Hacker News Reader

Comment by shortsightedsid | Hacker News Reader

I really wonder if these studies can be extended to countries which are naturally multi-lingual. By that I mean countries where there are more than 1 language spoken. E.g. Switzerland has German, Italian, French and Romansh as official languages. That means even its more than likely that the average Swiss will know more than 1 language. Therefore, the question I have is whether the Swiss have better brains than someone in England who speaks only English.

View on HN

Most people ignore the other languages. Swiss childern would have to learn one other language at school, but learning a language in school sucks so bad that most will not be able to speak anything in it. You don't learn a language by memorizing vocabulary for exams. You learn it by using it, and that's not happening.

So, I'd answer this with nope. Source: I'm swiss.

I'd suggest look at people who truly grew up bilingual.

Don't you at least learn some of the others to a passable extent? (I had a roommate who was from a French speaking part of Switzerland and he was able to speak at least passable German with my German friends, so I just assumed this was common in Switzerland... but maybe he was just an exception?).

We should. But at least the german speaking part mostly doesn't. At least in my personal experience. Of course some people do... But every single meeting I had in the french part was done in english because my french is non-existant and so was their german.

I think India might be a better test case for any such study. Most Indians are forced to learn at last two languages and in several parts even three. I guess I cannot speak for the all the rural regions where learning just the local dialect of the state language would suffice but education in most tier-2 and metro cities is carried out in English in most places and everybody knows it is the language they must learn if they are to enter the global marketplace at any point in their lives. Not everyone is equally fluent but they tend to know just about enough to communicate. In North India, the most prevalent language is Hindi. And several of the other state languages are often related in some way to Hindi making them at least partially mutually intelligible. Like Punjabi and Marathi. South India is a whole other matter. The four predominant languages there are quite different from the Northern ones. Some of them share different forms of similar words but each has its own script. Having spent varying amounts of time growing up in Delhi, Madras, Madurai and Bangalore, I can speak, read and write in Hindi, Tamil and English. My fluency in each of these areas tends to vary but I can get by in any one of these alone. Also, through my interactions with friends and neighbours, I can understand bits and pieces of few other languages as well

True. As a fellow South Indian forced to learn languages that I never used, I can completely relate to this point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com