391–400 of 435 posts
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If “bilingualism” is expanded even further to include having wealthy parents who are legacies at Harvard, I would say it does have an effect on outcomes.
I don't get your sarcasm. How do 'wealthy parents who are legacies at Harvard' constitute a language in any form?
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.
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> I feel as if this has expanded my ability What benchmark could you possibly have for this? You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like.
That's not even remotely close to being true. I have no more trouble imagining what monolingual me would have been like than I have imagining what color-blind me would have been like, or deaf me, or paraplegic me. Imagining a deficit in one's abilities is not hard. It's going the other way -- imagining what it would be like to be able to do something that you have never done -- that is difficult. (In fact, I don't ev…
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 who also speaks four languages, I agree with most of your post but here are some more advantages I can think of: * Access to more media I regularly consume newspapers, subreddits and similar in other languages to get different points of view on things. Then there's literature and films (especially the ones that don't have translations) * Ease of travel (this is highly dependent on the languages you know) *…
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That's not even remotely close to being true. I have no more trouble imagining what monolingual me would have been like than I have imagining what color-blind me would have been like, or deaf me, or paraplegic me. Imagining a deficit in one's abilities is not hard. It's going the other way -- imagining what it would be like to be able to do something that you have never done -- that is difficult. (In fact, I don't ev…
The key word in your response is "imagine" which is literally all you're doing.
"You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like."
And that's not true. I have several pretty good clues. Not only that, but what I imagine about the counterfactual me leads me to be able to formulate a testable hypothesis with respect to non-counterfactual situations, namely, that acquiring multiple languages in one's youth does afford some measurable cognitive advantages in general.
You can get a lot of leverage out of imagining things.
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There's a post nearby where people are said to spend their time watching braindead youtube videos. My niece does that too.
You do know that within that spectrum there are thousands of useful and fun activities, right? It's not "learn a million languages or be a meth head".
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 also speak the same four languages plus one more. I do consider there are advantages to speaking several languages. I learned from English that you can be very precise, but also economical in exposition of complex matter. I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian"…
Nabakov didn't feel the same way.
That said, as someone with decent Russian, I do like the language in many ways. I agree that it's a nuanced and powerful language in ways that English isn't; English is so ambiguous and low-context that you can say anything but I love Russian in that I can state things like number, gender, if they go & come back / complete, and do so in a word or two.
See also: high context vs low context languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
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Having achieved a foreign language college major with minors in two others I find it hard not to be cynical about this unless the doors you’re talking about are things like vacations, entertainment, and similar amusements. From a work perspective it has not done much for me. Of course that could be different if my native language weren’t English or I didn’t work in the US, but then that’s just about the relative econ…
for me the rewards to learning (basic) German have been more personal than professional - attempting to speak with a German speaker in their native language generally makes it easier to bond with them.
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My main "issue" with the paper (which I really like just to be clear) is that I can't completely figure out how they grouped someone as bilingual (maybe that's on me but it doesn't seem very clear in the methods section). It seems they used self identification by the participants (18+ old). If that's the case someone that learned the language in school would be considered bilingual. For example, if the questionaire a…
It's impressive that your comments reads like a well-educated native speaker of English, except for "Englisch". Anyway, your English is far, far better than "learned it in school". Those books and TV(And fluent English users in school?) were an effective immersion. It's quite different from the common USA style of learning a non-English language: "5 years of classes but no immersit in culture"
I'm learning German and there's a surprising lack of quality media. I don't want to throw shade on contemporary German culture, but it's just a very different level from the English-speaking world. My native language is Czech - which has a small cultural sphere - yet somehow the German-speaking cultural sphere does seem more similar in size to the Czech-speaking one than to the English-speaking one.
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I wonder if it's different if you've studied the language vs if you grew up with it. I learned polish from my parents when growing up and English from living in Canada and cartoons. My native tongue is English but I can speak polish fairly well and read and write it. I don't ever feel like I accidentally reach for polish or English words when I need the other.
If I understood correctly, the parent poster is saying that he mixes words between their second and third languages, not the native one. I agree with your interpretation though. My anecdotal experience tells me this happens with studied languages.