (aka an American [1]) that language binding monopolizes the language center. And trying to go through it to learn a new language is like trying to learn to program in C by using the C pre-processor. Everyone I know though who knows 3 or more languages has said that after 3 its much easier. I have heard people compare to learning "binding arbitrary sounds to language" rather than learning a new language.

[1] Old joke which goes - "What do you call people who speak two languages? Bilingual! Three languages? Trilingual! One language? American!"

I don't think 'single-threaded' is a good model. multilingual people often code-switch[1] during conversation (when talking to other multilingual people who understand the same languages).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

They have decoupled the language center from specific sounds associated with language.

Our neighbor's raised their kids tri-lingual and it was amazing to watch in action. Especially the pipeline stalls when a language concept had a word in one language but not another, (the foreign word would be injected).

Yeah! I speak English and Spanish fluently. I often listen to music in Spanish while working, because I can easily tune out the words, and it's not distracting. ...as long as I'm working in English. If I get an email in Spanish, I have to turn off the music, because it interferes too much.

The only part I would disagree with is the assertion that learning a second language "isn't really different" than learning a native language. My wife, who has a masters degree in theoretical linguistics and teaches English as a foreign language, has spoken to me several times about the differences between first and second language acquisition.

(Many ESL teachers are simply English speakers living in another country, but many of them are also like my wife, doing what is essentially applied linguistics.)

Other than that, I completely agree. The notion that you are simply doomed to only have one language after the crucial period is exaggerated, and the key to learning another language is immersion.

It's a controversial matter, to say the least.

Kids will eagerly engage in language acquisition activities that few adults are willing to do. For instance, a child will happily watch the same DVD many times, until he can repeat the dialogue word for word. Their urge to do these things seems to disappear with age, along with their aversion towards bitter flavors and playmates of the opposite sex.

So should we say that kids are more talented language learners? Or should we say that they are more enthusiastic about language acquisition?

There's much more to it than that, but that gives you a flavor of the debate.

I took the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery) along with all of the other military students who went to DLI (Defense Language Institute). DLI is without a doubt the most intense language school in the world, where you have to go from learning the alphabet to reading, speaking, and writing at a college level, and have at most 1 and a half years to do it. In the class that came after us, 2 people passed the arabic course out of 30.

As far as the predictability of someone's aptitude, the DLAB was a good baseline to show that a person had better language acquisition than the average student. When students barely met the baseline of 100 points on the test, they had an incredibly tough time in the beginning with a language as different from english as arabic. What the test didn't measure, however, is a person's will to persevere through the slow progress, constant mistakes, and utter frustration. Although the low scoring students had a tough time in the beginning, most of them passed in the end. The student's that ended up failing out of our class were, ironically, the students that did exceptionally well in the beginning. I mostly attribute this to them relying on the ease of understanding in the beginning, rather than studying at the level that the lower scoring students had had to learn how to do when they had started out.

Language learning is not a linear path where you can acquire x amount of words per day. Your language learning is affected by so many factors such as sleep, healthy living, happiness, motivation, among others. There also seems to be a point for almost everyone I was with where constant study results in a moment of clarity, where you start to believe in your skill in the language and lose the fear of failing in conversation.

All in all, I would say that learning a language is almost exactly like learning programming. The material to learn either is readily available on the internet, and each purely depend on your desire to learn them. There will always be those that just can't quite jump high enough to get past the initial hurdles, and that's what these tests are there to provide -- a way for them to get filtered out before money is invested in their ability. In that, it's similar in a way to giving someone a fizzbang test. It won't tell you that you have a great programmer, it will just give you a baseline assessment that you don't have someone that shouldn't be a programmer.

Fellow DLI alum here (Persian-Farsi, '98) and I agree with everything you've said. The DLAB was a decent stab at predicting my success of completing DLI, but it was grit and determination that allowed me to pass the DLPTS with 2s.

Funny that you associate it with programming-- I used that same hardheadedness to learn Python and now I write software for a living.

A lot of the comments here seem to be missing the key point. The question is not whether immersion is a good thing or is better than classroom. The question the theory set out to investigate is what does it take for someone to become an outstanding learner of a foreign language, even when older. Why can some people do what is widely regarded as being impossible, achieve true native level fluency when learning >18?

I've been attempting to pick up Japanese for about 15 years now. I've found a general pattern that I can go at it intently for 6-12 months, with about 4-6 hours a day of study. With that, I ultimately get to a point where for each new character or word I learn, I seem to forget a different one. Testing myself with flashcard-like custom software appears to confirm that. Eventually I burn out and cease studying for a year or so, which of course decimates a lot of knowledge and is really horrible to do.

It frustrates me to no end that this is the one thing I've really wanted to try and learn and do and failed at completely. Which is evidenced by why I still haven't given up. I refuse to be beaten, and I'm most certainly going to die trying.

Realizing it's not going to happen, I think it's time to start trying something new. So I'm currently looking into SRS algorithms and nootropics (piracetam et al.) I'll be curious to see if it helps or not.

In my case, the 2000+ characters aren't such a burden. It's the words that can have 500 different meanings (like the verb "kakeru") and the particles that can have 20 different purposes each that really ruin me. I find myself just guessing through all the different meanings and picking the least terrible sounding one, and I learn nothing from that exercise. I know it's all context, but I feel like I can't learn enough to clue into the contexts.

I can 'somewhat' handle the types of multiple-meaning words that are really just one underlying concept that we don't have a single one-to-one translation for. But some of these words just have so many of these that it's impossible to get a 'feel' for their underlying intent. And practically no language learning material out there tries to teach you these underlying meanings at all. They just give you the possible valid translations and leave you to it.

If you're serious about learning Japanese, you need to move there. I'm not sure there is any other way to properly understand all the uses of "kakeru" besides simply hearing them all hundreds of times to the point where you just "feel" when it's right to use it. There's just no substitute for immersion and pure exposure.

I studied Japanese at one of the most demanding University programmes for two years intensively (an hour of class, another hour or two of language lab time, another two or three hours studying PER DAY) but I honestly did not really start internalizing any of it until I lived it every day. It was watching TV, hanging out in bars, hearing the subway announcements, and texting my friends that actually let me become fluent.

It's like any other skill, actually... could you learn painting by reading about it but not using a brush all the time? Could you learn gymnastics watching demonstrations but never trying to do a flip? I'm not saying you don't practice - it sounds like you've worked very hard - but immersion is a completely different kind of experience. If there's any way you can, don't give up on your dream Move to Japan, even just for a year. Once you really internalize the language, it will be a part of you forever.

I really would love to go the immersion route, but just cannot do so. In my 20's, I was always far too poor. Perhaps I should have gone the student loan route and tried harder then, but unfortunately I didn't.

In my 30's now, I have some money; but I'm also married, have a stable career, a home, two cars, etc. The best I can hope for is to simulate immersion as much as possible. Watching TV Japan, playing games, listening to music, etc.

Even living in Japan is not enough. I'm able to get by for days in Tokyo with only please and thank-you's. Even one or two days using English-only, my SRS flashcards indicate I'm forgetting more vocabulary than I'm learning.

My suggestion is, wherever you are, find one or more native speakers to talk with at least every day. If aren't any in your local area, use Skype or some other video chat to talk with native speakers.

Just watching movies and TV shows and reading books doesn't usually work. You need to see the facial reactions of a native speaker as they listen to you speak.

My brother learned Cantonese fluently as a LDS Missionary. He then enlisted in the army after 9/11 and was given a battery of aptitude tests. I'm assuming this was one of them because he ended up at DLI learning Arabic and speaking that fluently as well.

DLI and being a Mormon missionary are about the two best places you can learn to speak a 2nd language fluently in a short amount of time.

> Before the participants took the half-day long tests they’d been sorted according to how well they knew a second language

Does doing well in the tests reflect how well someone will learn a second language, or does having already learnt a foreign language (e.g Cantonese) affect how well someone will learn another (e.g. Arabic) ? It could all be a mixup of causation and correlation!

I have made great progress learning Italian by simply changing my homepage to google.it instead of google.com. I search for words in Italian and read my news in Italian as much as I can. I also watch Italian TV.

I'm not an expert yet, but my point is that learning a language just takes more effort than most people are willing to put into it. They are looking for some silver bullet that will teach them without any effort. Just like learning how to code, or run a business, you just have to jump in and get your feet wet. Make mistakes and learn from them. The "silver bullet" is to immerse yourself in it.

Well crap. After reading the intro I hoped to find and take it (in order to, of course, confirm my own rather egotistical beliefs about my language aptitude), only to further read that it "will eventually be available for civilians." Oh well.

Actually, from reading the article, it sounds like you can get an approximation by taking tests designed to measure your working memory and associative memory.

Those tests don't cover most of the test discussed here, though, since there's no assessment of phonemic processing abilities, resilience to distractions, etc.

Yes, it's not so much a "languistic aptitude test" as it is a test of general intelligence. The isn't about separating the math geniuses (or whatever) from the language geniuses, it's about separating the lower intelligence enlisted men from the higher intelligence enlisted men.

>Yes, it's not so much a "languistic aptitude test" as it is a test of general intelligence.

More a test of associative memory than intelligence.

It'd be a waste of everyone's time if all their results were just a bad IQ test. I checked the first paper, and as expected from competent researchers, they did check for general intelligence, using RAPM scores: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/files/2013/06/Psycho...

I wonder if over time they'll adapt this sort of testing to computer science. I've often found learning new computer languages stimulating and exciting, frustrating at first but so much fun when I get closer to mastery. However many people see to lock into a language or a set of languages and never venture far from that root. I wonder if the same sort of issues are at play here. Perhaps we've all been pointing fingers at each other saying stuff like "languages are tools" and "right tool for the job" when perhaps the reality is some people are going to be really good at a handful of computer languages and we should focus them on problems that fit them well. Meanwhile others may be really good at a lot of languages and perhaps they should be part of the process of determining the right type of languages to apply to given problem sets?

Just a thought. I find it fascinating having coded for 30 years now that some people resist changing tech or languages so much. I still write in C often but most of the original languages I wrote in are dead now. I suspect if I get to write for another 30 years I'll still write in C once in a while and a whole new set of tools. Or maybe the computers will just code themselves finally.. :-)

I wonder if high natural language aptitude translates to high programming language aptitude, that is, not the ability to write good code but rather to write code in diverse languages.

It seems the skill set often associated with good programmers in my general impression as well as in some papers I read (good working memory, good implicit learning) is present in language aptitude as well so this sounds likely to me.

I started programming when I was 12. I'm 24 now and based upon where I went for school and where I have worked I'm pretty good at it.

I took Latin and Spanish in high school and was terrible at both of them. They were my lowest grades, and I hated them. My memorization skills are generally my weakest point.

So based on a sample size of one I think that programming stresses a different skill set. Programming anything that isn't simple stresses abstract thinking capability above all else. You alluded to this by mentioning good code vs diverse languages.

Good working memory pretty quickly stops being the largest factor as the problem size scales out. Instead organizational skills and the ability to abstract layers of complexity becomes the most important factor in programming ability.

I have noticed that I rely more on language references and code completion than some of the other good developers I know. Supposedly Spanish is derived from Latin, and I have seen many examples, but I found my experiences in one rarely translated well to the other where as my experiences in one programming language almost always translate well to other languages.

As someone who has been captivated by studying related languages and noticing similarities between them, I think the way that learning one language "helps" with learning a related language can be quite narrow. The main benefit is probably a built-in set of mnemonics for cognates (whether at the word level or the morpheme level).

For example, if you've learned the Latin verb conjugation endings -o -s -t -mus -tis -nt, you have a useful starting point for memorizing the Spanish equivalents -o -s -ø -mos -is -n (which derived from them), or the Portuguese equivalents -o -s -ø -mos -is -m, or French -ø -s -ø -ns -z -nt, and so on. Similarly, the numbers provide good mnemonics: Latin unus duo tres quattuor quinque sex ..., Spanish uno dos tres cuatro cinco seis ...

Similarly, if you know the personal pronouns in one Semitic language like Arabic or Hebrew, you've got a major boost for learning them in another because they're extremely similar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages#Independent_...

But in each case you still have a lot of memorization because there will be sound changes and lexical changes that are not predictable a priori, include extreme cases like suppletion, where one verb partially replaces another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppletion#Examples

In the programming context suppletion might be as if someone started implementing an API from one language and then decided to use a different API as the basis for half of the function names.

I think learning many natural languages (whether related or not) helps because it builds up your conceptual framework and repertoire for how things can work, especially in terms of syntax and morphosyntax. For example, Indo-European languages have a wide range of ways of using participles and infinitives (some of them different from the ways that English speakers are familiar with), and seeing a few of these can help with understanding how they work in other languages. Or there's relative clause structure (like "the first foreign language that I studied") and indirect discourse ("she felt that natural languages and programming languages were similar"), which are handled quite differently in different languages, and it's helpful to get a sense of some of the ways that these things can happen.

Maybe a programming language analogy would be ideas like indexing starting from zero, which is not necessarily always used in every context in every single language, but which is an important concept to know about. Or list comprehensions or anonymous functions, which are again not available in every language but which are useful to understand. Or lexical vs. dynamic variable scope. :-)

A given programming language can in theory make totally arbitrary choices about these things at the whim of its designer, but in any case it will probably do most things in a way that's conceptually related to at least some other programming languages that have come before.

Even more interesting to me is if one could create a test for prospective programmers that could be taken before one even knew how to program and would distinguish people who would be good at programming and those who wouldn't. Is this even possible? Programming is more complex than learning a new human language in that there are a lot more things that go into it than just knowing the language. But it's clear that some people are better at both programming and learning new programming things. Could one find a verifiable way to predict this ahead of time?

FizzBuzz, pseudocode variant.

This has been studied

http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr...

I suspect that at least two aptitudes are involved, and different programming languages/platforms place different demands on those two aptitudes.

One aptitude is essentially the math/engineering ability. The other is linguistic.

Also the working memory and a certain willingness to sit there doing purely mental work for significant periods of time (well I guess the latter is part of 'math/engineering ability'). The working memory aspect is what makes this sub-thread not a complete digression.

One US university used to (may still) have a program where they would take relatively non-technical people off the street, and if they could pass an aptitude test would consider them (interview) for a programmer training course. This test was notorious for the failure rate, but the program consistently produced coders who quickly became able to maintain the university's systems. (Trainees were taught a procedural language for a mainframe, but in the early 2000s they were gradually migrating to web and Java.)

This test, supposedly developed by IBM in the 1960s, had nothing about programming. It was all pattern recognition - look at a series of geometric figures and predict the next, and some variations on this concept.

I was skeptical of the suitability of this test, but the U. was convinced by the apparent results.

I already know my language aptitude and it's very low, it's near impossible for me to learn another language.

Could the language part of my brain be utilized for something else? Perhaps code? If so, I'd rather not know another language, English works fine for me.

Anyone have an fMRI I can borrow? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-parnin/scientists-begin-...

>Could the language part of my brain be utilized for something else?

Possibly, although as someone who has relatively easily learned as an adult 3 languages to varying degrees of proficiency, I've noticed that I learn the syntax of new programming languages with great ease, learning multiple PLs in the process, including ones of different paradigms.

My ability to learn new algorithms, on the other hand, is very much below average -- at least among my HN peers.

So if there indeed a correlation between learning natural languages and learning the syntax of programming languages, is possible that you good be bad at learning a new programming language but much better at algorithms, arguably more important to the working programmer, and definitely to the computer scientist.

What you said is definitely true from my personal experience, except rather than algorithms for me it's more that complex systems are easy.

I'd prefer to master a select few languages rather than risk getting syntax, functions, and language specific concepts confused.

Different languages (including programming languages) require memorization, and I'm much more of the type of person that can just figure things out rather than rely on it being memorized, not that either method is better, just an observation.

Since working memory is so important, will there be any policy to get children to practice that while they have the extra mental plasticity? Learning languages takes skill, effort and dedication, focusing on the skills part early would give a good return on the teaching investment.

Language learning becomes easier for the person who tries a few different languages, and for the person who formally studies linguistics, and for the person injected into an environment where the target language is pervasive. But somehow there is still individual variance in how rapidly and thoroughly language-learners learn in otherwise identical environments, so it is worthwhile for the United States government and other organizations to spot the learners most likely to be successful. For Hacker News readers who have to learn a natural language (for example, English) whether it is easy or not, I suggest referring to a set of language-learning tips posted 231 days ago as a Hacker News comment[1] back in the thread about Paul Graham's article "Founders' Accents." My tips refer to several issues for language-learners who desire to be understood by native speakers of their target language for business or for pleasure, based on academic research and my personal experience as a translator and interpreter.

I look forward to taking this test. (My background in learning languages other than my native language, General American English, is disclosed in my user profile.) I missed one chance to take an earlier general language-learning aptitude test in one previous employment setting because I was exempted from the test, having already demonstrated proficiency as a second-language learner of Modern Standard Chinese. But it would be fun to find out what this test says about my "natural" level of ability to learn a language ("baseline" would be a better adjective) after years of studying various languages.

I agree with comments posted earlier here that sometimes each new language attempted becomes easier than the previous foreign languages attempted. The first foreign language I was ever taught was German (it was mandatory for all elementary school pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my school district in Minnesota, very unusual for the United States). German is also a heritage language in my family (German-Americans are a bare majority of my ancestors), so I was happy to keep learning it as an elective subject in junior high school and senior high school, with some interruptions caused by a move to another state with a school district where German wasn't available as a junior high language (even though that state, Wisconsin, has a higher percentage of German-descended persons than any other state in the United States). In the years since, I took Russian as a high school and university subject, and ended up majoring in university in Chinese. Today I can comfortably read a book on a familiar nonfiction subject in German, but I am much better at speaking and understanding Chinese than German.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816

learning languages

"There weren’t enough trained language experts."

There were plenty, the military just fired them all for being gay.

Not sure why I'm being downvoted:

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/58_gay_arab_linguists_ouste...

You're improperly conflating the two issues, though I agree DADT was a horrible policy.

There simply weren't plenty of linguists before or after those discharges (which obviously didn't make the situation any better). There still isn't for languages like Arabic and Persian Farsi. Attrition rates for DLI are high.

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