291–300 of 435 posts
This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you. If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you'…
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You've probably invested thousand of hours in learning all of those languages. Some just by circumstance/luck (maybe something like this? mom speaking 1 language, dad speaking another, both speaking a common language, the place you were in having another secondary language), some through your own efforts. As always, the real question we can't really test is: what could you have done with probably literal person-years…
There's a post nearby where people are said to spend their time watching braindead youtube videos. My niece does that too.
It's not "learn a million languages or be a meth head".
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Where I grew up, a small EU country just knowing the local language would be super limiting. Here we learn Dutch, English, German and French in high school, and I picked up some Polish while living there. I'm not exceptional at all here and I'm nowhere near where someone who studies linguistics is.
The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual. Second language acquisition research is a joke, you cannot transform your learning by deep diving on it. And way too many linguists are barely capable of learning languages to fluency, it's not common for them to be polyglots. Being able to understand the hardest grammatical concepts in say Polish, Arabic, or Hungarian in a half hour doesn't imply one has any ca…
Who is that?
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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…
I agree that German isn't especially useful globally, but you're wrong on a couple points: - There are several countries with German as an official language, and a few other with German-speaking minorities. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium all have it as an official language (though the last few are not terribly significant). There are also around half a million native German speake…
That means they aren't internationally minded then.
This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you. If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you'…
> This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you. But that's not what the paper studied. It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increa…
This is a recurring problem with science reporting. Falsifiability and reproducibility demand that good studies focus on very specific, well-defined effects. Then it gets reported as leading to much broader conclusions on the topic as a whole.
Counterintuitively, "missing the forest for the trees" is exactly what you want a study like this to do. You can let a later meta-analysis figure out how to make a forest out of the trees.
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…
I find this discussion absurd. Here's a paper that most people have not read and then add their own subjective anecdote to it to confirm their personal opinion. Has anyone bothered to look at the tests that determine cognitive ability in this context? Here's one(or it's advanced version the double trouble test): “assess the ability to inhibit cognitive interference that occurs when processing of a specific stimulus f…
I put my hand up: I didn't read the paper (just the abstract). Their findings surprised me.
I speak (quite badly, nowadays) French and German, as well as my mother-tongue, English. I'm quite sure that my understanding of my own language is greatly enhanced by knowing French and German. And I'd be very surprised if a better knowledge of your native language doesn't enhance at least some aspects of cognition.
But this is a particular constellation of languages: if you exclude modern loanwords, it seems to me that the flow of vocabulary has been mainly from French and German into English, rather than vice-versa.
Decades ago, I did a class in Mandarin (now completely forgotten, except a few phrases). I don't think knowledge of Mandarin improved my understanding of my mother tongue at all.
So my surprise is that the researchers found no cognitive enhancement at all.
Perhaps their cognition test battery excludes those aspects of cognition that depend on thinking with words? It seems to me that I think mainly with words.
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.
I would be surprised if the majority of bilingual speakers in the US aren't first/second gen immigrants. Not exactly known to be "a sign of coming from" wealth
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That's not totally true - in Berlin there are lots of English speakers (many/most English as a second language) and so people including myself live here with pretty basic German (A2 probably). Those people are certainly learning alot about a different culture from wherever they came from even if they aren't speaking the dominant language. Obviously if I had B2 German it would be awesome and I would chat up more peopl…
Berlin is not Germany. Yes, every city and region is a bit different but Berlin as a whole has such a different culture, especially if you predominantly speak English. Most of my colleagues are English speaking only and they sometimes complain that its hard to do certain things where I have no problem with it. Getting appointments, doctors and Bürgerbüro especially, they always seem to struggle with. You can certainl…
Note: I'm not trying to trivialise your efforts to learn German, rather to encourage you by saying it could be much worse. For me I glance every now and then at Hungarian and Finnish and think "ok I can handle Czech"
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.
Your theory is entirely wrong. Read the study. The bilingual cohort was poorer.
This seems mainly interesting for people from English-speaking countries, since everyone else nowadays is bilingual anyway.
Everyone else nowadays is bilingual anyway. Uh, no. According to statistics (and everyday observation), slightly less than half of "everyone" is.