I use my third language, Spanish, every day, and my second, English, for work. On top of that, my partner is a native Portuguese speaker, so I'm passively soaking up a fourth. (I usually reply to her in Spanish, but we watch everything in Portuguese—though this month it's been all Italian, just for fun).
To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English. I think it's because even though I moved to Spain over seven years ago, I never fully immersed myself in the culture. I'm pretty sure I haven't read a single book in Spanish.
I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
Anyway, I can attest that grappling with a language you haven't quite mastered is a daily mini-puzzle that definitely keeps the brain working a bit harder than it otherwise would.
On a side note, I love that LLMs can handle so many languages now. After 17 years of living abroad, I still feel most at ease speaking my native language, Russian, even though my vocabulary is a bit lacking these days for more complex topics. It makes me completely understand why people prefer to receive medical care in their native tongue.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
Isn't that a thing everyone does? I don't have as many languages as you, but when I finally got to the point where I could reliably do what you're describing in Japanese, I felt like I had actually achieved a baseline level of fluency for the first time. The flywheel became self-perpetuating vs. my French, where every sentence is a struggle.
Not asking to be argumentative, btw -- just wondering what's on the other side.
There's another level after fluency (C1), which is near-native fluency (C2). At the level of such mastery you don't feel the need to simplify just to be understood, your utterances now define the language itself as you've achieved the level of the crowd whom the language belongs to in the first place.
P.S. I've typed this out in English after having achieved such unlock.
I would describe it as: natural human languages with native speakers eventually develop a grammatical way to complete the vast majority of incomplete thoughts that speakers tend to have.
So, if you know the entire language, then you can complete your thought. But if you only know the common parts of the language then you may need to start over with a different sentence structure in order to express your thought.
Maybe that maps to C1 vs C2? At C1 you can express your thoughts with occasional backtracking, but at C2 you almost never need to backtrack?
With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
Yeah. That's a level beyond -- You're "fluent" enough that you can break the rules -- but that's partially not about language, but about being perceived to be native. Changing the cultural presumption, so to speak, so that people give you the benefit of the doubt when you're saying something non-standard. I think anyone who attempts humor in a foreign language runs into this wall, hard.
The C1/C2 divide does seem to mix up that concept and the idea of "looking for the right word". I sort of understand what it's getting at, but it's unclear.
I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
> I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly. Now you have two problems:
1. You need to retroactively rephrase your whole sentence to present the same information in a different style, because that's the way this language does it. This works best if you can change the past.
2. You probably don't know the correct thing to say, or you wouldn't have made that mistake to begin with.
> When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly.
Yeah, I get that. Then later, you get to a point where you're largely not translating from your native language at all (i.e. "thinking in X"), and you just can't remember the word in the adopted language, so you need to re-route. Worst case, that ends up kicking you back up to your native language, and you're back to translation, which is like shifting into 1st gear on the highway.
I think my point is (to the extent that I have one) that being able to route around the issue in the second language is itself a fundamental form of fluency. That, plus being able to reliably receive definitions of words spoken in the new language are like the lambda calculus of speech. You can forget words all day long (and, believe me, many older people do!) but still be "fluent" if you never have to fall back to your old language as a crutch.
Anyway, I'm not trying to disagree with the broad notion -- there's clearly a point at which you're grasping around less like a foreign-language person, and more like a native person.
I do that a lot in English because English is so deep and there's a perfect word for everything. Recently I was ruminating on just how many ways there are to say "walk slowly" in English: saunter, meander, stroll, amble, shuffle and I think there were others.
Meanwhile in Chinese earlier I forgot how to say "shallow" so settled for "not deep"
When you spend some time transcribing live, impromptu speech, you'll notice that it often doesn't follow the rules of written grammar; speakers frequently abandon sentences midway through.
For example, in the linked clip[^1], the speaker says:
"uh the European Union uh that's not a US creation that's a you guys creation so don't ex..[abandoned word] the strength of the west [abandoned sentence] and the west is a really I don't know what"
For a moment, she struggles to express herself. Yet, there's a qualitative difference between not knowing what to say because a thought is not fully formed, and knowing what you want to say but realizing you've forgotten the specific word you need. For instance, you might be about to say "cherry," only to find you've forgotten the word and instead say something more general, like "forest fruit (fruta de bosque)," which is still correct but less precise.
That's sub A1 level (per European language classification).
Tho levels are often described and measured by what you are capable of, and not by what you do, or what you like to do. This includes: being able to understand others, and being able to create correct and appropriate text.
> With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
There are several concepts/situations here weaved together, but the two main are:
- artistic intent, playfulness
- inability to speak correctly
The second one is low level, and artistic intent is orthogonal to your level, and transfers from your native language.
(edit: BTW these two are closely related, since both are mostly just using patterns in places where they are not commonly used, and breaking them would be preferred)
It’s just a framework for evaluating how people learning languages stand.
Most native speakers would be hard pressed to be certified as C2 in their own language. I think a lot would fail C1 because they don’t know/use some of their language quirks which would be evaluated. I know for a fact that I can’t properly use some modes and tenses in my native language without a rule book.
Is the 'beyond C2' defined? C2 is the highest possible grade in the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. How would one ascertain that someone is beyond C2, given the lack of generally accepted criteria?
It's just a certification level that is almost meaningless compared to the natural Version of the language. And with some native speakers you honestly wonder why C2 requirements are so sophisticated.
yeesh, "online English." L337 h4xors with uber skillz?
"achieving unlock" is grammatically incorrect (im a native English speaker), if its idiomatic then of course that's different, but I wouldn't put that down as being "fluent," id put it down to be exposed to those specific idioms. It's not just about using the verb as a noun; where is the indefinite article?
If the gp was making a "I can has cheeseburgers?" style joke, then it went over my head, but it clearly is not grammatically correct English just because its used online.
It's incorrect English. If its idiomatic then its idiomatic. But its not a marker of fluency; its a marker of being exposed to a culture which uses those idioms.
It's much more common when you're multilingual, because you think in combination of all the languages you know and you only realize you're missing the specific word when you get to them trying to express the thoughts on the fly.
Sometimes it's not because you're not fluent - it's simply because the concept isn't expressible in the target language with that particular sentence structure you started with.
Typical example is English "I like him" vs Russian "on mne nravitsya" (+- he for me is desirable). If you start saying "I" you're already wrong.
It even happens within one language in highly inflected languages - because you wanted to say one thing, then changed the word to a better - but the sentence structure doesn't work with that new word, so you have to go back mid-sentence or make a grammatical mistake).
Often, looking for word mid-sentence generally is a manifestation of people not thinking in the language they are speaking which for me is the threshold at which you can be considered fluent.
Fluency is a very high level to reach. Most people are merely conversational in the foreign languages they speak and that’s more than enough for most interactions.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
This happens to me even when I speak my native language(s). Once you become multilingual, this is a fact of life.
So much this! During my 20s, English took over a significant chunk of communication. Years later, I mess up noun genders in my native language all the time and developed a strong distaste for formal forms of you/nouns - so much so, that I still dislike these in Greek that I'm currently learning. Although, sometimes it is a fun challenge when you use the wrong gender and scramble to find a matching noun/verb, making my speech kinda weird.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
That happens to me more with my bative language (german) than secondary (english) nowadays.
> To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English
I feel the same, albeit on a much lower level. Somehow Spanish just feels strange to me. For instance, a subject in Spanish often gets placed after the verb in a sentence, so I constantly have to figure out where the subject is: is it before the verb? after the verb? Or there's no subject and the conjugation of the verb implies the subject? I guess it's just a matter of time to get familiar with the verbs and it takes time. Also, listening comprehension is a huge problem for me. Even discerning words from conversations is very challenging. When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. However, I can read simple novels like El Alquimista now, yet I could only understand what was said in Extra at best with a super focus. In contrast, listening to Japanese is much easier for some reason, even though my level of Japanese is way below N5 (equivalent to Spanish's A1).
> When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes.
Friends does some interesting linguistic things. One of my favorite examples:
You told me to go out and be a caterer, so I went! I be'd!
Monica isn't making a mistake there. But I would be very surprised if someone who was just learning the language understood that joke.
Most likely not. That said, I could at least understand enough to enjoy the show. Not sure why understanding Spanish conversation has been so much harder.
German is my third language and this has been exactly my experience - I find it more challenging than English, my second language. I feel like my brain is at 100% when I want to speak German.
however, my kids are soaking up languages like a sponge. we speak Hungarian at home, English and Hungarian with our friends, and they speak both Swiss German and German at school, so they are already trilingual.
I know several families where the parents brings their own language, they speak English as a common language at home and the kids learn German/Swiss German at school, so that makes them... quadlingial?
The phonetic similarity between Russian and Spanish is a huge relief. As a Russian speaker, pronouncing English has always felt like a workout for my mouth; the sounds are completely alien. Spanish, on the other hand, is effortless. It just flows, since I'm using the same phonetic toolkit I grew up with.
Yeah, I have the opposite problem, being a native English speaker living in Portugal - to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do - and they won’t understand a bloody word. It isn’t just the phonemes, it’s the cadence - syllabic vs rhythmic stress. I’ll be like “um galão” and they’ll be like “galão?”, “sim, um galão”, “um… que? Galão?”, “sim,
galão”, “ahhh, um galão!” and I just can’t seem to be understood.
My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am.
German, I have no such problem despite being far weaker at the language imo.
> to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do
I noticed a similar thing listening to many English people trying to speak Spanish. I could hear that the native English speaker pronounced the vowel sounds of a Spanish word incorrectly - but that the English speaker could not tell. Very common if Spanish word learnt from reading and trying to pronounce it as English might. I also hear a similar reading mistake from other countries trying to speak English.
English can have extreme vowel variation - e.g. jokes based on bending vowel sounds to change word meaning. Spanish has a few vowel sounds and they seem very similar in different countries. English accents often change vowel sounds dramatically - so English speakers are not as aware of the importance of speaking vowels correctly. As a New Zealander, our vowel sounds trip up other English speakers.
I'm not sure how we learn to fix it when our hearing or sound formation is incorrect. Someone to incessantly correct one's mistakes does help but that level of patience is hard to find.
I know that I still can't hear or say nasal sounds correctly in other languages.
I think the issue here is that it's hard work for a native English speaker to keep track of the correctness of every single vowel sound because in English so many are elided or become "uh".
Listen carefully to different English accents, or even better try and mimic them.
There's a massive variety of vowel sounds in English: Sydney, Irish, Boston, Indian, etcetera.
English speakers can often hear the differences, and many people can produce the different vowels when mimicking the accents (country, city, person, foreigner).
I did not deny the fact that there is a greater variety of vowel sounds available in English. I merely doubt its explanatory power for the phenomenon you describe. But perhaps I am confused about exactly what that phenomenon is.
Actors and singers do it by hiring a voice coach - someone who doesn't just know the sounds, but can explain how to adjust your mouth muscles to make them correctly.
Most classes and individual teachers won't do that. They'll either think "Eh, good enough for a foreigner" and shrug, or they'll say "That's wrong" and repeat the correct sound at you, which won't fix the problem.
Sometimes changes happen in one language. There is a huge difference between the Received Pronunciation (RP) version of British English that was the standard up to around the early 90s, and the Estuary English that became mainstream after that.
European Portuguese sounds very Slavic; I'm sure Russians have a blast with it. English is a phonetically isolated language, largely due to the Great Vowel Shift. Unlike English, most languages have a closer linguistic relative. This makes English challenging for most people to learn, and it also makes it difficult for native English speakers to learn a foreign language without a heavy accent.
I've always been curious about how the non-English world feels about hearing their language spoken with a strong "English" accent. Dont they just get on with it? As a native English speaker I'm totally unfazed by strongly accented English: Indian accents, Chinese accents, Italian etc. For example Italians rarely pronounce the H in house (presumably because H is silent in Italian). Even twists like unusual word stress patterns or prnounciations are easily figured out on the fly.
I know that Parisians are supposed to be one exception: infamously snooty about visitors speaking French absolutely perfectly. But fpr everyone else, it's 2025 and we live in a world of mass tourism and mass migration. Are the non-English still fazed by English accents and insistent on audible correctness?
Growing up in the US I was similarly comfortable with accents. Having lived ~10 years in China/Taiwan I struggle now. For instance I often can't understand Australians at all. It's completely incomprehensible. British English is a bit of a strain sometimes
Similarly Chinese in China have little exposure to non-native speakers so I often find people can't understand me. While in Taiwan you can use the wrong tones and grammar and people don't have any issues figuring it out
But for instance a lot of local people really struggle with Indian English bc it's seldom used in the media landscape, while for me it sounds natural bc a lot of my colleagues speak it
I don't know that it's necessarily about snootiness. You learn to understand thick accents through exposure, and many countries don't have such a high amount of non native speakers running around as English speaking ones do.
I have a friend who struggled to understand thick Latin American accents. I understand a lot of accents by now well enough, but I somewhat recently spoke to a Nigerian person for the first time in my life and it was a struggle.
I'm not even getting into languages that have a high degree of tonality or homophony going on. That's an entire extra layer of difficulty when your counterparty in the conversation is not fluent.
I am a German native speaker fluent in English and living in Spain for a few years with not much opportunity of learning the language.
I just finished A2 in community college. Many of my classmates were native English speakers or Russians.
Most of them are elderly and Spanish is their first foreign language.
My Spanish is not good enough yet to judge pronunciation, but my impression is, that the russian accent is much more pronounced when beginners speak German or English than in Spanish.
The older Brits and Irish that learned no other foreign language before have a very hard time even realising their English accent.
I just left London, my first time going and as a native English speaker I struggled more with understanding perfect English with a British accent than I ever do with someone who speaks perfect or imperfect English with a heavy accent where English is a second language.
And when I first started working with Indians that were still in India, I had to adjust my speech and slow down a lot because they struggled with my southern accent.
Despite having worked 10x harder at it than I did Portuguese or Spanish. When speaking those two languages, it’s close enough to a correct accent that people often will ask if my family is Latino or Portuguese once they hear that im American or hear my English. This hasn’t happened 5 times but so many, I just assume it will happen now.
However my experience has been different in French, even if it’s obvious I’ve worked very hard at French (C1 now), my French friends are not begging to speak to me in French unless they have limited English skills… just because my pronunciation/cadence/intonation isn’t quite right or even remotely ok, despite having much more immersion in French than those other two languages. French also feels like I’m singing at a concert rather that just conversing.
Just sometimes your culture/brain/ linguistic mix result in happy or unhappy accidents.
Edit I’m sure someone will bring up cultural differences but I have several multilingual friends .. they all say my Spanish is beautiful and nearly to a person criticize my French (in a helpful friendly manner), this is true if they’re Latin American or French. Just seriously it’s a thing, brains are weird.
What is "good for one's brain" (apart from proper nutrition and absence of concussions) is a strong education and healthy lifelong social interactions. Human language is essential for these interactions. Having multiple human languages opens more books, interactions, and cultures.
The opposite is to remain closed. This is a dangerous state of mind and culture.
From TFA:
all these studies take for granted the uncontroversial mental superpower that you get from language study: being able to talk to people you could not have otherwise.
Not just to talk to people, but to unlock an understanding of their culture and perspectives.
Talking to more people in more contexts is a practical affordance: having more tools in the shop means being able to handle new and different types of problems effectively. People solve problems working together with people.
Having the cognitive adaptability to use new and different tools is certainly a valuable quality. We can nurture it as a learning objective, but it may may not be as universalisable as we have hoped. That said, the cost of not trying to educate people is to fail even worse.
I don't think I agree that social interactions are necessary to keep one sharp. In fact excessive social interactions with people that aren't all that sharp might dull one a bit.
Reading and thinking and studying can be done alone just fine.
Now as far as effectiveness in the real world, yes, social interactions and fluency is needed, but I believe this to be different from being "sharp". It probably helps keep you looking sharp though.
As someone content with being by myself, I get what you're saying but overall I don't agree. COVID was a good experiment and it busted up a lot of people.
Even excepting COVID, in the elderly the difference with social isolation can be night and day. I have witnessed firsthand one's cognitive deterioration reversed when the person moved into an assisted living community and gained a social life, and then when COVID hit and everyone was locked down the decay set in again
> What is "good for one's brain" (apart from proper nutrition and absence of concussions) is a strong education and healthy lifelong social interactions
Sure, but I think this is more about the fact that what you don't use, you lose. Learning languages is hard, so even learning old Greek keeps you brain sharp as long as you enjoy it to some extent.
Gym for the brain is good, what you do with it can be better, but gym is still good.
These studies always miss the obvious cultural point to me, [1] which is that knowing more than one language usually means you deeply understand more than one culture. This by default makes one a bit more capable of nuance, seeing other perspectives, etc. Languages are not just interchangeable collections of words, but are whole worldviews. Language in this sense is a kind of knowledge and not a different brain state, akin to reading books about history to understand a conflict better.
1. Maybe that’s not their fault, as they are ostensibly interested only in the biology. But it still seems like a major hole when discussing the benefits of being bilingual.
100%. Just knowing how other countries value different things, work and succeed in different ways, and what concepts they find important enough to give words to when we don't - all of this has been super interesting.
It's probably why I was able to get proficient in Japanese but more Anglosphere-adjacent languages felt boring.
In terms of the knowledge sense I mean, I think it is logical that the more distant the worldviews of the languages, the greater the effect. Even more so if they both have a large media / cultural sphere.
I think so, yes. My daughter speaks English and German fluently and I can see she has deep insights into these cultures. (She also speaks 2 other languages)
She once told me that she likes to read conversational books like “Greg’s Tagebuch” in German while “Harry Potter” type books in English.
Could it also be because translations are never as good as the originals? One thing that comes to mind is translated songs, they usually sound off and forced to my ear. On the other hand I never read the same material in two languages so it's hard to really have an opinion but I did CS in another language than English and can say very confidently say that it was a huge pain to discuss with professors CS terms that were force translated into my native tongue, it was unnecessary and even though it's been many years since I graduated I still have those terms imprinted into my mind.
I was born in a trilingual home and couldn't agree more.
(I then added English)
Languages are (metaphorically) the key to a culture which can configure your thinking. Some words that are obscure or technical in one language are used more commonly in others. A little example is that in Spain it's common to use the jugular vein for a number of idioms. I know for a fact most French speakers have never heard of it and I think it's also not that common for English speakers.
n=1 data point here, but most of my free time these days is spent learning Finnish, a notoriously difficult language for English monolinguals. (I haven't always been in the monolingual camp, but a decade away from Latin has 99% put me back there.)
For the most part, I don't feel like it has made me any sharper. Had I taken the ~2000 hours I'm in the hole for so far and spent them on going to the gym and sleeping more I'm nearly certain that would have had a much larger effect on my day to day mental acuity. Had I spent it on my career I'd probably be substantially richer. I probably have another ~2000 to go before I reach a level where I'm happy plateauing.
In general I think it's very hard to justify learning a foreign language when subjected to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis. I persist mostly because I just really, really, really want to reach true proficiency, not the fake proficiency that gets you an A in Spanish or Latin class, as I outlined in [1]. If you don't have a similar drive your time and energy is probably better spent elsewhere.
In general I think it's very hard to justify learning a foreign language when subjected to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis.
This is true for most people. I'd say the exception is if you're learning a language that's native to the place where you live. This reduces the effort required to get conversation practice AND makes it more fun. So rather than choosing between Netflix and language study, you're choosing between Netflix and chatting with people in a bar.
Well, Finnish is native to the place I live, because I also live in Finland. My experience even here suggests that even this exception is only true for maybe 10-15% of immigrants, which is already a small pool of people.
Part of this, of course, is that we're now talking very different goals with different levels of commitment required. You can pick up enough of any language to be fun at a bar in a single digit precentage of the time it takes to become professionally fluent with it. The opportunity cost really is at least one, and maybe two, orders of magnitude lower here, depending on how much "My practice needs to be fun" matters to you.
Empirically, from both personal experience and personal observation: Most people who move countries, if they're not already moving as working class professionals with a preexisting command of the native language, just find it much easier to settle into enclaves of similar immigrants and try to interact with the broader society with help from that community. This was as true in the US as it is in Finland, and I've known a lot of immigrants from a lot of different backgrounds throughout my life. Like seeks like everywhere alike.
My attempt at being the opposite of this person puts me at odds with most other immigrants I have known. I'm actually the only person I've met here so far who has actually read a complete, non-selkosuomi book in Finnish without being a native or heritage speaker, for example. "Can read an ordinary book written for adults" is not exactly a high bar to pass in absolute terms for any language, but it's higher than what the vast majority of people will ever do in one they didn't grow up with.
> it's [...] hard to justify learning a foreign language [...] to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis.
A "normal" existence in a populous, monolingual country may not involve other languages... But human language is remarkably various in the world. Even on HN, knowing a set of non-natural semantics (e.g. coding) is a common profession.
Most employers don't pay handsomely for multilingualism, but they do pay software workers well.
I... don't really understand what this comment means.
I don't see why the situation would be any different if your airdropped, say, a 25 year old person who grew up in eg quadrilingual Luxembourg into eg extremely monolingual Yakutsk, and act like their childhood means they can suddenly master the native tongue there without hundreds to thousands of hours of unpaid effort.
They would probably do a lot better spending that time, well, getting out of Yakutsk. Assuming no one is holding them there at gunpoint.
To focus on the linguistic challenge of living in Yakutsk, we can agree that a) learning a new language takes time, and b) the Luxembourgish languages might be some help (but not much) for learning Turkic and Russian.
> act like their childhood means they can suddenly master the native tongue
But there are many cases where those languages would be an advantage. Say, in learning Spanish and English.
People can and do learn languages. Some people are better at it than others. But people emigrate (or escape, as you say) and adapt.
Programming languages are a (simplified) subset of human languages. Programmers learn a marketable skill. (I use about five programming languages at work.) Employers will pay people well for programming -- better than I have seen people paid for speaking several human languages.
The way that people complain about programming languages (simplified as they are!) is somewhat related to broader struggles with learning human languages.
Person A: "Learning X is a poor use of time for almost everyone. Here are some numbers."
Person B: "And yet some people learn X! And X is superficially similar to Y, which tons of people do with much less time investment for much more money! Checkmate!"
I have no idea what your actual argument here is. This follow up isn't doing any favors.
---
My experience is that you reach "fluency" in your first programming language in about an order of magnitude less time than you can any human language. Python took me about a summer of teenage study at about 2 hours a day to feel comfortable with. Most further programming languages took an order of magnitude time less than that.
Human languages by contrast demand no less from the vast majority of people than 1000 hours of practice in the easiest cases for one to feel comfortable with them. There is a reason you can major in Swedish at Harvard but not Python. It is the same reason you can graduate having majored in Swedish at Harvard without actually being fluent in Swedish. It's the same reason. 1000 hours is a long time, and that is as easy as it gets.
You are drawing a strange and false equivalence between these two things, and I'm just not really sure what your point is. If your point is "these are secretly the same activity", my strongest response is "quantity has a quality all its own".
> Age plays a role too. Studies suggest that the effects of languages on the brain are stronger for young children and the old than they are for young adults. Bilingual tots seem to outperform in cognitive development in the early years, but their monolingual classmates may catch up with them later. One meta-analysis on the topic found that 25 studies of 45 found a bilingual advantage in children younger than six, while only 17 found them in children aged 6-12.
That's gonna be a let down to most people who read the title and make assumptions.
I wonder how is this cognitive development progress was measured, and I question the results of whichever study this refers to.
I acknowledge that "bilingual tots seem to outperform in cognitive development in the early years" seems both intuitive and logical.
This is a string of words that we'd expect to find together. We'd almost be offended if they weren't. Because both bilingualism and learning more things are better.
My concern over the reference to this research is that early cognitive development milestones are largely language acquisition milestones, and it has long been known that language acquisition is somewhat behind in bilingual tots. Rather than accelerated.
Generally, it is assumed that bilingual child development metrics will later catch up to those of their peer group.
Which is the inverse of "their monolingual classmates may catch up with them later".
Bilingual children aren't actually cognitively delayed, if only marginally on the face of their assessments, but rather they tend toward having a temporary delay in language acquisition due to to their bilingual environment. With any cognitive development disadvantage that this could theoretically cause essentially being non-risk.
However, I've never seen anything that indicates performant development due to bilingualism. Just the opposite, to a statistically relevant degree. Even if only marginally behind.
This is textbook information and part of the body of knowledge of language acquisition. It's not a vanguard research topic.
Could be explained by education systems. If all these children go through the same kind of schools, then the cognitive development may be limited there, allowing the monolingual kids to catch up, while wasting the potential of the bilingual ones.
That comparison is meaningless without doing a proper meta-analysis. What is the sample size of these studies? What are the effect sizes? That's more important than the number of studies that go in each direction.
I don’t know but my limited personal experience has been totally different. Not only learn my children their primary languages faster, they also learn other languages more quickly. I don’t know if that affects their IQ but I don’t see math or science as a much different language.
Of course, speaking a language is only part of the bigger puzzle: staying curious and immersing yourself in the cultures and thoughts of people from diverse backgrounds is IMO even more important and beneficial. While translation is excellent and very convenient today due to the globalization, I’d say it's very hard to understand the people of a particular culture if you don’t understand what they natively and rawly say on various social media platforms. Mainstream media and news paper don’t necessarily reflect these sentiments and predispositions. In fact, they may even hide these “small voices” very well. So, there are clear benefits to using many languages.
I have a different take. I am an immigrant. I speak 3 regional languages fluently and can partly speak German. While I always had English exposure since the age of 5 or 6, my parents spoke different language.
Everyone in my neighborhood who was not economically okay spoke different language than English.
I think it hurts more than helps when you are polylingual if you decide to spend majority of time in country like United States.
I have collected a lot of data around this. Time and time again, I can prove with data, that native english langauge speakers outperform anyone else. Whether it is college admissions, admissions to incubators like Y Combinator, job opportunities, sports opportunities, housing opportunities and more. If language is the sole factor to be considered, then polylinguals do not win.
When you speak a foreign language than English, you accent is bound to be messed up. Look at Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans or other people who speak dual langauge. There is always something off about their accent. This leads to acceptance and at time getting asked "are you american" or "were you born here?"
I am not saying dont learn foreign language. But, language is one aspect of being polylingual. You just dont speak words. Words have meaning and they are deeply ingrained in cultures.
If you know long term where you want to be, learn and speak and immerse yourself in the culture. Otherwise you are just creating more noise for social media points and making it harder for yourself to be a master of one language.
> When you speak a foreign language than English, you accent is bound to be messed up. Look at Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans or other people who speak dual langauge.
That's not true, in this case it is simply the accent they learn because everyone around them has this accent.
But learning different languages when young doesn't mean one develops a foreign accent. I know Flemish people of Vietnamese origins who speak correct Vietnamese as well as Flemish with a perfectly good farmer accent from West Flanders. And their kids speak native French with a neutral (French) accent in addition to native Flemish, because the French speakers in their family are French and not Belgian.
When learning languages young, accents don't creep from one language to the other, that happens when one learns a language later on.
As far as my anecdotal experiences go, it is true. Bilinguals do carry bilingual accents even in native languages. You notice it from first few seconds listening. In my first language it sounds as if the person is playing in 4-note chords instead of 3-note.
It probably only matter as an item in the list of falsehood about speech recognition, definitely not something that deserve to be described as "messed up", but it's also not not true.
Yes, and the ones who can master pronunciation are the ones who realize that languages are just codified ways of expressing human sound. Then you can start to see them all as phonetic expressions, instead of as translations.
Yes, I am an accent coach and many immigrants do not accept this fact. They resist and resist out of stubbornness or laziness. I try to explain to them that people will react better if they can speak the native language like the natives to but to no avail. It's not even a matter of "correctness." It's great that you speak Kenyan/Punjabi/Ukrainian English! But we don't speak that here!
That said, if you have a foreign accent people expect a certain (low to average) level of fluency and can get quite confused if you use native idioms or slangs, which they only expect from native speakers with a native accent. There’s no way to pull off an “innit” unless you speak like a native Brit.
Vocab is easy to learn, losing one’s native accent is exponentially harder the older you learn a language, and as you probably know only through hard work with an accent coach you can eliminate that uncanny valley between fluent second-language speaker and native.
Also, not everyone wants to invest in a coach unless they really have to. You can learn a language on your own, not everybody has time, money and need to hire an accent coach.
It's work most people don't need to do unless they're an actor or they really need to pass for a native speaker. So maybe not hard, but often unnecessary and costs $$$.
>When you speak a foreign language than English, you accent is bound to be messed up. Look at Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans or other people who speak dual langauge. There is always something off about their accent.
in the case of Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans, I've seen that it's not about the accent, but about the vocalization: there are some sounds that are exclusive to English that simply don't exist in Indian languages. As an example: the "f" or "v" sound - made by lightly touching your bottom lip to your upper teeth and then blowing air through (unvocalized for "f" and vocalized for "v").
Similarly for "th" - you stick your tongue out between your teeth and the sound of the air flowing through that restriction is what defines the "th" (vocalized or unvocalized). I guarantee that if you start making these sounds in these ways, you will be seen as closer to a native speaker of English.
I can't speak about the American experience but as someone English I would say don't worry about erasing your accent.
If an accent is too strong, yes it can be a hinderance but English is a very flexible language and native speakers are very quick to adapt to variations because we grow up with large regional variations. We expect it.
In most cases having some varience in accent is charming.
I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world in my personal experience I may occationally ask you to repeat something but I'll lock in soon enough.
We used to have a TV show in the UK called "Rab C. Nesbitt"[1] about a guy from Glasgow with a seemingly impenitrable accent. Here's the thing though, you'd watch the first 5 minutes and not understand a word ...and then sunddenly you get it. If it works for him it will work for you.
With time being limited, I wonder if using a second language, playing an instrument, solving puzzles, physical activity, or some other activity is "better" brain stimulus.
My father was 76 and started to forget things, basic things like what he did yesterday, who we met the week before (family from overseas who we haven’t seen in years)…
This is when I realised it was getting serious. But he’s a Norwegian born in the 40s, so talking about his mental health and opening up to him is near impossible.
I did call him out on these massive lapses in memory, but jokingly though.
However, without formally addressing anything, he started out of no where and never, ever before doing it my entire life: sudoku.
1-2 hours a day, then more, all the time.
He’s now in his mid 80s and as sharp as ever.
I know he went and saw a GP, and they prescribed sodoku.
But the effectiveness of it, taken seriously, is absolutely incredible.
I forgot who said it but they had the theory that the way to stay sharp is to take on new mental tasks that create new though patterns.
You know when you are learning something and you get to that point where it is kind of a strain. That feeling that is kind of tense, exhausting but intriguing, all because you are about to get that thing. It is the transition from something being purely cognitive and moving into behavior intuition, like playing an instrument.
That is the thing that, in part, is keeping you sharp.
I say in part because don't forget your physical health, diet and social health. They all contribute.
I started learning Japanese after age 30 (currently around CEFR B1; JLPT N2), but I did it by moving to Japan. I don't know if the "language study", per se, provided the benefit, but the act of moving there so radically transformed my daily life that it was like being 20 years younger.
David Sedaris did a long interview on learning French (he also became proficient late in life) where he said something like: when you first start learning a language, everything is new and interesting. Eventually you become fluent, you get into a pattern, and 'living in a foreign country' is just 'living'. (heavily paraphrased -- I'll try to find the original).
Anyway, my point is that I think "learning a language" is probably as good as anything else when it comes to "brain stimulation", but in my opinion, the real value comes from being completely immersed in a new culture and kicked forcefully out of any sense of routine.
I've lived in Japan for a while and got N1 a decade ago
and I still love using it every day and don't take it for granted. It's kind of like flying on a plane. It always seems amazing to me, that I am doing this. I started as 28 and always thought it would be impossible.
It is funny that at the start literally everyone is interesting, even the most boring conversations. I was more of a blank slate and more likeable too. That's gone away, but the things I enjoy are more enjoyable in a deeper way, and the scope of things I can do is larger. Goes both ways imo.
> It is funny that at the start literally everyone is interesting, even the most boring conversations. I was more of a blank slate and more likeable too.
Yes! I've found the same thing.
> That's gone away
Also noticing this -- I knew that it would happen, but was surprised that it didn't take very much fluency before the natural human tendency to judge people re-appeared.
> ...but the things I enjoy are more enjoyable in a deeper way, and the scope of things I can do is larger. Goes both ways imo.
That's good to hear. I'm about to come back for another extended round, so I worry about the other stuff fading over time.
For things like this I don't think you can view it as a destination, but rather a journey.
Your mind, body, and any skill will deteriorate over time if not regularly trained, so it must become a part of your life.
And because of this, the answer is easy - do what is permanently and realistically sustainable for yourself. It doesn't matter what's best when you're only going to really keep with things that are personally satisfying for yourself.
Would any effect be limited once you achieve mastery (or close to it)? After 25 years playing my instrument when I play it my brain just switches off. No thinking at all. Doesn't matter whether I'm looking at sheet music playing something new, improvising, or playing something I know well. It's all easy. I imagine it's similar with a second language if you fully immerse yourself in it for a long time.
When did this transition happen? I have tried to play but found that even after four or five years it was difficult, required a lot of concentration, and gave me little pleasure.
The only physical skill I have that might be comparable is typing, but (as a programmer) even after typing for over 40 years, while I can type without "thinking" about where the keys are, I can usually type only three or four words without needing to make a correction.
Probably not until the 12 year mark. Maybe a little before that. I would say that it was a combination of time + actively learning certain skills. There were periods where I rested on my laurels for a few years so I probably could have reduced the time by a few years (if that was the aim). I would say 7 years is around where it got really enjoyable though and I knew enough that it wasn't too much effort to learn new songs and skills.
Worth mentioning I started when I was a kid. Learning something when you're young is so much easier due to the available time and the ability to obsess (this was also pre-internet mostly). When I try learning new instruments these days it takes much longer because I have responsibilities.
I try to play guitar. For simple songs, I can play them without thinking about it. My fingers just find the next chord, almost like driving a car and not remembering the last minute of driving. For more complex things, I have to think.
So may it really is about the journey, and any learning is good learning.
Physical activity is the clear winner just from an overall impact perspective, but you don't need much to reap the benefits, so there's plenty of time for other stuff.
Beyond that, I'd say learning an instrument is probably a better investment than learning a language unless you need to learn the second language to live somewhere. This is because:
- language learning takes a LOT of time investment to show utility compared to using a translate app, while a lot of instruments are fun to play stuff on even when you suck
- Music is also a language, but it's a language of tonal relationships and how they map to emotion, and the emotional phrases they can form, which is more distinct than another spoken language.
- Learning an instrument also forces heavy bidirectional communication between brain hemispheres. Normally humans are very "one half brain then the other" so this encourages more plasticity.
Puzzles have been shown to be poor for cognitive development unless they closely model the cognitive task being measured, so don't bother unless you just really like puzzles.
I am quite familiar with various languages, have learned an instrument, and engage in regular physical activity and I am probably the stupidest person on Earth. I don't think any of those things are universally beneficial to people's mental capacity. At least physical activity has the benefit of improving quality of life in one's later years, so that should probably be the go-to.
Ok, let's see...
Mantis fist practitioner living in Belgium. Daily driving GNU/Linux since 2012. Interested in C, Scheme, Lisp, Perl, and Java.
This does not sound like the stupidest person on earth, at all. Were you concussed when you wrote this maybe?
Do things that you enjoy doing. If learning languages is something you enjoy, do more of that. If not, do something else. I learned English as a side effect of doing things I really wanted to do. Programming, reading books, watching movies, etc. I moved abroad and have not picked up any other language like I picked up English. My native language is Dutch; I barely use it on a daily basis and have not lived in my home country for 20 years now. Most days, English is what I use even though I never lived anywhere where that is the native language.
I lived in Sweden for two years, in Finland for three, and for the last sixteen years I've been living in Germany. I learned a bit of Swedish via a beginners course. No Finnish whatsoever (it's a hard language, there was no need, and Swedish is an official language). When I moved to Germany, I refreshed what little German I knew in high school. So, I can mumble my way through a phone conversation, order food, and sit in meetings understanding maybe 80% of what is being discussed. The language is similar enough to Dutch that I can usually pick it apart if people don't mumble too much. I butcher the grammar and have the vocabulary of a five year old. And this does not bother me too much.
Undeniably, improving my German would be useful to me. But the thing is, people don't appreciate how much of a time commitment it is to learn a language properly. And the simple fact is that this is not an enjoyable activity to me. And we're talking many thousands of hours! I usually have more fun, useful, interesting, etc. things to do and am not exactly bored. And I need my downtime as well. Also, learning in your downtime doesn't work in any case. I know two languages well. Adding a third is not a priority to me. Certainly not getting that third language anywhere close to the level of the first two. So, not happening and I'm OK with that.
These days with LLMs and machine translations you don't need to speak any language other than your own. We're not that far away from being able to have direct conversations with anyone on this planet. Real time translations are not quite there yet but are starting to get usable. Native speakers of whatever will lose their home advantage. They'll no longer be needed as intermediaries. I find this very interesting. I think it will affect the status of English as the world's favorite second language.
It's learning languages by employing "thinking method" where you learn new language using English, mostly, as a basis. In the case of some languages, like Spanish, using the knowledge of common Latin roots. And thinking method itself focuses on learning the rules rather than memorizing individual words. Here[1] the author explains his method in details, in a guidebook for writers of new courses.
I think that most people working in tech that don't have English as their native language are bilingual. What that means, I am not sure, the article suggests some benefits and the next logical step is to assume these people should be slightly better on average than native English speakers, but this is just speculation.
Here in Finland, we have a good trial population: Finnish-Swedes.
They are genetically very similar to Finns, but despite being bi-lingual, and wealthier than native population, they are very slightly duller. (1-3 iq points).
Sometimes I really pity the monolinguals who can’t witness the beauty of the varied linguistic cultures of the world.
It’s not a brag but here’s a sample of how my polylingustic life looks like: In the past week I had discussions about Clausewitz’s “Vom Krige” and “Rét Samadhi” by Gitanjali Shree, discussed Marathi poetry with my daughter, listened to mellifluous Tamil songs like “Nenjukkul Peidhidum”, appreciated my wife’s Uttara Kannada accent, all the while consuming English media in copious amounts.
Languages and accents are a unique part of being human and I firmly believe that we’re meant to be multilingual.
You're talking about the huge amount of content you can consume but speak nothing of creation. No matter what you enjoy, there is an unfathomable spectrum of the human experience you have not been a part of. Your particular preference is not superior to anyone else's.
BTW how are monolinguals immune to the charge you’ve laid against me? At least we multilinguals can enjoy the “unfathomable expanse” in more dimensions than them.
You said it was part of being human, that we are meant to be multilingual (so monolinguals aren't human enough?), you clarified "it's not a brag" (i.e. it sounds like a brag), you said you pity them.
> BTW how are monolinguals immune to the charge you’ve laid against me?
Monolinguals have to learn languages from scratch. This is a massive investment of time. You can do other things with that time. Some people spend their whole life creating art, music and writing. Are they superior to to people who only consume? Some people volunteer or travel the world, are they superior to those who cannot? Nobody can do everything, we all have to choose.
But humans were always multilingual the moment we left Africa. How else would the Sumerians, Romans, Persians, Indians, Chinese trade with each other? The "brag" is just a reality of most people of the world who aren't monolingual (e.g. Rammstein/Taylor Swift/K-Pop). Pity doesn't mean looking down upon them, it's just a remark about unrealized potential.
You seem to be projecting too much into this, the reality is not that complicated. It doesn't take much to pick up basics (CEFR A2 levels) of another language,if they chose to do so.
> A study from 2019 showed that a moderate amount of language learning in adults does not boost things like executive function.
I guess these days a few paragraphs qualifies for an "in depth" article. No links to any of the sources referenced, except to one of their own pages. Not very useful.
That said, sure, as someone who speaks several languages and can mostly understand a few more, I think there are interesting insights gained by having this ability. For me, a lot of it has to do with, perhaps, less-than-verbal communication. Each culture has a certain way to communicate in person during conversations. Spanish spoken in Spain, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Argentina, while different, also drag along non-verbal cues that are distinct in each culture. Same with English in various parts of the UK, US and other anglo-speaking countries. As much as some Canadians think themselves to be French, there are differences there as well with France. Non-verbal cues in the Arab world (and Middle East in general) are different as well. How you sit, move, pace, use your hands and gesticulate during in-person conversations are linked to both language and culture. Etc.
Who remembers the bar scene in Inglorious Basterds? Yup, very true. Instant communication.
Oh, I am sure. And yet, I have also seen evidence to the contrary from some. People can be weird.
The argument goes something like: We are direct descendants of French immigrants ("pure blood" argument). It's along similar lines as descendants of Italian immigrants in New York calling themselves "Italian"...not realizing how far they are from that being remotely real.
Is there not a big difference between Canadiens living in a Francophone province (one that they founded hundreds of years ago), speaking French as a first language and practicing French culture, and Italian-Americans speaking English and living in English speaking states that they have no historical association with?
I'm not sure those people are hyperpolyglot (whatever that exactly means). They usually have extreme skills in two languages, one being their native language.
However, a task like simultaneous translation is tough. It requires a different way of focusing, and has other demands on working memory. There is some evidence that it leads to "functional" changes in the brain. That could be a factor. OTOH, since the effect is bound to a small group living in a few places, it could just as well be a life-style effect.
Sometimes there is a thin line between a genius and someone with a mental illness. That is not to say those translators are geniuses, I am speaking more broadly.
My theory is that being bilingual isn't good so much because you know two languages, but because you get to know two cultures. I'd probably go crazy if american was the only culture I was exposed to on a deep level and didn't have a second language to help filter out the bad ideas from the good.
There are so many cultures that speak English though. I'm only fluent in English, but as an Irish person who spent parts of my childhood in England and Scotland, I feel like I have a deep (fluent) understanding of Irish and English culture, and a second language equivalent of Scottish and American cultures, maybe at a third language equivalent level I could add Australian.
All of these cultures are easily as different from each other as non English speaking European cultures like German, French, Italian.
I've also spent the last few years living and running a business in Vietnam, and while I've failed hard at learning the language, I do work with Vietnamese people everyday and I am growing to have a reasonable understanding of Vietnamese culture, even while I would struggle to have any kind of deep conversation in the language.
I have a theory that being bilingual in early ages and having constant exposure to both languages, the latter being key, create two cognitive centers in your brain. It also matters when you picked up your languages. Exposure later in life may mean that you basically and merely “installed” a translation layer.
If you want to slow cognitive decline or improve mental flexibility, then learning a second language, even if it's started later in life, does make sense, but expecting it to improve intelligence or memory overall is probably a beautiful but unrealistic fantasy.
'Second language' is a technical term meaning a foreign language learnt after early childhood. For example, if someone grows up speaking English and German natively and then learns French at school, French is a second language to them, even though you could say it's language #3.
Personally, being half lifed and busted mentally, I found surprising how refreshing it was to learn bits of latin. It rewires concepts all across the brain in a smooth way and connect news ideas that you don't in you native language.
They don’t lie! When they say “We value your privacy” they mean that your privacy is valuable to them. Of course, they need to convert that value into money.
Already doing that, they don't really have a choice.
I still have to deal with the awful UX they've chosen to inflict on everyone by "valuing our privacy by selling our info to over 100 companies", and they can still sell data they collect directly.
Your comment would be much more persuasive if you provide a concrete actionable suggestion instead of vague handwringing about “finding a better user agent” (and don’t get me started on how “user agent” is basically just an ingroup signal these days)
english usage aside: you could accuse him of handwaving, but he's not complaining, so his comment is not "handwringing". you are complaining (about his comment) so your comment is closer to handwringing.
"find a better user agent" is not handwringing; "i can't find a better user agent" is handwringing.
I'm pretty sure that learning Polish made me dumber. After years of effort I still don't speak it fluently and lost countless days of my focus for having a marginal convenience of knowing Polish superficially.
The way looking up words in your vocabulary works kind of like a vector db search. Then sometimes I think of something and the query result returns only the thing in language 3.
Yes this. I worked in restaurants a lot and embarrassed myself back home when I could only remember the term pichet for jug, making me not look like a very talented linguist at all. Now I've been away from the learned language countries it's happening a bit in reverse.
I think English monolingual people have a harder time learning and distinguishing homophones (words with same pronunciation but different spelling) - such as to/too/two, there/their/they're, its/it's, etc. If you know another language and correspond the aforementioned English words with those in the other language, you can see that they become quite distinct. For example, to/too/two in French is à/aussi/deux.
Need to learn the second language and use it over years switching thinking between the two languages. Learning it in university then not using it does not count.
It's not just about delaying dementia, either. I've heard it improves cognitive flexibility and multitasking abilities. Makes sense, you're constantly switching between mental frameworks.
Pro-diversity folks, especially in the humanities, did pick it up. There are several trends you can observe in popular literature on linguistics for general public. One, you will see linguists express regret that languages are dying out, and argue that diversity of languages is a general good (see e.g. Language Death by David Crystal). Another, you will hear linguists argue against the dismissive attitude towards regional dialects, and for a more permissive attitude towards the norm.
The BBC admitted more and more announcers with regional accents; and in 2017, it launched an online news service in West African Pidgin English.
No one is pro diversity. Including Google, Microsoft and Apple. They just think it’s good publicity to make more money. And getting women and immigrants put to work drops drive down wages. More workers equals less pay.
You can see this by how those companies operate with their divisions in the Middle East. You won’t see a pride flag. If you were really taking a stand, you’d fight the hard fights, lose money. Not just do things where you think you can get away with it.
In fact, if I’m not mistaken, most of those companies changed their policies on DEI hiring as soon as Trump said anyone with contracts with US government could not participate in DEI or they lose those contracts. But there is no uproar all.
I saw those TikTok videos where "women in tech" went into an empty office building from Google and Facebook and did absolutely nothing. Can I get a work like that, too, if I tell them I identify as a female? Genuine question.
No. Leftist movements are about who you are, not what are you doing. You're not the right person for these perks, so you can't get the job, and there's nothing you can do to change it.
Wait, what do you mean? Is it not enough to identify as a female to get such a job offer to fill a FAANG company's quota? Sadly I am light skinned, but it might work for my girlfriend who is a Latina. What do you think?
Based on my experience raising such issues with my local HR department, all I received was laughter, even though the HR girl was part of some "DEI council". I suspect that as a white, straight male, I don’t have the privilege of determining how others perceive me; instead, I seem to be someone people want to confront rather than assist.
Unless you love the culture, there's no reason to learn a language besides English. I would ditch the knowledge and thousands of hours spent on my native language to improve my English, or really any other skill. Always funny watching Americans try to larp as cultured cosmopolitans by learning a language they'll never actually need. Especially in 2025, when you can just point an AI at something and ask it to read it for you.
As a US emigrant, the joke I was told when I first arrived (with B2 german and nearly nonexistent french and italian) in my adoptive country went as follows:
Q. What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? A. Trilingual
Q. What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? A. Bilingual
Q. What do you call someone who speaks 1 language? A. American
Q. What do you call an American who speaks multiple languages? A. CIA
I would rather do the opposite and try to learn as many languages as possible. I can’t imagine the fun of reading “Cien Años de Soledad” in Spanish or Dostoevski in Russian.
You'd rather spend hundreds of hours learning enough Spanish to read 100 Years of Solitude, then read 100 Years of Solitude, then hundreds more hours learning Russian, then read Dostoevsky - when both of these works have already been translated to death by some of the world's most talented translators into English?
I side with the utilitarian here. You're in a very small class of people if the inherent joy of language learning is so strong for you that that sounds like a good idea.
Like, think of all the other things you could do with that time. Why not go to the gym instead or something? Why not read 20 classics instead of 2?
>Why not go to the gym instead or something? Why not read 20 classics instead of 2?
Because as Nabokov said, what a scholar one could be if one could only read five or six books. Real knowledge lies in depth, full exploration, individuation. Knowing five books totally, having one unique experience, is worth infinitely more than checking books of your Goodreads list.
Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit just to read the Gita. Was that "utilitarian"? No, but he didn't care, because utilitarianism is a suckers philosophy anyway. Don't try to be good by some stupid quantitative metric, try to do something interesting.
One notes that Nabokov did not in fact only read 5 or 6 books. Curious.
Let's take him at face value, though. Why not read 2 classics 10 times instead of just once, then? Most every language with a writing system has at least 2 classics these days. Finnish, for example: Sinuhe egyptiläinen and Seitsemän veljestä. English: The Bible and Bart Simpson's Guide to Life. Etc.
Re/ Oppenheimer, I wouldn't necessarily point at the guy who rained atomic hellfire upon Japan as someone with an especially sound moral compass, or even an interesting view on anything except how to dispense violence at scale. It is true there's a lot of violence in the Gita, so, I dunno, maybe he was just trying to read it as a self-insert fic or something. I don't think you have to be a utilitarian to say he probably did a lot of really bad things, in fact I think it helps not to be. A deontologist can at least say "I don't care if you think someone else will do it anyway, it's still bad and you shouldn't pull that lever."
I’ve read these classics in the languages I know. I’ve also read translated classics from my mother tongues and I know how woefully inadequate they feel.
I think our time scales are on different scales. I treat this as a lifelong pursuit and savour it slowly in a leisurely manner. I don’t need to sacrifice anything that way.
>I’ve also read translated classics from my mother tongues and I know how woefully inadequate they feel.
This is an interesting point where our experiences totally differ. I have myself read a few classics in both original and translation, between the English-Latin-Spanish triumvirate, such as Cien Años de Soledad as you mentioned. I percieved little if any drop in quality between Marquez and the translation - indeed I often thought the translated work was superior to the original. It's not a classic in the same vein, but I similarly found the modern Latin translations of Harry Potter were much more fun than the original English prose, which even as a kid felt very workaday and even uninspired at times to me.
So I see this more as evidence that you put a very high aesthetic value on linguistic purism than anything else. You don't just want the thing, you like working really hard to get the original thing. You like pushing the boulder up that hill. To be clear, I consider that an extremely commendable character trait, I just also think it means you're living on another planet compared to most of the population. Which isn't a bad thing, it's nice here.
>I don’t need to sacrifice anything that way.
It may be a sacrifice you're happy to make, but you are absolutely making some kind of large tradeoff every time you invest 500-1500 hours into learning a new language to C1 level, man. Like come on. That's like the economic definition of an opportunity cost.
... Although, there is one really interesting possibility I failed to account for here.
The Indian subcontinent is ancient, and so is its literary tradition. It's possible that truly ancient works like the various parts of the Mahabharata genuinely can't be translated at a high enough level of quality - because they actually happened. They are not entirely fictional accounts of a time and place so fundamentally different to our own, that no attempt at a translation within a secular context could work well, because the whole semantic space of modern language is just too divergent from it. It would be like handing a caveman a copy of Accelerando or something. I did know one guy in college who learned Aramaic for a few years years, and eventually recoiled in horror and stopped because this was the conclusion he came to.
Nah man, I’m not aiming for any linguistic purity or any such thing. All I want is to experience the sounds, smells, quirks, slangs and unique things that make up the culture. e.g. when I read „Stasiland “, I knew exactly what Miriam felt. When I read the „Kite runner”, as an ex-kite runner, I felt one with Aamir and Hassan. Linguistic purity reminds me of casteism/accentism which I abhor.
I just want to be as close as the original experience as possible, and it maybe my naive thinking that original languages capture that nuance better?
However your point about English-Latin-Spanish triumvirate is interesting and may explain your reasoning. Indian works like Mrityunjaya or Godān can easily be read in many Indic languages without any drop of quality.
You might be surprised but I’ve actually found German translations of Mahabharata or Tripitaka to be much better then English ones.
I'm not sure about that. I speak 3 language fluently, I think its important to nurture your native language. Perhaps because we partially identify our personalities and cultures based on our mother tongue, but I would feel like a part of me would be lost if I drop it.
I agree with your point regarding English however, I think everyone should learn it regardless and I can't help but feel like it's a lighthearted language.
I wonder if others are the same, but I feel like a different person based on the language I speak.. somehow I'm "kinder" (is that the right word?) when I speak English for example..
You should be complementing people trying to be cosmopolitan and learning another language. There’s nothing wrong with that. And as people have commented here, it’s good for their mind.
It seems that Americans can never win. Either the most racist xenophobic people in the world that deserve to have foreigners take their country over. Or, they’re fake cosmopolitans larping. Of course the real answer is that people are just envious of Americans. But we won’t go into that.
It’s true that AI is making nearly any intellectual endeavor pointless from a necessity standpoint. But that’s OK, we’re going to be able to intellectually dive into things that we actually want to do for enjoyment in the future. People will still learn languages and study whatever they want.
I find foreign language is interesting and fun. I don’t know if it’s the brain stimulation or just the sheer joy of having a secret language that many people around me don’t understand.
https://archive.is/lSCR2
I use my third language, Spanish, every day, and my second, English, for work. On top of that, my partner is a native Portuguese speaker, so I'm passively soaking up a fourth. (I usually reply to her in Spanish, but we watch everything in Portuguese—though this month it's been all Italian, just for fun).
To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English. I think it's because even though I moved to Spain over seven years ago, I never fully immersed myself in the culture. I'm pretty sure I haven't read a single book in Spanish.
I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
Anyway, I can attest that grappling with a language you haven't quite mastered is a daily mini-puzzle that definitely keeps the brain working a bit harder than it otherwise would.
On a side note, I love that LLMs can handle so many languages now. After 17 years of living abroad, I still feel most at ease speaking my native language, Russian, even though my vocabulary is a bit lacking these days for more complex topics. It makes me completely understand why people prefer to receive medical care in their native tongue.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
Isn't that a thing everyone does? I don't have as many languages as you, but when I finally got to the point where I could reliably do what you're describing in Japanese, I felt like I had actually achieved a baseline level of fluency for the first time. The flywheel became self-perpetuating vs. my French, where every sentence is a struggle.
Not asking to be argumentative, btw -- just wondering what's on the other side.
There's another level after fluency (C1), which is near-native fluency (C2). At the level of such mastery you don't feel the need to simplify just to be understood, your utterances now define the language itself as you've achieved the level of the crowd whom the language belongs to in the first place.
P.S. I've typed this out in English after having achieved such unlock.
I would describe it as: natural human languages with native speakers eventually develop a grammatical way to complete the vast majority of incomplete thoughts that speakers tend to have.
So, if you know the entire language, then you can complete your thought. But if you only know the common parts of the language then you may need to start over with a different sentence structure in order to express your thought.
Maybe that maps to C1 vs C2? At C1 you can express your thoughts with occasional backtracking, but at C2 you almost never need to backtrack?
With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
Yeah. That's a level beyond -- You're "fluent" enough that you can break the rules -- but that's partially not about language, but about being perceived to be native. Changing the cultural presumption, so to speak, so that people give you the benefit of the doubt when you're saying something non-standard. I think anyone who attempts humor in a foreign language runs into this wall, hard.
The C1/C2 divide does seem to mix up that concept and the idea of "looking for the right word". I sort of understand what it's getting at, but it's unclear.
I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
> I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly. Now you have two problems:
1. You need to retroactively rephrase your whole sentence to present the same information in a different style, because that's the way this language does it. This works best if you can change the past.
2. You probably don't know the correct thing to say, or you wouldn't have made that mistake to begin with.
> When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly.
Yeah, I get that. Then later, you get to a point where you're largely not translating from your native language at all (i.e. "thinking in X"), and you just can't remember the word in the adopted language, so you need to re-route. Worst case, that ends up kicking you back up to your native language, and you're back to translation, which is like shifting into 1st gear on the highway.
I think my point is (to the extent that I have one) that being able to route around the issue in the second language is itself a fundamental form of fluency. That, plus being able to reliably receive definitions of words spoken in the new language are like the lambda calculus of speech. You can forget words all day long (and, believe me, many older people do!) but still be "fluent" if you never have to fall back to your old language as a crutch.
Anyway, I'm not trying to disagree with the broad notion -- there's clearly a point at which you're grasping around less like a foreign-language person, and more like a native person.
I do that a lot in English because English is so deep and there's a perfect word for everything. Recently I was ruminating on just how many ways there are to say "walk slowly" in English: saunter, meander, stroll, amble, shuffle and I think there were others.
Meanwhile in Chinese earlier I forgot how to say "shallow" so settled for "not deep"
When you spend some time transcribing live, impromptu speech, you'll notice that it often doesn't follow the rules of written grammar; speakers frequently abandon sentences midway through.
For example, in the linked clip[^1], the speaker says:
For a moment, she struggles to express herself. Yet, there's a qualitative difference between not knowing what to say because a thought is not fully formed, and knowing what you want to say but realizing you've forgotten the specific word you need. For instance, you might be about to say "cherry," only to find you've forgotten the word and instead say something more general, like "forest fruit (fruta de bosque)," which is still correct but less precise.[^1]: https://youtu.be/_hBd8w-Hlm4?si=7-kvpUoeYo5ODPiI&t=787
That's sub A1 level (per European language classification).
Tho levels are often described and measured by what you are capable of, and not by what you do, or what you like to do. This includes: being able to understand others, and being able to create correct and appropriate text.
They were describing the level where you can create perfectly cromulent words in your second language out of thin air, that is well past A1.
No, they were explicit about the opposite of it.
> With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
There are several concepts/situations here weaved together, but the two main are:
The second one is low level, and artistic intent is orthogonal to your level, and transfers from your native language.(edit: BTW these two are closely related, since both are mostly just using patterns in places where they are not commonly used, and breaking them would be preferred)
I think your have the classification backwards
A1 level is "can barely speak the language, can maybe order a baguette"
C2 is ~native level
What's the best way to measure how close I am to that?
Can a non-native speaker go beyond C2?
It’s just a framework for evaluating how people learning languages stand.
Most native speakers would be hard pressed to be certified as C2 in their own language. I think a lot would fail C1 because they don’t know/use some of their language quirks which would be evaluated. I know for a fact that I can’t properly use some modes and tenses in my native language without a rule book.
Is the 'beyond C2' defined? C2 is the highest possible grade in the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. How would one ascertain that someone is beyond C2, given the lack of generally accepted criteria?
Maybe if you can create professional-level works in that language? Ie poems, lyrics, prose, etc.
It's just a certification level that is almost meaningless compared to the natural Version of the language. And with some native speakers you honestly wonder why C2 requirements are so sophisticated.
Sure they can. It is just a matter of immersion.
[dead]
Close....You've typed this out in English after having achieved such AN unlockING.
Online English can definitely use "unlock" as a noun like that, it comes from gaming culture.
An unlocking would be less idiomatic IMO.
yeesh, "online English." L337 h4xors with uber skillz?
"achieving unlock" is grammatically incorrect (im a native English speaker), if its idiomatic then of course that's different, but I wouldn't put that down as being "fluent," id put it down to be exposed to those specific idioms. It's not just about using the verb as a noun; where is the indefinite article?
If the gp was making a "I can has cheeseburgers?" style joke, then it went over my head, but it clearly is not grammatically correct English just because its used online.
Did you just lead off a linguistic purity rant with "yeesh"?
Good illustration of the comment about true fluency being able to play with the language.
English takes this to pro level, of course.
It's incorrect English. If its idiomatic then its idiomatic. But its not a marker of fluency; its a marker of being exposed to a culture which uses those idioms.
> Isn't that a thing everyone does?
It's much more common when you're multilingual, because you think in combination of all the languages you know and you only realize you're missing the specific word when you get to them trying to express the thoughts on the fly.
Sometimes it's not because you're not fluent - it's simply because the concept isn't expressible in the target language with that particular sentence structure you started with.
Typical example is English "I like him" vs Russian "on mne nravitsya" (+- he for me is desirable). If you start saying "I" you're already wrong.
It even happens within one language in highly inflected languages - because you wanted to say one thing, then changed the word to a better - but the sentence structure doesn't work with that new word, so you have to go back mid-sentence or make a grammatical mistake).
Often, looking for word mid-sentence generally is a manifestation of people not thinking in the language they are speaking which for me is the threshold at which you can be considered fluent.
Fluency is a very high level to reach. Most people are merely conversational in the foreign languages they speak and that’s more than enough for most interactions.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
This happens to me even when I speak my native language(s). Once you become multilingual, this is a fact of life.
So much this! During my 20s, English took over a significant chunk of communication. Years later, I mess up noun genders in my native language all the time and developed a strong distaste for formal forms of you/nouns - so much so, that I still dislike these in Greek that I'm currently learning. Although, sometimes it is a fun challenge when you use the wrong gender and scramble to find a matching noun/verb, making my speech kinda weird.
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
That happens to me more with my bative language (german) than secondary (english) nowadays.
Same here. English seems to be a very invasive language for the mind.
> To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English
I feel the same, albeit on a much lower level. Somehow Spanish just feels strange to me. For instance, a subject in Spanish often gets placed after the verb in a sentence, so I constantly have to figure out where the subject is: is it before the verb? after the verb? Or there's no subject and the conjugation of the verb implies the subject? I guess it's just a matter of time to get familiar with the verbs and it takes time. Also, listening comprehension is a huge problem for me. Even discerning words from conversations is very challenging. When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. However, I can read simple novels like El Alquimista now, yet I could only understand what was said in Extra at best with a super focus. In contrast, listening to Japanese is much easier for some reason, even though my level of Japanese is way below N5 (equivalent to Spanish's A1).
> When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes.
Friends does some interesting linguistic things. One of my favorite examples:
You told me to go out and be a caterer, so I went! I be'd!
Monica isn't making a mistake there. But I would be very surprised if someone who was just learning the language understood that joke.
Most likely not. That said, I could at least understand enough to enjoy the show. Not sure why understanding Spanish conversation has been so much harder.
German is my third language and this has been exactly my experience - I find it more challenging than English, my second language. I feel like my brain is at 100% when I want to speak German.
however, my kids are soaking up languages like a sponge. we speak Hungarian at home, English and Hungarian with our friends, and they speak both Swiss German and German at school, so they are already trilingual.
I know several families where the parents brings their own language, they speak English as a common language at home and the kids learn German/Swiss German at school, so that makes them... quadlingial?
Do you find there's a similarity between Spanish and Russian? In my limited experience, Russians who speak Spanish also seem to speak it quite well.
The phonetic similarity between Russian and Spanish is a huge relief. As a Russian speaker, pronouncing English has always felt like a workout for my mouth; the sounds are completely alien. Spanish, on the other hand, is effortless. It just flows, since I'm using the same phonetic toolkit I grew up with.
Yeah, I have the opposite problem, being a native English speaker living in Portugal - to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do - and they won’t understand a bloody word. It isn’t just the phonemes, it’s the cadence - syllabic vs rhythmic stress. I’ll be like “um galão” and they’ll be like “galão?”, “sim, um galão”, “um… que? Galão?”, “sim, galão”, “ahhh, um galão!” and I just can’t seem to be understood.
My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am.
German, I have no such problem despite being far weaker at the language imo.
> to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do
I noticed a similar thing listening to many English people trying to speak Spanish. I could hear that the native English speaker pronounced the vowel sounds of a Spanish word incorrectly - but that the English speaker could not tell. Very common if Spanish word learnt from reading and trying to pronounce it as English might. I also hear a similar reading mistake from other countries trying to speak English.
English can have extreme vowel variation - e.g. jokes based on bending vowel sounds to change word meaning. Spanish has a few vowel sounds and they seem very similar in different countries. English accents often change vowel sounds dramatically - so English speakers are not as aware of the importance of speaking vowels correctly. As a New Zealander, our vowel sounds trip up other English speakers.
I'm not sure how we learn to fix it when our hearing or sound formation is incorrect. Someone to incessantly correct one's mistakes does help but that level of patience is hard to find.
I know that I still can't hear or say nasal sounds correctly in other languages.
I think the issue here is that it's hard work for a native English speaker to keep track of the correctness of every single vowel sound because in English so many are elided or become "uh".
Listen carefully to different English accents, or even better try and mimic them.
There's a massive variety of vowel sounds in English: Sydney, Irish, Boston, Indian, etcetera.
English speakers can often hear the differences, and many people can produce the different vowels when mimicking the accents (country, city, person, foreigner).
I did not deny the fact that there is a greater variety of vowel sounds available in English. I merely doubt its explanatory power for the phenomenon you describe. But perhaps I am confused about exactly what that phenomenon is.
Actors and singers do it by hiring a voice coach - someone who doesn't just know the sounds, but can explain how to adjust your mouth muscles to make them correctly.
Most classes and individual teachers won't do that. They'll either think "Eh, good enough for a foreigner" and shrug, or they'll say "That's wrong" and repeat the correct sound at you, which won't fix the problem.
Sometimes changes happen in one language. There is a huge difference between the Received Pronunciation (RP) version of British English that was the standard up to around the early 90s, and the Estuary English that became mainstream after that.
I heard that actors & singers don't necessarily manage to fix the accent in the natural speech so they can only recite extracts perfectly well.
Which is good enough for their purposes. It would be more effort to fix speach but mostly the same.
European Portuguese sounds very Slavic; I'm sure Russians have a blast with it. English is a phonetically isolated language, largely due to the Great Vowel Shift. Unlike English, most languages have a closer linguistic relative. This makes English challenging for most people to learn, and it also makes it difficult for native English speakers to learn a foreign language without a heavy accent.
(This is not intended as an adversial question.)
I've always been curious about how the non-English world feels about hearing their language spoken with a strong "English" accent. Dont they just get on with it? As a native English speaker I'm totally unfazed by strongly accented English: Indian accents, Chinese accents, Italian etc. For example Italians rarely pronounce the H in house (presumably because H is silent in Italian). Even twists like unusual word stress patterns or prnounciations are easily figured out on the fly.
I know that Parisians are supposed to be one exception: infamously snooty about visitors speaking French absolutely perfectly. But fpr everyone else, it's 2025 and we live in a world of mass tourism and mass migration. Are the non-English still fazed by English accents and insistent on audible correctness?
It's a matter of exposure.
Growing up in the US I was similarly comfortable with accents. Having lived ~10 years in China/Taiwan I struggle now. For instance I often can't understand Australians at all. It's completely incomprehensible. British English is a bit of a strain sometimes
Similarly Chinese in China have little exposure to non-native speakers so I often find people can't understand me. While in Taiwan you can use the wrong tones and grammar and people don't have any issues figuring it out
But for instance a lot of local people really struggle with Indian English bc it's seldom used in the media landscape, while for me it sounds natural bc a lot of my colleagues speak it
I don't know that it's necessarily about snootiness. You learn to understand thick accents through exposure, and many countries don't have such a high amount of non native speakers running around as English speaking ones do.
I have a friend who struggled to understand thick Latin American accents. I understand a lot of accents by now well enough, but I somewhat recently spoke to a Nigerian person for the first time in my life and it was a struggle.
I'm not even getting into languages that have a high degree of tonality or homophony going on. That's an entire extra layer of difficulty when your counterparty in the conversation is not fluent.
I am a German native speaker fluent in English and living in Spain for a few years with not much opportunity of learning the language.
I just finished A2 in community college. Many of my classmates were native English speakers or Russians.
Most of them are elderly and Spanish is their first foreign language. My Spanish is not good enough yet to judge pronunciation, but my impression is, that the russian accent is much more pronounced when beginners speak German or English than in Spanish.
The older Brits and Irish that learned no other foreign language before have a very hard time even realising their English accent.
I just left London, my first time going and as a native English speaker I struggled more with understanding perfect English with a British accent than I ever do with someone who speaks perfect or imperfect English with a heavy accent where English is a second language.
And when I first started working with Indians that were still in India, I had to adjust my speech and slow down a lot because they struggled with my southern accent.
Yes. People are often actively offended by my Portuguese. It’s like… would you prefer it if I just spoke loudly in English at you?
I have this in French.
Despite having worked 10x harder at it than I did Portuguese or Spanish. When speaking those two languages, it’s close enough to a correct accent that people often will ask if my family is Latino or Portuguese once they hear that im American or hear my English. This hasn’t happened 5 times but so many, I just assume it will happen now.
However my experience has been different in French, even if it’s obvious I’ve worked very hard at French (C1 now), my French friends are not begging to speak to me in French unless they have limited English skills… just because my pronunciation/cadence/intonation isn’t quite right or even remotely ok, despite having much more immersion in French than those other two languages. French also feels like I’m singing at a concert rather that just conversing.
Just sometimes your culture/brain/ linguistic mix result in happy or unhappy accidents.
Edit I’m sure someone will bring up cultural differences but I have several multilingual friends .. they all say my Spanish is beautiful and nearly to a person criticize my French (in a helpful friendly manner), this is true if they’re Latin American or French. Just seriously it’s a thing, brains are weird.
English has few single vowels, they’re usually diphthongs. It’s very obvious when native English speakers try to repeat pronunciations of names.
> My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am.
There's an explanation for this
https://youtu.be/Pik2R46xobA?si=T2NpUGe-32HY42oh
What is "good for one's brain" (apart from proper nutrition and absence of concussions) is a strong education and healthy lifelong social interactions. Human language is essential for these interactions. Having multiple human languages opens more books, interactions, and cultures.
The opposite is to remain closed. This is a dangerous state of mind and culture.
From TFA:
Not just to talk to people, but to unlock an understanding of their culture and perspectives.Talking to more people in more contexts is a practical affordance: having more tools in the shop means being able to handle new and different types of problems effectively. People solve problems working together with people.
Having the cognitive adaptability to use new and different tools is certainly a valuable quality. We can nurture it as a learning objective, but it may may not be as universalisable as we have hoped. That said, the cost of not trying to educate people is to fail even worse.
I don't think I agree that social interactions are necessary to keep one sharp. In fact excessive social interactions with people that aren't all that sharp might dull one a bit.
Reading and thinking and studying can be done alone just fine.
Now as far as effectiveness in the real world, yes, social interactions and fluency is needed, but I believe this to be different from being "sharp". It probably helps keep you looking sharp though.
As someone content with being by myself, I get what you're saying but overall I don't agree. COVID was a good experiment and it busted up a lot of people.
Even excepting COVID, in the elderly the difference with social isolation can be night and day. I have witnessed firsthand one's cognitive deterioration reversed when the person moved into an assisted living community and gained a social life, and then when COVID hit and everyone was locked down the decay set in again
> What is "good for one's brain" (apart from proper nutrition and absence of concussions) is a strong education and healthy lifelong social interactions
Sure, but I think this is more about the fact that what you don't use, you lose. Learning languages is hard, so even learning old Greek keeps you brain sharp as long as you enjoy it to some extent.
Gym for the brain is good, what you do with it can be better, but gym is still good.
These studies always miss the obvious cultural point to me, [1] which is that knowing more than one language usually means you deeply understand more than one culture. This by default makes one a bit more capable of nuance, seeing other perspectives, etc. Languages are not just interchangeable collections of words, but are whole worldviews. Language in this sense is a kind of knowledge and not a different brain state, akin to reading books about history to understand a conflict better.
1. Maybe that’s not their fault, as they are ostensibly interested only in the biology. But it still seems like a major hole when discussing the benefits of being bilingual.
100%. Just knowing how other countries value different things, work and succeed in different ways, and what concepts they find important enough to give words to when we don't - all of this has been super interesting.
It's probably why I was able to get proficient in Japanese but more Anglosphere-adjacent languages felt boring.
I wonder if these studies also take in account indigenous languages and its native speakers.
People from Paraguay speak both Spanish and Guarani. A lot of people from Mexico speak both Spanish and Mayan.
Does that have the same effect as the son of a family that speaks English and German?
In terms of the knowledge sense I mean, I think it is logical that the more distant the worldviews of the languages, the greater the effect. Even more so if they both have a large media / cultural sphere.
I think so, yes. My daughter speaks English and German fluently and I can see she has deep insights into these cultures. (She also speaks 2 other languages)
She once told me that she likes to read conversational books like “Greg’s Tagebuch” in German while “Harry Potter” type books in English.
Could it also be because translations are never as good as the originals? One thing that comes to mind is translated songs, they usually sound off and forced to my ear. On the other hand I never read the same material in two languages so it's hard to really have an opinion but I did CS in another language than English and can say very confidently say that it was a huge pain to discuss with professors CS terms that were force translated into my native tongue, it was unnecessary and even though it's been many years since I graduated I still have those terms imprinted into my mind.
I was born in a trilingual home and couldn't agree more.
(I then added English)
Languages are (metaphorically) the key to a culture which can configure your thinking. Some words that are obscure or technical in one language are used more commonly in others. A little example is that in Spain it's common to use the jugular vein for a number of idioms. I know for a fact most French speakers have never heard of it and I think it's also not that common for English speakers.
n=1 data point here, but most of my free time these days is spent learning Finnish, a notoriously difficult language for English monolinguals. (I haven't always been in the monolingual camp, but a decade away from Latin has 99% put me back there.)
For the most part, I don't feel like it has made me any sharper. Had I taken the ~2000 hours I'm in the hole for so far and spent them on going to the gym and sleeping more I'm nearly certain that would have had a much larger effect on my day to day mental acuity. Had I spent it on my career I'd probably be substantially richer. I probably have another ~2000 to go before I reach a level where I'm happy plateauing.
In general I think it's very hard to justify learning a foreign language when subjected to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis. I persist mostly because I just really, really, really want to reach true proficiency, not the fake proficiency that gets you an A in Spanish or Latin class, as I outlined in [1]. If you don't have a similar drive your time and energy is probably better spent elsewhere.
[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/thoughts-on-language-learning-at-the...
Well, Finnish is native to the place I live, because I also live in Finland. My experience even here suggests that even this exception is only true for maybe 10-15% of immigrants, which is already a small pool of people.
Part of this, of course, is that we're now talking very different goals with different levels of commitment required. You can pick up enough of any language to be fun at a bar in a single digit precentage of the time it takes to become professionally fluent with it. The opportunity cost really is at least one, and maybe two, orders of magnitude lower here, depending on how much "My practice needs to be fun" matters to you.
Empirically, from both personal experience and personal observation: Most people who move countries, if they're not already moving as working class professionals with a preexisting command of the native language, just find it much easier to settle into enclaves of similar immigrants and try to interact with the broader society with help from that community. This was as true in the US as it is in Finland, and I've known a lot of immigrants from a lot of different backgrounds throughout my life. Like seeks like everywhere alike.
My attempt at being the opposite of this person puts me at odds with most other immigrants I have known. I'm actually the only person I've met here so far who has actually read a complete, non-selkosuomi book in Finnish without being a native or heritage speaker, for example. "Can read an ordinary book written for adults" is not exactly a high bar to pass in absolute terms for any language, but it's higher than what the vast majority of people will ever do in one they didn't grow up with.
> it's [...] hard to justify learning a foreign language [...] to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis.
A "normal" existence in a populous, monolingual country may not involve other languages... But human language is remarkably various in the world. Even on HN, knowing a set of non-natural semantics (e.g. coding) is a common profession.
Most employers don't pay handsomely for multilingualism, but they do pay software workers well.
I... don't really understand what this comment means.
I don't see why the situation would be any different if your airdropped, say, a 25 year old person who grew up in eg quadrilingual Luxembourg into eg extremely monolingual Yakutsk, and act like their childhood means they can suddenly master the native tongue there without hundreds to thousands of hours of unpaid effort.
They would probably do a lot better spending that time, well, getting out of Yakutsk. Assuming no one is holding them there at gunpoint.
People do make practical choices.
To focus on the linguistic challenge of living in Yakutsk, we can agree that a) learning a new language takes time, and b) the Luxembourgish languages might be some help (but not much) for learning Turkic and Russian.
> act like their childhood means they can suddenly master the native tongue
But there are many cases where those languages would be an advantage. Say, in learning Spanish and English.
People can and do learn languages. Some people are better at it than others. But people emigrate (or escape, as you say) and adapt.
Programming languages are a (simplified) subset of human languages. Programmers learn a marketable skill. (I use about five programming languages at work.) Employers will pay people well for programming -- better than I have seen people paid for speaking several human languages.
The way that people complain about programming languages (simplified as they are!) is somewhat related to broader struggles with learning human languages.
Person A: "Learning X is a poor use of time for almost everyone. Here are some numbers."
Person B: "And yet some people learn X! And X is superficially similar to Y, which tons of people do with much less time investment for much more money! Checkmate!"
I have no idea what your actual argument here is. This follow up isn't doing any favors.
---
My experience is that you reach "fluency" in your first programming language in about an order of magnitude less time than you can any human language. Python took me about a summer of teenage study at about 2 hours a day to feel comfortable with. Most further programming languages took an order of magnitude time less than that.
Human languages by contrast demand no less from the vast majority of people than 1000 hours of practice in the easiest cases for one to feel comfortable with them. There is a reason you can major in Swedish at Harvard but not Python. It is the same reason you can graduate having majored in Swedish at Harvard without actually being fluent in Swedish. It's the same reason. 1000 hours is a long time, and that is as easy as it gets.
You are drawing a strange and false equivalence between these two things, and I'm just not really sure what your point is. If your point is "these are secretly the same activity", my strongest response is "quantity has a quality all its own".
The most interesting part:
> Age plays a role too. Studies suggest that the effects of languages on the brain are stronger for young children and the old than they are for young adults. Bilingual tots seem to outperform in cognitive development in the early years, but their monolingual classmates may catch up with them later. One meta-analysis on the topic found that 25 studies of 45 found a bilingual advantage in children younger than six, while only 17 found them in children aged 6-12.
That's gonna be a let down to most people who read the title and make assumptions.
I wonder how is this cognitive development progress was measured, and I question the results of whichever study this refers to.
I acknowledge that "bilingual tots seem to outperform in cognitive development in the early years" seems both intuitive and logical.
This is a string of words that we'd expect to find together. We'd almost be offended if they weren't. Because both bilingualism and learning more things are better.
My concern over the reference to this research is that early cognitive development milestones are largely language acquisition milestones, and it has long been known that language acquisition is somewhat behind in bilingual tots. Rather than accelerated.
Generally, it is assumed that bilingual child development metrics will later catch up to those of their peer group.
Which is the inverse of "their monolingual classmates may catch up with them later".
Bilingual children aren't actually cognitively delayed, if only marginally on the face of their assessments, but rather they tend toward having a temporary delay in language acquisition due to to their bilingual environment. With any cognitive development disadvantage that this could theoretically cause essentially being non-risk.
However, I've never seen anything that indicates performant development due to bilingualism. Just the opposite, to a statistically relevant degree. Even if only marginally behind.
This is textbook information and part of the body of knowledge of language acquisition. It's not a vanguard research topic.
Could be explained by education systems. If all these children go through the same kind of schools, then the cognitive development may be limited there, allowing the monolingual kids to catch up, while wasting the potential of the bilingual ones.
That comparison is meaningless without doing a proper meta-analysis. What is the sample size of these studies? What are the effect sizes? That's more important than the number of studies that go in each direction.
I don’t know but my limited personal experience has been totally different. Not only learn my children their primary languages faster, they also learn other languages more quickly. I don’t know if that affects their IQ but I don’t see math or science as a much different language.
Of course, speaking a language is only part of the bigger puzzle: staying curious and immersing yourself in the cultures and thoughts of people from diverse backgrounds is IMO even more important and beneficial. While translation is excellent and very convenient today due to the globalization, I’d say it's very hard to understand the people of a particular culture if you don’t understand what they natively and rawly say on various social media platforms. Mainstream media and news paper don’t necessarily reflect these sentiments and predispositions. In fact, they may even hide these “small voices” very well. So, there are clear benefits to using many languages.
I have a different take. I am an immigrant. I speak 3 regional languages fluently and can partly speak German. While I always had English exposure since the age of 5 or 6, my parents spoke different language.
Everyone in my neighborhood who was not economically okay spoke different language than English.
I think it hurts more than helps when you are polylingual if you decide to spend majority of time in country like United States.
I have collected a lot of data around this. Time and time again, I can prove with data, that native english langauge speakers outperform anyone else. Whether it is college admissions, admissions to incubators like Y Combinator, job opportunities, sports opportunities, housing opportunities and more. If language is the sole factor to be considered, then polylinguals do not win.
When you speak a foreign language than English, you accent is bound to be messed up. Look at Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans or other people who speak dual langauge. There is always something off about their accent. This leads to acceptance and at time getting asked "are you american" or "were you born here?"
I am not saying dont learn foreign language. But, language is one aspect of being polylingual. You just dont speak words. Words have meaning and they are deeply ingrained in cultures.
If you know long term where you want to be, learn and speak and immerse yourself in the culture. Otherwise you are just creating more noise for social media points and making it harder for yourself to be a master of one language.
> When you speak a foreign language than English, you accent is bound to be messed up. Look at Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans or other people who speak dual langauge.
That's not true, in this case it is simply the accent they learn because everyone around them has this accent.
But learning different languages when young doesn't mean one develops a foreign accent. I know Flemish people of Vietnamese origins who speak correct Vietnamese as well as Flemish with a perfectly good farmer accent from West Flanders. And their kids speak native French with a neutral (French) accent in addition to native Flemish, because the French speakers in their family are French and not Belgian.
When learning languages young, accents don't creep from one language to the other, that happens when one learns a language later on.
As far as my anecdotal experiences go, it is true. Bilinguals do carry bilingual accents even in native languages. You notice it from first few seconds listening. In my first language it sounds as if the person is playing in 4-note chords instead of 3-note.
It probably only matter as an item in the list of falsehood about speech recognition, definitely not something that deserve to be described as "messed up", but it's also not not true.
Yes, and the ones who can master pronunciation are the ones who realize that languages are just codified ways of expressing human sound. Then you can start to see them all as phonetic expressions, instead of as translations.
Yes, I am an accent coach and many immigrants do not accept this fact. They resist and resist out of stubbornness or laziness. I try to explain to them that people will react better if they can speak the native language like the natives to but to no avail. It's not even a matter of "correctness." It's great that you speak Kenyan/Punjabi/Ukrainian English! But we don't speak that here!
That said, if you have a foreign accent people expect a certain (low to average) level of fluency and can get quite confused if you use native idioms or slangs, which they only expect from native speakers with a native accent. There’s no way to pull off an “innit” unless you speak like a native Brit.
Vocab is easy to learn, losing one’s native accent is exponentially harder the older you learn a language, and as you probably know only through hard work with an accent coach you can eliminate that uncanny valley between fluent second-language speaker and native.
Also, not everyone wants to invest in a coach unless they really have to. You can learn a language on your own, not everybody has time, money and need to hire an accent coach.
"Hard work," really equals taking a few lessons on tongue & mouth positioning and working on changing your vowels one at a time.
It's work most people don't need to do unless they're an actor or they really need to pass for a native speaker. So maybe not hard, but often unnecessary and costs $$$.
>When you speak a foreign language than English, you accent is bound to be messed up. Look at Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans or other people who speak dual langauge. There is always something off about their accent.
in the case of Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans, I've seen that it's not about the accent, but about the vocalization: there are some sounds that are exclusive to English that simply don't exist in Indian languages. As an example: the "f" or "v" sound - made by lightly touching your bottom lip to your upper teeth and then blowing air through (unvocalized for "f" and vocalized for "v").
Similarly for "th" - you stick your tongue out between your teeth and the sound of the air flowing through that restriction is what defines the "th" (vocalized or unvocalized). I guarantee that if you start making these sounds in these ways, you will be seen as closer to a native speaker of English.
I can't speak about the American experience but as someone English I would say don't worry about erasing your accent.
If an accent is too strong, yes it can be a hinderance but English is a very flexible language and native speakers are very quick to adapt to variations because we grow up with large regional variations. We expect it.
In most cases having some varience in accent is charming.
I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world in my personal experience I may occationally ask you to repeat something but I'll lock in soon enough.
We used to have a TV show in the UK called "Rab C. Nesbitt"[1] about a guy from Glasgow with a seemingly impenitrable accent. Here's the thing though, you'd watch the first 5 minutes and not understand a word ...and then sunddenly you get it. If it works for him it will work for you.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbhhE4i8V2c
With time being limited, I wonder if using a second language, playing an instrument, solving puzzles, physical activity, or some other activity is "better" brain stimulus.
My father was 76 and started to forget things, basic things like what he did yesterday, who we met the week before (family from overseas who we haven’t seen in years)…
This is when I realised it was getting serious. But he’s a Norwegian born in the 40s, so talking about his mental health and opening up to him is near impossible.
I did call him out on these massive lapses in memory, but jokingly though.
However, without formally addressing anything, he started out of no where and never, ever before doing it my entire life: sudoku.
1-2 hours a day, then more, all the time.
He’s now in his mid 80s and as sharp as ever.
I know he went and saw a GP, and they prescribed sodoku.
But the effectiveness of it, taken seriously, is absolutely incredible.
I forgot who said it but they had the theory that the way to stay sharp is to take on new mental tasks that create new though patterns.
You know when you are learning something and you get to that point where it is kind of a strain. That feeling that is kind of tense, exhausting but intriguing, all because you are about to get that thing. It is the transition from something being purely cognitive and moving into behavior intuition, like playing an instrument.
That is the thing that, in part, is keeping you sharp.
I say in part because don't forget your physical health, diet and social health. They all contribute.
I started learning Japanese after age 30 (currently around CEFR B1; JLPT N2), but I did it by moving to Japan. I don't know if the "language study", per se, provided the benefit, but the act of moving there so radically transformed my daily life that it was like being 20 years younger.
David Sedaris did a long interview on learning French (he also became proficient late in life) where he said something like: when you first start learning a language, everything is new and interesting. Eventually you become fluent, you get into a pattern, and 'living in a foreign country' is just 'living'. (heavily paraphrased -- I'll try to find the original).
Anyway, my point is that I think "learning a language" is probably as good as anything else when it comes to "brain stimulation", but in my opinion, the real value comes from being completely immersed in a new culture and kicked forcefully out of any sense of routine.
Edit: interview is here - https://www.thisamericanlife.org/165/transcript
Relevant bit:
---
Someday, David says, he'll be more comfortable in French. His accent will improve and that daily anxiety will be removed from his life.
David Sedaris: But when it is removed from me, then I probably won't be interested in living here anymore. I'll probably leave.
Ira Glass: Because it'll be just like living back home.
David Sedaris: Plus the more you learn, the more disappointed you wind up being. It's easy to like somebody when you don't know what they're saying.
I've lived in Japan for a while and got N1 a decade ago and I still love using it every day and don't take it for granted. It's kind of like flying on a plane. It always seems amazing to me, that I am doing this. I started as 28 and always thought it would be impossible.
It is funny that at the start literally everyone is interesting, even the most boring conversations. I was more of a blank slate and more likeable too. That's gone away, but the things I enjoy are more enjoyable in a deeper way, and the scope of things I can do is larger. Goes both ways imo.
> It is funny that at the start literally everyone is interesting, even the most boring conversations. I was more of a blank slate and more likeable too.
Yes! I've found the same thing.
> That's gone away
Also noticing this -- I knew that it would happen, but was surprised that it didn't take very much fluency before the natural human tendency to judge people re-appeared.
> ...but the things I enjoy are more enjoyable in a deeper way, and the scope of things I can do is larger. Goes both ways imo.
That's good to hear. I'm about to come back for another extended round, so I worry about the other stuff fading over time.
For things like this I don't think you can view it as a destination, but rather a journey.
Your mind, body, and any skill will deteriorate over time if not regularly trained, so it must become a part of your life.
And because of this, the answer is easy - do what is permanently and realistically sustainable for yourself. It doesn't matter what's best when you're only going to really keep with things that are personally satisfying for yourself.
Would any effect be limited once you achieve mastery (or close to it)? After 25 years playing my instrument when I play it my brain just switches off. No thinking at all. Doesn't matter whether I'm looking at sheet music playing something new, improvising, or playing something I know well. It's all easy. I imagine it's similar with a second language if you fully immerse yourself in it for a long time.
When did this transition happen? I have tried to play but found that even after four or five years it was difficult, required a lot of concentration, and gave me little pleasure.
The only physical skill I have that might be comparable is typing, but (as a programmer) even after typing for over 40 years, while I can type without "thinking" about where the keys are, I can usually type only three or four words without needing to make a correction.
Probably not until the 12 year mark. Maybe a little before that. I would say that it was a combination of time + actively learning certain skills. There were periods where I rested on my laurels for a few years so I probably could have reduced the time by a few years (if that was the aim). I would say 7 years is around where it got really enjoyable though and I knew enough that it wasn't too much effort to learn new songs and skills.
Worth mentioning I started when I was a kid. Learning something when you're young is so much easier due to the available time and the ability to obsess (this was also pre-internet mostly). When I try learning new instruments these days it takes much longer because I have responsibilities.
I try to play guitar. For simple songs, I can play them without thinking about it. My fingers just find the next chord, almost like driving a car and not remembering the last minute of driving. For more complex things, I have to think.
So may it really is about the journey, and any learning is good learning.
Physical activity is the clear winner just from an overall impact perspective, but you don't need much to reap the benefits, so there's plenty of time for other stuff.
Beyond that, I'd say learning an instrument is probably a better investment than learning a language unless you need to learn the second language to live somewhere. This is because:
- language learning takes a LOT of time investment to show utility compared to using a translate app, while a lot of instruments are fun to play stuff on even when you suck
- Music is also a language, but it's a language of tonal relationships and how they map to emotion, and the emotional phrases they can form, which is more distinct than another spoken language.
- Learning an instrument also forces heavy bidirectional communication between brain hemispheres. Normally humans are very "one half brain then the other" so this encourages more plasticity.
Puzzles have been shown to be poor for cognitive development unless they closely model the cognitive task being measured, so don't bother unless you just really like puzzles.
I am quite familiar with various languages, have learned an instrument, and engage in regular physical activity and I am probably the stupidest person on Earth. I don't think any of those things are universally beneficial to people's mental capacity. At least physical activity has the benefit of improving quality of life in one's later years, so that should probably be the go-to.
Ok, let's see... Mantis fist practitioner living in Belgium. Daily driving GNU/Linux since 2012. Interested in C, Scheme, Lisp, Perl, and Java. This does not sound like the stupidest person on earth, at all. Were you concussed when you wrote this maybe?
Maybe he has imposter syndrome?
Do things that you enjoy doing. If learning languages is something you enjoy, do more of that. If not, do something else. I learned English as a side effect of doing things I really wanted to do. Programming, reading books, watching movies, etc. I moved abroad and have not picked up any other language like I picked up English. My native language is Dutch; I barely use it on a daily basis and have not lived in my home country for 20 years now. Most days, English is what I use even though I never lived anywhere where that is the native language.
I lived in Sweden for two years, in Finland for three, and for the last sixteen years I've been living in Germany. I learned a bit of Swedish via a beginners course. No Finnish whatsoever (it's a hard language, there was no need, and Swedish is an official language). When I moved to Germany, I refreshed what little German I knew in high school. So, I can mumble my way through a phone conversation, order food, and sit in meetings understanding maybe 80% of what is being discussed. The language is similar enough to Dutch that I can usually pick it apart if people don't mumble too much. I butcher the grammar and have the vocabulary of a five year old. And this does not bother me too much.
Undeniably, improving my German would be useful to me. But the thing is, people don't appreciate how much of a time commitment it is to learn a language properly. And the simple fact is that this is not an enjoyable activity to me. And we're talking many thousands of hours! I usually have more fun, useful, interesting, etc. things to do and am not exactly bored. And I need my downtime as well. Also, learning in your downtime doesn't work in any case. I know two languages well. Adding a third is not a priority to me. Certainly not getting that third language anywhere close to the level of the first two. So, not happening and I'm OK with that.
These days with LLMs and machine translations you don't need to speak any language other than your own. We're not that far away from being able to have direct conversations with anyone on this planet. Real time translations are not quite there yet but are starting to get usable. Native speakers of whatever will lose their home advantage. They'll no longer be needed as intermediaries. I find this very interesting. I think it will affect the status of English as the world's favorite second language.
I reckon differences between them are dwarfed by the constraint of which one you're willing to do every day.
Mandatory mention of Language Transfer project[1].
[1] https://www.languagetransfer.org/
Can you give more info on that? the website is not very clear what it is, so basically it's an app to learn languages?
It's learning languages by employing "thinking method" where you learn new language using English, mostly, as a basis. In the case of some languages, like Spanish, using the knowledge of common Latin roots. And thinking method itself focuses on learning the rules rather than memorizing individual words. Here[1] the author explains his method in details, in a guidebook for writers of new courses.
[1] https://www.languagetransfer.org/guidebook
I think that most people working in tech that don't have English as their native language are bilingual. What that means, I am not sure, the article suggests some benefits and the next logical step is to assume these people should be slightly better on average than native English speakers, but this is just speculation.
Here in Finland, we have a good trial population: Finnish-Swedes.
They are genetically very similar to Finns, but despite being bi-lingual, and wealthier than native population, they are very slightly duller. (1-3 iq points).
Sometimes I really pity the monolinguals who can’t witness the beauty of the varied linguistic cultures of the world.
It’s not a brag but here’s a sample of how my polylingustic life looks like: In the past week I had discussions about Clausewitz’s “Vom Krige” and “Rét Samadhi” by Gitanjali Shree, discussed Marathi poetry with my daughter, listened to mellifluous Tamil songs like “Nenjukkul Peidhidum”, appreciated my wife’s Uttara Kannada accent, all the while consuming English media in copious amounts.
Languages and accents are a unique part of being human and I firmly believe that we’re meant to be multilingual.
You're talking about the huge amount of content you can consume but speak nothing of creation. No matter what you enjoy, there is an unfathomable spectrum of the human experience you have not been a part of. Your particular preference is not superior to anyone else's.
You brought in „superiority” into this not me.
BTW how are monolinguals immune to the charge you’ve laid against me? At least we multilinguals can enjoy the “unfathomable expanse” in more dimensions than them.
You said it was part of being human, that we are meant to be multilingual (so monolinguals aren't human enough?), you clarified "it's not a brag" (i.e. it sounds like a brag), you said you pity them.
> BTW how are monolinguals immune to the charge you’ve laid against me?
Monolinguals have to learn languages from scratch. This is a massive investment of time. You can do other things with that time. Some people spend their whole life creating art, music and writing. Are they superior to to people who only consume? Some people volunteer or travel the world, are they superior to those who cannot? Nobody can do everything, we all have to choose.
But humans were always multilingual the moment we left Africa. How else would the Sumerians, Romans, Persians, Indians, Chinese trade with each other? The "brag" is just a reality of most people of the world who aren't monolingual (e.g. Rammstein/Taylor Swift/K-Pop). Pity doesn't mean looking down upon them, it's just a remark about unrealized potential.
You seem to be projecting too much into this, the reality is not that complicated. It doesn't take much to pick up basics (CEFR A2 levels) of another language,if they chose to do so.
> A study from 2019 showed that a moderate amount of language learning in adults does not boost things like executive function.
I guess these days a few paragraphs qualifies for an "in depth" article. No links to any of the sources referenced, except to one of their own pages. Not very useful.
That said, sure, as someone who speaks several languages and can mostly understand a few more, I think there are interesting insights gained by having this ability. For me, a lot of it has to do with, perhaps, less-than-verbal communication. Each culture has a certain way to communicate in person during conversations. Spanish spoken in Spain, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Argentina, while different, also drag along non-verbal cues that are distinct in each culture. Same with English in various parts of the UK, US and other anglo-speaking countries. As much as some Canadians think themselves to be French, there are differences there as well with France. Non-verbal cues in the Arab world (and Middle East in general) are different as well. How you sit, move, pace, use your hands and gesticulate during in-person conversations are linked to both language and culture. Etc.
Who remembers the bar scene in Inglorious Basterds? Yup, very true. Instant communication.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Ckh80mLlQ
French-Canadians think they're French-Canadian, not "French."
Oh, I am sure. And yet, I have also seen evidence to the contrary from some. People can be weird.
The argument goes something like: We are direct descendants of French immigrants ("pure blood" argument). It's along similar lines as descendants of Italian immigrants in New York calling themselves "Italian"...not realizing how far they are from that being remotely real.
Is there not a big difference between Canadiens living in a Francophone province (one that they founded hundreds of years ago), speaking French as a first language and practicing French culture, and Italian-Americans speaking English and living in English speaking states that they have no historical association with?
I have heard that hyperpolyglots, such as translators at EU headquarters who work with many languages, are more susceptible to mental illness.
Could be from listening to politician talk all day every day though.
Just look at how much mental illness politics seems to produce in people who interact with it less frequently.
I'm not sure those people are hyperpolyglot (whatever that exactly means). They usually have extreme skills in two languages, one being their native language.
However, a task like simultaneous translation is tough. It requires a different way of focusing, and has other demands on working memory. There is some evidence that it leads to "functional" changes in the brain. That could be a factor. OTOH, since the effect is bound to a small group living in a few places, it could just as well be a life-style effect.
Sometimes there is a thin line between a genius and someone with a mental illness. That is not to say those translators are geniuses, I am speaking more broadly.
My theory is that being bilingual isn't good so much because you know two languages, but because you get to know two cultures. I'd probably go crazy if american was the only culture I was exposed to on a deep level and didn't have a second language to help filter out the bad ideas from the good.
There are so many cultures that speak English though. I'm only fluent in English, but as an Irish person who spent parts of my childhood in England and Scotland, I feel like I have a deep (fluent) understanding of Irish and English culture, and a second language equivalent of Scottish and American cultures, maybe at a third language equivalent level I could add Australian.
All of these cultures are easily as different from each other as non English speaking European cultures like German, French, Italian.
I've also spent the last few years living and running a business in Vietnam, and while I've failed hard at learning the language, I do work with Vietnamese people everyday and I am growing to have a reasonable understanding of Vietnamese culture, even while I would struggle to have any kind of deep conversation in the language.
America has endless subcultures
I have a theory that being bilingual in early ages and having constant exposure to both languages, the latter being key, create two cognitive centers in your brain. It also matters when you picked up your languages. Exposure later in life may mean that you basically and merely “installed” a translation layer.
If you want to slow cognitive decline or improve mental flexibility, then learning a second language, even if it's started later in life, does make sense, but expecting it to improve intelligence or memory overall is probably a beautiful but unrealistic fantasy.
> then learning a _second_ language
Strange way to phrase it. Lots of people know more than one language already.
'Second language' is a technical term meaning a foreign language learnt after early childhood. For example, if someone grows up speaking English and German natively and then learns French at school, French is a second language to them, even though you could say it's language #3.
Personally, being half lifed and busted mentally, I found surprising how refreshing it was to learn bits of latin. It rewires concepts all across the brain in a smooth way and connect news ideas that you don't in you native language.
>We value your privacy
>... Together with our 173 trusted partners...
In a full screen, multi-stage permissions pop-up.
Yeah how about no. No need to lie, tell me how you really feel, maybe "we will sell anything we can to anyone we can because we need the money".
(It is a very detailed pop-up tho, in a good way - breaks down each toggle with individual companies, and there's a search across all of them)
They don’t lie! When they say “We value your privacy” they mean that your privacy is valuable to them. Of course, they need to convert that value into money.
If your user agent is providing strangers with information you don’t want it to, find a better user agent.
Already doing that, they don't really have a choice.
I still have to deal with the awful UX they've chosen to inflict on everyone by "valuing our privacy by selling our info to over 100 companies", and they can still sell data they collect directly.
Indeed. Blame the regulators that required this, and/or the engineers that have developed a system that gives away your data.
uBlock Origin has lists that block most of these modals
Your comment would be much more persuasive if you provide a concrete actionable suggestion instead of vague handwringing about “finding a better user agent” (and don’t get me started on how “user agent” is basically just an ingroup signal these days)
“User agent” is a technical term. what ingroup does it signal that you’re part of, by using the term correctly?
The most despicable group of the modern era: folks who expect their own software to act on their own behalf.
Thank you for the snark. I am sure this will work wonders to persuade more people to take their privacy seriously.
I’m quite sure nobody here knows what you’re point you’re trying to make.
Let me do it on their behalf:
Firefox + uBlock Origin + EasyList Cookie List
...until Firefox learns to dismiss cookie banners on its own (they're working on it).
english usage aside: you could accuse him of handwaving, but he's not complaining, so his comment is not "handwringing". you are complaining (about his comment) so your comment is closer to handwringing.
"find a better user agent" is not handwringing; "i can't find a better user agent" is handwringing.
I'm pretty sure that learning Polish made me dumber. After years of effort I still don't speak it fluently and lost countless days of my focus for having a marginal convenience of knowing Polish superficially.
The way looking up words in your vocabulary works kind of like a vector db search. Then sometimes I think of something and the query result returns only the thing in language 3.
Yes this. I worked in restaurants a lot and embarrassed myself back home when I could only remember the term pichet for jug, making me not look like a very talented linguist at all. Now I've been away from the learned language countries it's happening a bit in reverse.
I think English monolingual people have a harder time learning and distinguishing homophones (words with same pronunciation but different spelling) - such as to/too/two, there/their/they're, its/it's, etc. If you know another language and correspond the aforementioned English words with those in the other language, you can see that they become quite distinct. For example, to/too/two in French is à/aussi/deux.
Need to learn the second language and use it over years switching thinking between the two languages. Learning it in university then not using it does not count.
https://archive.is/20250628212925/https://www.economist.com/...
It's not just about delaying dementia, either. I've heard it improves cognitive flexibility and multitasking abilities. Makes sense, you're constantly switching between mental frameworks.
I suspect the benefit is greater when the second language is from a completely different family, and has a different writing system.
https://archive.is/lSCR2
I don't think it's bad for your brain.
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These kinda articles are 2nd language imposition propaganda we've seen lot.
I wonder why pro-diversity folks didn't pick it up yet. What could be more monocultural if not the language? We need more language diversity.
Pro-diversity folks, especially in the humanities, did pick it up. There are several trends you can observe in popular literature on linguistics for general public. One, you will see linguists express regret that languages are dying out, and argue that diversity of languages is a general good (see e.g. Language Death by David Crystal). Another, you will hear linguists argue against the dismissive attitude towards regional dialects, and for a more permissive attitude towards the norm.
The BBC admitted more and more announcers with regional accents; and in 2017, it launched an online news service in West African Pidgin English.
No one is pro diversity. Including Google, Microsoft and Apple. They just think it’s good publicity to make more money. And getting women and immigrants put to work drops drive down wages. More workers equals less pay.
You can see this by how those companies operate with their divisions in the Middle East. You won’t see a pride flag. If you were really taking a stand, you’d fight the hard fights, lose money. Not just do things where you think you can get away with it.
In fact, if I’m not mistaken, most of those companies changed their policies on DEI hiring as soon as Trump said anyone with contracts with US government could not participate in DEI or they lose those contracts. But there is no uproar all.
I saw those TikTok videos where "women in tech" went into an empty office building from Google and Facebook and did absolutely nothing. Can I get a work like that, too, if I tell them I identify as a female? Genuine question.
No. Leftist movements are about who you are, not what are you doing. You're not the right person for these perks, so you can't get the job, and there's nothing you can do to change it.
Wait, what do you mean? Is it not enough to identify as a female to get such a job offer to fill a FAANG company's quota? Sadly I am light skinned, but it might work for my girlfriend who is a Latina. What do you think?
Based on my experience raising such issues with my local HR department, all I received was laughter, even though the HR girl was part of some "DEI council". I suspect that as a white, straight male, I don’t have the privilege of determining how others perceive me; instead, I seem to be someone people want to confront rather than assist.
Big corpos, sure.
But small confused individuals belive this.
So I'm wondering why they won't learn a new language to bring more diversity.
Unless you love the culture, there's no reason to learn a language besides English. I would ditch the knowledge and thousands of hours spent on my native language to improve my English, or really any other skill. Always funny watching Americans try to larp as cultured cosmopolitans by learning a language they'll never actually need. Especially in 2025, when you can just point an AI at something and ask it to read it for you.
As a US emigrant, the joke I was told when I first arrived (with B2 german and nearly nonexistent french and italian) in my adoptive country went as follows:
Q. What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? A. Trilingual Q. What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? A. Bilingual Q. What do you call someone who speaks 1 language? A. American Q. What do you call an American who speaks multiple languages? A. CIA
This is such a sad and utilitarian take.
I would rather do the opposite and try to learn as many languages as possible. I can’t imagine the fun of reading “Cien Años de Soledad” in Spanish or Dostoevski in Russian.
You'd rather spend hundreds of hours learning enough Spanish to read 100 Years of Solitude, then read 100 Years of Solitude, then hundreds more hours learning Russian, then read Dostoevsky - when both of these works have already been translated to death by some of the world's most talented translators into English?
I side with the utilitarian here. You're in a very small class of people if the inherent joy of language learning is so strong for you that that sounds like a good idea.
Like, think of all the other things you could do with that time. Why not go to the gym instead or something? Why not read 20 classics instead of 2?
>Why not go to the gym instead or something? Why not read 20 classics instead of 2?
Because as Nabokov said, what a scholar one could be if one could only read five or six books. Real knowledge lies in depth, full exploration, individuation. Knowing five books totally, having one unique experience, is worth infinitely more than checking books of your Goodreads list.
Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit just to read the Gita. Was that "utilitarian"? No, but he didn't care, because utilitarianism is a suckers philosophy anyway. Don't try to be good by some stupid quantitative metric, try to do something interesting.
One notes that Nabokov did not in fact only read 5 or 6 books. Curious.
Let's take him at face value, though. Why not read 2 classics 10 times instead of just once, then? Most every language with a writing system has at least 2 classics these days. Finnish, for example: Sinuhe egyptiläinen and Seitsemän veljestä. English: The Bible and Bart Simpson's Guide to Life. Etc.
Re/ Oppenheimer, I wouldn't necessarily point at the guy who rained atomic hellfire upon Japan as someone with an especially sound moral compass, or even an interesting view on anything except how to dispense violence at scale. It is true there's a lot of violence in the Gita, so, I dunno, maybe he was just trying to read it as a self-insert fic or something. I don't think you have to be a utilitarian to say he probably did a lot of really bad things, in fact I think it helps not to be. A deontologist can at least say "I don't care if you think someone else will do it anyway, it's still bad and you shouldn't pull that lever."
I’ve read these classics in the languages I know. I’ve also read translated classics from my mother tongues and I know how woefully inadequate they feel.
I think our time scales are on different scales. I treat this as a lifelong pursuit and savour it slowly in a leisurely manner. I don’t need to sacrifice anything that way.
>I’ve also read translated classics from my mother tongues and I know how woefully inadequate they feel.
This is an interesting point where our experiences totally differ. I have myself read a few classics in both original and translation, between the English-Latin-Spanish triumvirate, such as Cien Años de Soledad as you mentioned. I percieved little if any drop in quality between Marquez and the translation - indeed I often thought the translated work was superior to the original. It's not a classic in the same vein, but I similarly found the modern Latin translations of Harry Potter were much more fun than the original English prose, which even as a kid felt very workaday and even uninspired at times to me.
So I see this more as evidence that you put a very high aesthetic value on linguistic purism than anything else. You don't just want the thing, you like working really hard to get the original thing. You like pushing the boulder up that hill. To be clear, I consider that an extremely commendable character trait, I just also think it means you're living on another planet compared to most of the population. Which isn't a bad thing, it's nice here.
>I don’t need to sacrifice anything that way.
It may be a sacrifice you're happy to make, but you are absolutely making some kind of large tradeoff every time you invest 500-1500 hours into learning a new language to C1 level, man. Like come on. That's like the economic definition of an opportunity cost.
... Although, there is one really interesting possibility I failed to account for here.
The Indian subcontinent is ancient, and so is its literary tradition. It's possible that truly ancient works like the various parts of the Mahabharata genuinely can't be translated at a high enough level of quality - because they actually happened. They are not entirely fictional accounts of a time and place so fundamentally different to our own, that no attempt at a translation within a secular context could work well, because the whole semantic space of modern language is just too divergent from it. It would be like handing a caveman a copy of Accelerando or something. I did know one guy in college who learned Aramaic for a few years years, and eventually recoiled in horror and stopped because this was the conclusion he came to.
Nah man, I’m not aiming for any linguistic purity or any such thing. All I want is to experience the sounds, smells, quirks, slangs and unique things that make up the culture. e.g. when I read „Stasiland “, I knew exactly what Miriam felt. When I read the „Kite runner”, as an ex-kite runner, I felt one with Aamir and Hassan. Linguistic purity reminds me of casteism/accentism which I abhor.
I just want to be as close as the original experience as possible, and it maybe my naive thinking that original languages capture that nuance better?
However your point about English-Latin-Spanish triumvirate is interesting and may explain your reasoning. Indian works like Mrityunjaya or Godān can easily be read in many Indic languages without any drop of quality.
You might be surprised but I’ve actually found German translations of Mahabharata or Tripitaka to be much better then English ones.
> I can’t imagine the fun of reading “Cien Años de Soledad” in Spanish or Dostoevski in Russian.
I wouldn't call reading Dostoevski fun in any language (and I did read it in Russian) :-)
I'm not sure about that. I speak 3 language fluently, I think its important to nurture your native language. Perhaps because we partially identify our personalities and cultures based on our mother tongue, but I would feel like a part of me would be lost if I drop it.
I agree with your point regarding English however, I think everyone should learn it regardless and I can't help but feel like it's a lighthearted language.
I wonder if others are the same, but I feel like a different person based on the language I speak.. somehow I'm "kinder" (is that the right word?) when I speak English for example..
You should be complementing people trying to be cosmopolitan and learning another language. There’s nothing wrong with that. And as people have commented here, it’s good for their mind.
It seems that Americans can never win. Either the most racist xenophobic people in the world that deserve to have foreigners take their country over. Or, they’re fake cosmopolitans larping. Of course the real answer is that people are just envious of Americans. But we won’t go into that.
It’s true that AI is making nearly any intellectual endeavor pointless from a necessity standpoint. But that’s OK, we’re going to be able to intellectually dive into things that we actually want to do for enjoyment in the future. People will still learn languages and study whatever they want.
I find foreign language is interesting and fun. I don’t know if it’s the brain stimulation or just the sheer joy of having a secret language that many people around me don’t understand.