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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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, 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
P.S. I've typed this out in English after having achieved such unlock.
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).
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.
This happens to me even when I speak my native language(s). Once you become multilingual, this is a fact of life.
That happens to me more with my bative language (german) than secondary (english) nowadays.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's probably why I was able to get proficient in Japanese but more Anglosphere-adjacent languages felt boring.
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?
She once told me that she likes to read conversational books like “Greg’s Tagebuch” in German while “Harry Potter” type books in English.
(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.
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...
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.