171–180 of 435 posts
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> an extra language I learned spanish at a young age and I find it pretty useless. The last time I used it in the past 20 years was watching Casa De Papiel Really wished I learned something like German or Chinese instead
nit: It's "Casa de Papel", just made me curious about how deep your Spanish goes.
At least in the US this is often a sign of affluence, you need to have money to attend language school after your normal classwork. I was very ignorant of this when I was younger, my first girlfriend was Korean , but couldn't really speak it since her parents( presumably) didn't put her in classes. On the other hand, if your parents have money for language classes, they probably can afford general tutoring. So your d…
The linked study shows the opposite. Bilingual cohort was twice as likely to be low socioeconomic status. This is likely dominated by lower income immigrants.
Only after getting exposed to the rest of the world (And people making a big deal out of it) did I realize that it was a "class" thing
If the bilinguals are mainly economic migrants, sure, I'd expect the correlation to be different
The thing is, beyond critical developmental stages in early childhood, and barring significant environmental factors like lead poisoning or brain trauma, one's general cognitive abilities are largely a genetic phenomenon.
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> an extra language I learned spanish at a young age and I find it pretty useless. The last time I used it in the past 20 years was watching Casa De Papiel Really wished I learned something like German or Chinese instead
Globally speaking, German is useless, unless you're European and trying to find a job in Germany because it pays better than your home country. The only German speaking country is full of educated people who also speak fluent English. You'll never meet an internationally minded German who doesn't speak excellent English. Spanish, however, is spoken in an entire continent, which also has a very low level of English, p…
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You seem to speak 4 languages so well that at least in one of them you can't count to 5 ;) Please take this tongue in cheek, as in kind of like the other comment said: for lots of folks splitting that atte tion is detrimental at least in some regard. Personally I think some diversification in language is good. It "keeps you on your toes". If you never use a muscle it will deteriorate. But you won't be able to exercis…
> "You seem to speak 4 languages so well that at least in one of them you can't count to 5 ;) " For what it's worth, I counted 4 languages instead of 5, assuming the comment wasn't edited. The commenter wrote: "Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English." Brazilian Portuguese is a single language as the dialect of Portuguese used in Brazil [1], versus the European Portuguese…
My theory: in the United States, speaking multiple languages can be a sign of coming from a more financially sound household. I wouldn’t expect a second language to be any better for the brain than studying math or learning to play an instrument. As always, the most important factor is money.
As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful! I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four langua…
Exactly, I'll find myself doing translations in my head while speaking in English (my second language). And I find interacting socially much smoother in my native tongue. I'm not sure if that relates directly to being able to connect deeply with the society of my upbringing, or that there is some hidden neural pattern there? For what it's worth, I've now been speaking English primarily longer than my mother tongue.
Perhaps in one's native tongue, the idioms and phrases that are fitting to an idea come to mind easily, whereas in a second language, you may need additional effort to find roughly equivalent phrases that are not exact translations.
That may or may not be relevant to the thinking pattern you were mentioning, though I figure the lack of direct translations can sometimes be a barrier to fluency. The idea of "untranslatability" (aka the lack of a direct translation) was also explored last week in an interesting HN discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35629354
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The same way in that a CS PHD is going to be able to pickup programming languages better and more quickly than someone who has learned C++ and python, they understand the underlying mechanics of language, what makes it work. But a toddler is something different, they primarily mimic and play with the language gauging function on result, how do people react to what I say. Learning languages from a young age is why the…
I don't really know much about linguistics or linguists (though I would certainly believe that linguists find picking up new languages easier), but I don't think the analogy holds for a CS graduate. PhD graduates don't have magic in-depth knowledge about programming languages. PhD graduates (in any field, really, not just CS), choose to dive very deeply into a very specific topic in their field. They do not just "go…
No magic involved, they generally have a good understanding of how a computer functions which means they can relate a language directly 1:1 to what the computer is doing instead of relating it to what another language they already know does or by simple trial and error.
>No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition.
Toddlers are in the 12-36 month range, they primarily mimic and use language on simple cause and effect terms, if I say this than this is the result. They do not understand the concept of language or languages and if you teach them with multiple languages they do not see them as separate languages they see them as a sound and a result. We develop those distinctions and understanding of meaning during childhood and adolescence.
I see monolingual English speakers who confuse to/too/two, there/their/they're, etc. It's hard to blame them because these word triplets are pronounced the same, so why bother distinguishing them in writing.
Knowing how these words map to different languages reinforces their distinctions. There/their/they're in Chinese are 那裏 (na li) / 他們的 (ta men de) / 他們是 (ta men shi).
This goes deeper and works for homonyms like free, which maps to 免費 (no cost / gratuis) vs. 自由 (freedom / liberty). It makes you think harder about what you mean when you use the word free.
Learning different languages challenges your assumptions. An Euro-centric upbringing would assume that spaces are required to separate words. Chinese and Japanese disagree with this and work just fine. 26-letter alphabet vs. thousands of characters. Implicit tones vs. prescriptive tones. Context-dependent letter shapes (Sanskrit). Optional/implied vowels (Arabic). Word order (SVO etc.).
As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful! I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four langua…
>As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful! I've heard that there is an unusually high rate of mental illness among European Parliament translators.
At most, I found a systematic review article [1] with the conclusion that interpreters for refugees experience higher levels of emotional and work-related stress, but it seems like this is more of a result of the content being translated, versus the act of translation.
It seems plausible, too, that assuming the claim is true (though I couldn't source an article to confirm this), it may alternatively be a result of the content of the translation or the pressure of the job (e.g. there may be serious consequences if there are mistranslations), versus the act of translation itself.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.7107...
