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Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

journals.sagepub.com

411–420 of 435 posts

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#411
post #154

As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful! I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four langua…

I also speak the same four languages plus one more. I do consider there are advantages to speaking several languages. I learned from English that you can be very precise, but also economical in exposition of complex matter. I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian"…

> I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.

Not all types of Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic, some are different enough to be considered a different language as different as Nigerian Pidgin and British English.

> I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere).

I don't find Russian to be particularly more expressive than any other bigger slavic language, like Polish or Yugoslavian. I would say that it's largely a myth propagated by Russians. It has a bunch of newer loan words from French, German and kept some of its' older synonyms, oh and a lot of archaics from Old Church Slavinic. In that sense it isn't more nuanced than English. One more con is that the convoluted sentence structure makes it an unfriendly language for non native speakers to learn. Phonetics are terrible, a bunch of my friends that had been studying Russian fairly well and still don't know how to pronounce those rarely used words.

How is Russian language used to scare people? If you live in EU and hear a lot of Russian you shouldn't be scared since a lot of them are Ukranian refugees from the East and South. There are very few Russians you should be scared of, except some angry and very drunk ones in tourist resorts, fortunately those aren't coming in droves anymore.

I speak a few different languages, knowledge of languages is overrated if you don't use them regularly. Actually I regret learning some of those, that time would have been better spent on acquiring some technical skills. I have met very few people that are truly bilingual, most of them say they are, but aren't actually equally as good in both. A lot of Ukranians are bilingual btw, but it's easier when two languages are that similar.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#412
post #59

As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful! I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four langua…

I am also originally from Moldova and speak the same 4 languages. If I had to guess, this is fairly common in Moldova -- at least in private schools. I would say there is a very mild advantage, even recognizing vaguely similar words in other languages when traveling. I find Russian to be very useful in a way that French and Romanian aren't. English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish are the most "useful" as they…

I don't agree on French not being very useful it has lost some status but you can get by with it in many places of the World and I would put Hindi and Swahili on that list too.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian.…

In russian, you can express anything using just 5 words and their derivative forms.

But not on federal TV.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's understandably hard to get actual numbers on the proportion of bilingual people. There is a semi-random 50% number thrown around, but just to take the two biggest countries, there's no way we get accurate data on people in India and China given their size and lack of reporting of the inner regions. In China in particular, no one will boast about being fluent in a non-official language in a survey. I think the sa…

It's understandably hard to get actual numbers on the proportion of bilingual people. It's not "easy" to get the data but it's a well-studied topic. As attended to by people who presumably have thought about the matter and know what they're doing. So I'll take their number (at around 60 percent for multilingualism) at face value. Seems to correlate with observations from traveling (through which one rapidly makes the…

> well-studied topic

I kinda became sceptic of "trust us, it's ok" assumptions in many fields. I trust experts, but I also trust them to give insights on how they deal with the complexity, even if we don't look at the actual numbers etc.

For instance on this specific study all the research is based on Cambridge Brain Science/Creyos, and that gives me pause on how much the results are reliable (they are still valuable, way better than nothing, but might have huge flaws as well)

In that respect I'd like to know how they deal with "the gov might deport us in reeducation camp if we're too loud about our original culture" kind of situation, and wouldn't be surprised if the answer was "we pull numbers out of a magic hat", as it has been in many very prominent studies.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#415
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought so as well, but a quick web search suggests that Noam Chomsky speaks English and Hebrew. (It's a shame that Noam Chomsky is the most famous linguist, because he's so far from the best or most relevant one.) See also eg https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/8ght5y/what_langua...

The only other candidate then would be Pinker, but I'm not sure if he's monolingual either.

The Internet suggests he speaks English and French, which seems plausible since he lived in Montreal.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#416
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Show me any German native speaker under 50 who’s not fluent in English. I know quite a few of them. Comes with growing up in Germany.

Perhaps make that 40.

Still plenty of examples.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#417
I have long been suspicious when people tell me that learning multiple languages is "good for brain development". Primarily because, through most of human history, I believe the only situation where you would learn multiple (really exactly 2) languages is when your tribe was conquered.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#418
post #388
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point about the other German speaking countries. I don't really know why that slipped my mind. But the social class thing you mentioned is kind of my point. I think it's pretty much true in all of those German speaking countries, that if you only want to interact with service workers in cities and professional, college educated, internationally minded people, you will have plenty of people to talk to and might n…

Again, Angele Merkel is a pretty convincing counterexample.

I'll keep that in mind when I'm trying to socialize with the likes of Angele Merkel

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#419
post #418
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, Angele Merkel is a pretty convincing counterexample.

I'll keep that in mind when I'm trying to socialize with the likes of Angele Merkel

Yeah, probably the chancellor and foreign minister were the only two from their generation that were educated, internationally minded and don't speak English.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#420
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are different levels of investment and different level of expectations, and I say this as someone that speaks 3 languages (Romanian, English, French) and understands a few others at a basic level (German, Italian, Spanish). Children have a very limited vocabulary and tend to make a lot of mistakes (grammar, word usage and pronunciation mistakes) and those mistakes are easily overlooked, especially by adults, si…

The CEFR is a tool to evaluate proficiency, but it's misleading if you look at it as a "ladder" with "native" at the top". Most adults aren't C2 in their own native language, despite "investing" sometimes hundreds of thousands of hours "learning" it. This video [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj5qPF_puU ] by Olly Richards sums up my feelings on the definition of fluency. Personally, I believe even as early as B2 y…

> Those tend to be cultural.

Language is culture. A large part of language learning is learning culture, expressions, idioms.

If I say"white as cheese" to a Frenchman he won't understand what I mean because the average cheese in France is not white, unlike in Romania.

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