31–40 of 57 posts
I wonder to what extent using several programming languages has the same effect. If the hypothesis about language switching as an inhibitory mental exercise is correct, then polyglot programming should have some of the same benefits.
I've been around a lot of people who were raised bilingual in English and an oriental language and most of them complained that it was too hard. They felt that at the high school and college level it's not possible to fully develop advanced vocabulary and usage in both languages. You can risk coming across as non-native or stupid in both languages. I think a lot of this stuff about bilingualism is biased toward peopl…
Perhaps it depends on the languages. I was raised in English; French was added starting at 5. Today, at 49, I am fluently and idiomatically bilingual in English, French, and various idiomatic variations on both common to the provinces in which I've lived (I can switch from stock-standard English to various idiomatic dialects and accents, as many of you can, e.g., formal English Vs the street or town English you spoke…
I want to be careful about these sort of research. Too many times I've seen these kind of "research" is often funded by commercial entities that teach foreign languages. It's like what PG had described in his "Submarine" essay. There is a big industry to teach foreign languages to toddlers and even new born. There is quite a bit of reputable research to back up positive effects however no one seems to be doing resear…
The claim that second language acquisition is defined solely by this is, however completely false. It is a large and well-researched academic discipline and there exists plenty of research regarding negative effects. Here is a pretty decent summary, with a very compact abstract:
Bilingualism: The good, the bad, and the indifferent
http://www.yumingschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Bilin...
> The present paper summarizes research showing that bilingualism affects linguistic and cognitive performance across the lifespan. The effect on linguistic performance is generally seen as a deficit in which bilingual children control a smaller vocabulary than their monolingual peers and bilingual adults perform more poorly on rapid lexical retrieval tasks. The effect on cognitive performance is to enhance executive functioning and to protect against the decline of executive control in aging. These effects interact to produce a complex pattern regarding the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Memory tasks based primarily on verbal recall are performed more poorly by bilinguals but memory tasks based primarily on executive control are performed better by bilinguals. Speculations regarding the mechanism responsible for these effects are described.
There's also evidence that we are less susceptible to biases when given hypothetical scenarios in foreign languages. I am considering keeping my todo list in a foreign language, in case that helps me prioritize e.g. sales, where things like loss aversion might stifle it. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/18/095679761143...
It can also have a significant downside: I've tried maintaining a todo list in a language that I'm not very good at, only to realise that looking up highly specific vocabulary was such a chore that after a while, I'd unconsciously skip writing some entries that looked too complicated to translate.
Have a go, it might work out better for you, but this particular experiment was a failure as far as I'm concerned.
I'm 37, italian, always been good at speaking english (since I was 7).
In the past few years, my command of english improved so much that I started forgetting words both in italian and in english. /facepalm
I've been around a lot of people who were raised bilingual in English and an oriental language and most of them complained that it was too hard. They felt that at the high school and college level it's not possible to fully develop advanced vocabulary and usage in both languages. You can risk coming across as non-native or stupid in both languages. I think a lot of this stuff about bilingualism is biased toward peopl…
Perhaps it depends on the languages. I was raised in English; French was added starting at 5. Today, at 49, I am fluently and idiomatically bilingual in English, French, and various idiomatic variations on both common to the provinces in which I've lived (I can switch from stock-standard English to various idiomatic dialects and accents, as many of you can, e.g., formal English Vs the street or town English you spoke…
My "nights and weekends" project for the past few years has been writing iOS language learning apps. The niche that I'm looking to fill is to create enough "games/drills" to help alleviate the incredible repetition needed to learn another language. Anyway, I'm looking for suggestions so I can find my niche in a really crowed market... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?... I'd really apprecia…
Include phonetic training. Make the user distinguish between each minimal pair in the language, possibly even every single syllable in the language. This is simple, but rarely done.
Include an extensive reading component. This is a monumental task that could be broken into many apps or many short stories that are in app purchases.
Good luck! I'm really, really hoping to see something better than the very low bar hit by existing apps!
My "nights and weekends" project for the past few years has been writing iOS language learning apps. The niche that I'm looking to fill is to create enough "games/drills" to help alleviate the incredible repetition needed to learn another language. Anyway, I'm looking for suggestions so I can find my niche in a really crowed market... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?... I'd really apprecia…
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One thing is setting your logic to follow a certain way of thinking, and a completely different thing is the language you are using to think. Furthermore, programming languages are written in English. A real language cannot be written in another language. I'm not a linguist nor a programmer, but I'm trilingual, and I have scripted at a basic level. And honestly, although I see the resemblance, I don't think that prog…
I'm trilingual (Spanish,French,German) and program fluently in at least 3 languages (Python, Javascript, PHP). Things in common: You build an idea in the air and shoot it in the language. Happens to me a lot in German where I don't have a vocabulary as wide as Spanish on English that the brain will have to build a sentence maybe 30% longer but it will eventually bring out something that does the job. When I'm coding…
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I don't think it applies. Being bilingual means thinking in two different languages. I'm talking about your inner voice. As far as I know, people don't think in Python or C. I would say that a programming language is like math. You can use it as a plugin in your language, but you still need the main program which is your language.
I might not be so much about the language but about the paradigm. Certainly going from Java to C++ might not be that different but through in something like Haskell and you almost have to entirely rethink your solution.