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Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

fens2026.abstractserver.com

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Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#31

Post by asveikau »

Thraway198 wrote: post #25
asveikau wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any multilingual person will be skeptical of your analysis. Translation is not a substitute for understanding the original. It's good that we have translations, but it isn't the same. As you get into consuming art, literature, poetry, commentary, this is relevant.

The AI will be able to do all that for you. What you're touching on is the difference between comprehension vs merely being a vessel for information.

I'll give you a very simple example I saw recently. I saw a dad joke in Spanish on social media and it gave me a chuckle. It was a comment to a lawyer's video and it translates to "can I study law if I'm a leftie?" It relies on the fact that law is also a word for "right".

AI won't be able to succinctly translate that joke and have it hit the same way. As an experiment I just fed that into ChatGPT, and it did explain the pun in 6 paragraphs with quotations and a bulleted list, but that kills the simplicity of the humor.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#32

Post by pebble »

TFNA wrote: post #5
asveikau wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any multilingual person will be skeptical of your analysis. Translation is not a substitute for understanding the original. It's good that we have translations, but it isn't the same. As you get into consuming art, literature, poetry, commentary, this is relevant.

Learning a foreign language in order to get more out of art, literature, or poetry is already a very niche hobby and one risks being accused of snobbism or privilege for suggesting it. Art, literature (of the kind where learning the original language could be important), and poetry themselves are niche hobbies.

Let me tell you about a little thing called kpop. Korean language courses are booming.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#33

Post by paulsutter »

markerz wrote: post #26
thisoneisreal wrote: post #2

One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties. That's a known dimension that improves health and aging and I wonder if just being able or interested in speaking with a broader swath of people is what helps more than the cognitive demands of switching.

In my world, most multilingual speakers are children of immigrant families, and that transcends socio-economic boundaries. Plenty of immigrants were already wealthy before coming to the SF Bay Area, where we import highly educated, specialized workers. On the other hand, we also import physical laborers who are also generally multilingual but not in the same social class. Some of these immigrants are very well suppor…

On first reading I assumed you meant the physical laborers would have the stronger social network, and the wealthy would be more isolated (true in my experience). But you may have meant just the opposite!

In fact it's two separate questions because it can go both ways, heavily.

Interesting food for thought, thanks for posting.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#34

Post by estebank »

TFNA wrote: post #7
asveikau wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know your history, but this sounds like a monolingual person not understanding and being arrogant about it. It's not a niche hobby if that's literally your life. Many people are not multilingual as a hobby, or as a choice.

Did you not notice that I specified “developed-country Gen Z above” and also China? That was to leave a carve-out for the still very vibrant everyday multilingualism of the Indian Subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, etc. But for East Asia, Europe and most of Latin America, the trends speak for themselves. I am not monolingual, nor are many educated people of my generation, but younger people in my country are likely to…

Someone who can speak English on top of their mother tongue is already multilingual. Anecdotally, people who live anywhere close to a border in Europe tends to speak at least two languages, often more than two, regardless of class or profession.

In Latin America, most countries speak Spanish (with the obvious exception of Brazil and smaller colonies from the other European countries), so the every day pressure to learn another language isn't there and English becomes the "obvious" choice. I don't quite get why you seem to discount English entirely.

There's always been a Lingua Franca. It hasn't always been the same one. There will likely always be one.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#35

Post by Thraway198 »

asveikau wrote: post #31
Thraway198 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI will be able to do all that for you. What you're touching on is the difference between comprehension vs merely being a vessel for information.

I'll give you a very simple example I saw recently. I saw a dad joke in Spanish on social media and it gave me a chuckle. It was a comment to a lawyer's video and it translates to "can I study law if I'm a leftie?" It relies on the fact that law is also a word for "right". AI won't be able to succinctly translate that joke and have it hit the same way. As an experiment I just fed that into ChatGPT, and it did explain…

It can't now. It will be able to in the future, when the translation actually becomes fluent for the user.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#36

Post by paulsutter »

TFNA wrote: post #3

Sadly, this beneficial activity doesn’t look promising in the longterm. Real-time interpretation of foreign languages through earbuds is already available in its nascent phase, and China at least has begun cutting foreign-language programmes at its unis because such AI translation is seen as the way of future. Once this tool becomes adopted enough societally, the learning of foreign languages is going to become a ver…

With AI there will always be people who learn more, faster using AI. And there will be people who use AI to avoid learning. When moving abroad, I hope folks will do the former (and the latter as tourists).

When I move back to Japan I'll wear something like Even Realities glasses, and when unknown vocabulary gets used, display that. Personally I think this will help me learn better than before. But let's wait and see!

I'm very hopeful about learning-acceleration tools. Just think what will be possible with Neuralink.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#37

Post by estebank »

tekno45 wrote: post #23
TFNA wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art is perennial and omnipresent in human societies, but the sort of art that operates through a language foreign to the aficionado’s own, and learning that language would be beneficial to appreciation of it, is obviously going to be a niche subset of art.

basic puns and rhyming are niche forms of art?

If anything comedy is an excellent way of learning a language: the use of double and triple entendres helps to quickly get exposed to alternate meanings and misunderstandings of words. Comedy aimed at learners or multilinguals can also help, plenty of anglos who learned Spanish can relate to "feeling pregnant" early on :)

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#38

Post by fusslo »

totally off topic. I noticed the banner photo ( https://fens2026.abstractserver.com/program/img/logo.e8cd4ff... ) load noticeably slow.

It's 1,790.16 KB (1,833,122 bytes), which is ~800,000 bytes larger than the code space of the main microprocessor of the product I'm working on.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#39

Post by timr »

thisoneisreal wrote: post #2

One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties. That's a known dimension that improves health and aging and I wonder if just being able or interested in speaking with a broader swath of people is what helps more than the cognitive demands of switching.

> One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties.

Yes. This is exactly what you should be asking with this kind of stuff. The research is hopelessly confounded by social status traits that correlate with wealth.

And before anyone says it, the abstract claiming "adjustment for linguistic, physical, and sociopolitical exposome factors" is fine, but it's essentially impossible to control for something as pervasive as the effects of wealth, without randomization. There are also factors -- like the culture you grew up in -- that are equally difficult to control. For example, if your dataset has only X multi-lingual Americans, and 1000x multi-lingual Western Europeans, no amount of statistical massage will correct for the imbalance.

Re: Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

#40

Post by m0llusk »

TFNA wrote: post #3

Sadly, this beneficial activity doesn’t look promising in the longterm. Real-time interpretation of foreign languages through earbuds is already available in its nascent phase, and China at least has begun cutting foreign-language programmes at its unis because such AI translation is seen as the way of future. Once this tool becomes adopted enough societally, the learning of foreign languages is going to become a ver…

That seems like saying weightlifting is pointless because we have robots for lifting and moving things around. But lifting weights can improve health and lifespan. It may also be that thinking in another language is different from merely translating because of the idioms and cultural norms and references involved.
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