21–30 of 54 posts
I'm a native English speaker who learned Mandarin 10+ years ago, and I can honestly say it has not added a cent to my income as a programmer.
I realize the article is pro-multilingual, but I disagree with the notion that time spent learning a foreign language is time not spent learning another subject. My son was in Spanish immersion preschool from age 2 until 3 years 4 months. He can speak and understand Spanish and understands that he speaks a language that my wife and I don't. Then we moved and put him in Mandarin/English bilingual school. He's 2.5 mont…
I speak three languages fluently and a bunch of others to varying degree. I also hold a PhD in Physics. What I've noticed is that my brain manages very well if I have prolonged periods of intense "sciencing" and it also works well if I take some time to learn languages.
However, if I try to do half a day of thinking about algorithms and then half a day of language learning, I will get a headache and slight nausea! Might be that this only happens to me because of some "manufacturing error", but I've tried it repeatedly and it invariably happens.
This has lead me to form the following, highly unproven, high-level working heuristic about the brain: The brain might be just like the rest of our body. You can train to be a weightlifter, or you can train to be a marathon runner. If you do both over the course of your life, you can become good at both, but you'll probably never become the worlds best at any of the two.
If you do intense training on both without a resting period in between, you'll hurt yourself.
So that's my weird theory, for what it's worth.
That said, I think your child has a lot to gain from the broad knowledge he receives. I can tell you from experience that this is the age of interdisciplinarity, and it's a lot of fun.
I speak Spanish/French/German and to be completely honest, the majority of their usage to me is chatting up girls from those countries I happen to meet. I've never met a programmer who didn't speak English better than I spoke their language. That being said, the ability to chat up girls, and the fact that I just love languages, makes the endeavor entirely worth it to me...
>>I speak Spanish/French/German and to be completely honest, the majority of their usage to me is chatting up girls from those countries I happen to meet. I'm currently single. You just sold me on it, man.
I am from Slovakia, where you are never more than 3 hours by car from some border. Sometimes the neighbors speak similar language like Polish, sometimes you stumble into totally different like Hungarian. And not the mention the minorities in Slovakia.
Now I am living in Denmark, that is not much different So the list of languages that I yearly get in contact with is: Danish, German, Polish, Hungarian, plus languages I speak: Slovak, Czech and English.
I can see the profit of learning any one of them.
It may be a 2% premium on average, but in the US, it's probably more like 0% for the vast majority of people, and quite a sizeable increase for a very small number. So the average isn't very meaningful, when it hides such extreme variation. I know a lot of professional people here in the US who are fluent in two, three, even four languages. Only one of them actually uses a second language as a part of their job. I me…
Well, there is more to a language than just words and grammar, right? Learning a language is also a crash course in terms of cultural studies. If you happen to be in contact with other cultures this might be quite helpful to deal with colleagues and/or customers.
We're living in a world where a majority of people communicate. Cultural understanding is more important than ever and even though English seems to be the global language, everyone should be willing to learn at least one foreign languages and basic concepts of other cultures with it.
There's also a small test about this: if you happen to be in a foreign country just try to learn the local phrases for "Hello" and "Thank you". Use it when checking in at the hotel, eating in restaurants and dealing with local people - you'll be amazed what those simple words can archive. It's a sign of respect and that you made an effort to learn about their culture.
To sum it up: cultural understanding is getting more important as the whole world (regardless of national borders) communicates. Learning a language comes with learning about a different culture and reflecting your own. This is an essential thing when dealing with foreign people and everybody should have basic knowledge about it.
That's an experience that goes beyond the act of learning grammar rules and a new vocabulary. It's a complex process made of many different intellectual and cultural enhancements that help you get the world in a better perspective, and in the end gives you an unquantifiable advantage over the mono-lingual.
Apart from that, I agree that Spanish may not be the better choice in the US, since the position of superiority the non-Latin still has when it come to fluency for professional purposes. Even for the Romans it made no sense to learn the language of the inferior populations they had around them, and you'll know how it went down. Learning Saxon languages certainly had a bad ROI back then.
Furthermore, if you really had to follow this skewed line of ROI-based reasoning, where the hell is Chinese? I have the hunch that, as an US-born American, knowing the pretty obscure language of one of the biggest traders in the world might give you a pretty big advantage.
This is so silly! Thanks to my ability to speak Russian, I am able to employ a team of Russian speaking developers all over the world, and therefore build things more efficiently and for less money than I would hiring local developers. That right there created a huge amount of value not just for me but all the users of our apps, and made the whole thing possible.
Totally makes sense, but Spanish is still one of the easiest languages for learn for English speakers. So if you are planning to learn a new language, do give Spanish a try. One of the best books for learning Spanish is - Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish. French is a little more difficult, and German is way more difficult. Probably that's another reason for the difference in the returns over time?
I'm Spanish and I'm curious about what you said. I feel that English has much easier grammar than Spanish (just think of the verb conjugation in both languages!), but much more difficult phonetics (just how many vowels do you have? Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"? Half-kidding only); so I can write in English far better than I can speak. I expected that a native English speaker…
They're called schwa and wedge. This is actually a discussion I've had (not particularly fruitfully); schwa, being a reduced vowel, is sort of notionally only available in unstressed syllables. So you'd want to say a stressed syllable uses the wedge. But indeed they don't seem to be pronounced differently for many people, or at least not differently enough that there's an obvious answer. Merriam-Webster seems to use schwa even for stressed syllables like "stuff".
Totally makes sense, but Spanish is still one of the easiest languages for learn for English speakers. So if you are planning to learn a new language, do give Spanish a try. One of the best books for learning Spanish is - Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish. French is a little more difficult, and German is way more difficult. Probably that's another reason for the difference in the returns over time?
(The easiest language being English, due to exposure, extreme alienation by French a few centuries back and overall simplicity for the more casual ranges of speech.)