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Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

weblog.noahburney.com

11–20 of 32 posts

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#11
post #2

From the post: "Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon." A great answer for the perennial questions "why should I learn math or science." It changes the way you think -- only instead of learning about culture you learn about patterns and nature. I got a physics degree before leaving the field. People who didn't take science ask if I still use it. How do I answer so…

Every experience changes the way you think.

The question is: how and by how much?

(could you please post links to best 2-3 studies)

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#12

"Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon." This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.

Which two? I'm near-fluent in Korean and I definitely think differently when in "Korean mode" than when I'm speaking English. But when I've studied e.g. Norwegian, it's so similar to English that there's not much of a change.

Russian and English. They are apparently quite different. Nevertheless, I don't even have separate "modes" for the two.

Edit: clarity.

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#13
post #4

"Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon." This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity what were the languages? they may be very similar.

Russian and English. They are quite different, although definitely more similar than say Spanish/Vietnamese.

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#14
This is a simplistic restatement (on a rather ugly webpage color scheme) of the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ("Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), which is surely wrong. My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German.

German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc.

I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background. But it is useful to learn another language and to live in another culture for exposure to new basic assumptions, and the same applies to learning computer language paradigms. People who program for a living, or who program just for fun, may like the books

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-...

or

http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Danie...

among other books on programming languages mentioned here on HN as examples of overviews of different approaches to high-level computer programming languages facilitating different kinds of programming problem-solving.

The case of human languages is quite a bit different. All human languages are constrained by the biology of the human brain, and human ear and human vocal tract (or hands and arms, in the case of sign languages for the deaf), and all human languages, without exception and even if they are constructed languages, have ambiguities and illogical features inconsistent with other features of the language. Many of the faults of Esperanto are very well documented,

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

and the Lojban promoters I have met online since 1994 have repeatedly demonstrated lack of logical capacity (at least in our common language of English) in a manner that puts me off from learning Lojban.

Learning a new cultural perspective by living in a new culture and learning the predominant language there is a very good idea, and highly educational. But the incidental features of one language as contrasted with another have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think, or how they can think.

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#16
Learning anything changes the way you think: chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc. I'd place a language somewhere between a science and something like astrology as far as usefulness goes.

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#17
post #10

I've often wondered what it would be like to think in a rational language (i.e. one free of contradictions). I suspect that logic and reasoning would improve as a side effect.

How one can think in a language? Isn't language a product of thinking?

This question is a bit funny, given that it's posted on a site with frequent arguing over which programming language is better for certain purposes. You can think in French just like you think in C++ or Python, but I think that what is different about thinking in two natural languages is that they are more alike each other than programming languages are.

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which two? I'm near-fluent in Korean and I definitely think differently when in "Korean mode" than when I'm speaking English. But when I've studied e.g. Norwegian, it's so similar to English that there's not much of a change.

Russian and English. They are apparently quite different. Nevertheless, I don't even have separate "modes" for the two. Edit: clarity.

It's worth noting that they are from the same linguistic family. Having studied Latin, to me Russian seemed pretty familiar conceptually once I got past the whole cyrillic thing. I am admittedly nowhere near fluent, and I realize the experience would be different for someone without previous 2nd-language exposure.

About the modes, did you by chance have Russian exposure during childhood (guessing based on your id)... that might account for some degree of integration even if you only became fluent later.

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#19

This is a simplistic restatement (on a rather ugly webpage color scheme) of the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ("Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), which is surely wrong. My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of…

I'm impressed by your vast experience with different languages! I'm also curious to learn why one language contrasted with another language have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think. The authors post seem to prove the opposite:

>An Australian Aboriginal tribe, The Guugu Yimithirr, famously have no words for left, right, in front of or behind. They use north, east, west, and south instead. And as a result: they develop an internal compass—always knowing which way is north, even if you blindfold them and spin them around.

I for sure don't know the direction after being spun blindfolded :)

(edit: grammar)

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

#20

This is a simplistic restatement (on a rather ugly webpage color scheme) of the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ("Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), which is surely wrong. My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of…

I'm impressed by your vast experience with different languages! I'm also curious to learn why one language contrasted with another language have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think. The authors post seem to prove the opposite: >An Australian Aboriginal tribe, The Guugu Yimithirr, famously have no words for left, right, in front of or behind. They use north, east, west, and south instead.…

It may be possible that they developed their internal compass due to their nomadic lifestyle and the use of absolute directions within language resulted from that (rather than vice versa). I have no idea if this is the case.
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