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Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

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Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#31

Post by huhtenberg »

Nothing impresses me more in people than their fluency in more than one language.

This is the one skill that is so raw and fundamental that it beats hands down everything else a person can ever learn, be it athletics, flying a jet or mastering business management. I worked with a tech support intern who was just starting in the business. He was white, in his early 20s and seemed like of an Irish descent. Then at some point he casually mentioned he spoke Chinese. What blew me away is how instantaneously my opinion of him changed. He jumped from being a smart guy, of which there's a metric ton, to someone I started to respect. Weird stuff, but perhaps it's just me.

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#32

Post by chousuke »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #27

It would also be interesting to see how learning a non-phonetic alphabet, like Chinese or Japanese Kanji affects your brain. Learning tens of thousands of pictographs by heart is no easy feat, and I can tell you that bilingualism does not prepare you for that.

Learning kanji isn't quite so hard as people often make it out to be... It's not trivial, of course, but you're off by an order of magnitude. :P A native Japanese person once told more she sees kanji as images, so it probably is different, though.

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#33

Post by agrostis »

mootothemax wrote: post #16
jgrahamc wrote: post #12

I learnt French at school and did badly and then as an adult learnt French to a very high standard (I would call myself fluent and not bilingual). Something definitely happened to my brain as my French got really good; it was like I became two different people.

I've noticed similar as I become more and more conversant in Polish - adapting to new grammatical forms definitely makes me think in a different manner. That, and a new, huge, appreciation for anyone that learns the easy-to-start, nightmare-to-master, English as a second language.

You might find interesting Anna Wierzbicka's essay on her own experience of bilingualism (http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/pdfs/double-life....). Wierzbicka is a Polish-Australian linguist specializing in semantic universals and their cross-cultural manifestations, so it's kind of an insider's account, but charmingly personal at that.

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#34

Post by hkmurakami »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #27

It would also be interesting to see how learning a non-phonetic alphabet, like Chinese or Japanese Kanji affects your brain. Learning tens of thousands of pictographs by heart is no easy feat, and I can tell you that bilingualism does not prepare you for that.

I'm bilingual in English and Japanese (When I am in Japan, people can't tell I'm not from Japan until I tell them).

I seem to have have better than average graphic memory (I remember taking tests and picturing a page in the textbook or a page of my notes in my head, then picturing where the information was on the page, then seeing the info itself on the page).

I have no idea if this is because of learning 2k Kanji characters though.

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#35

Post by narcissus »

acabal wrote: post #4

I was raised trilingual: born in America to a Colombian dad and Lithuanian mom, so I speak English, Spanish, and Lithuanian. My Lithuanian has gotten a bit rusty since my younger days (mostly out of lack of practice--it's not a language you hear every day), but otherwise I'm fine with all three. Though I can't quite put my finger on it, I have no doubt in my mind that being raised with three languages has had a signi…

Being in Canada, we've been able to put our daughter into French immersion schooling (we only speak English at home... for now!). She's only in kindergarten and so we're finding it really hard to get her to understand the reasons why it's good for her to do this. C'est la vie :)

Although we see all of these awesome benefits in our friends who are bilingual, like I say, it's hard to get her to understand this. Instead, we just tell her how good it will be that pretty soon she will be able to talk with her cousin and our son (who are both about to start school the same way) without parents understanding what it is they're talking about. She likes that idea.

Of course, my wife and I are feverishly trying to learn it ourselves, too!

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#36

Post by rcthompson »

alpine wrote: post #22

I'm not so sure about the statement that being bilingual reduces the vocabulary. If this is true, this would discourage me from raising a kid to speak two languages... after all, wasn't George Orwell's thesis in 1984 that removing words from the language removed the ability to think? Who would want to do this to a child? Does learning Latin as a second language, or Ruby indeed, restrict your vocabulary? I doubt it.

George Orwell was talking about removing important words from the language. For example, removing any words relating to democracy and freedom from the language would prevent people from expressing what they thought they might want the government to give them. This isn't just reducing someone's vocabulary. This is targeted destruction of a language's capacity to express specific concepts. When you learn a language, you learn the important words first.

We can make an analogy to programming languages. The reduced vocabulary (if any) from learning two languages at once can be likened to the fact that when you learn two programming languages you will probably not be familiar with as many modules from each language that you learn, whereas focusing on one programming language would allow you to deeply learn all the modules available. However, you would still fully learn the syntax and most of the core features of both programming languages. In contrast, the analogy to what George Orwell was talking about would be removing features from the core language to the point that it is no longer Turing-complete, and is only capable of expressing "approved" programs. Kind of like HQ9+[1], only instead of "hello world", quine, and 99 bottles, it's "The government is great", "I love the government", and "All power to the government". The plus can still increment the accumulator, but the accumulator represents how much you love the government.

[1] http://esolangs.org/wiki/HQ9%2B

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#37

Post by alpine »

rcthompson wrote: post #36
alpine wrote: post #22

I'm not so sure about the statement that being bilingual reduces the vocabulary. If this is true, this would discourage me from raising a kid to speak two languages... after all, wasn't George Orwell's thesis in 1984 that removing words from the language removed the ability to think? Who would want to do this to a child? Does learning Latin as a second language, or Ruby indeed, restrict your vocabulary? I doubt it.

George Orwell was talking about removing important words from the language. For example, removing any words relating to democracy and freedom from the language would prevent people from expressing what they thought they might want the government to give them. This isn't just reducing someone's vocabulary. This is targeted destruction of a language's capacity to express specific concepts. When you learn a language, yo…

You are absolutely right, he was talking about words that were important to the Party. Words that facilitated criticism, dissent etc. However, my point still stands. If you consider a child with a good vocabulary in two languages versus an excellent vocabulary in one language, which supports the superior reasoning?

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#38

Post by mathattack »

mootothemax wrote: post #13

My wife (Polish) and I (British) are currently trying to have a child, and very much want to encourage our children to be bilingual. I've spoken to a couple of people here who have one Polish parent, one non-Polish parent, and all seem to agree that it's easy enough to keep up the "Mum speaks Polish, Dad speaks language X" game for the first few years. Both said, though, that the real challenge was keeping interested…

You hit it right. Kids are smart enough to know, "This language is for this person, that language for another person." The key is being strict about who speaks each language, otherwise they get confused. It is very doable, you just have to be disciplined.

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#39

Post by mathattack »

tomp wrote: post #11

I love learning languages. I chose 12 languages and made a plan to learn each of them for a month, instead of watching TV. That way, in 5 years time, I will hopefully be very happy to have made this decision now.

Don't you think it will take more than a month? Or are you that solid at learning them already? If so, I'm very impressed!

Re: Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

#40

Post by rcthompson »

alpine wrote: post #37
rcthompson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Orwell was talking about removing important words from the language. For example, removing any words relating to democracy and freedom from the language would prevent people from expressing what they thought they might want the government to give them. This isn't just reducing someone's vocabulary. This is targeted destruction of a language's capacity to express specific concepts. When you learn a language, yo…

You are absolutely right, he was talking about words that were important to the Party. Words that facilitated criticism, dissent etc. However, my point still stands. If you consider a child with a good vocabulary in two languages versus an excellent vocabulary in one language, which supports the superior reasoning?

Judging from the other comment threads here, I would guess the two languages with good vocabulary in each.
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