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.
timr · 1h ago
> 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.
afiodorov · 1h ago
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.
senkora · 53m ago
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?
xvilka · 1h ago
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.
timr · 59m ago
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.
afiodorov · 33m ago
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.
> 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).
_zoltan_ · 44m ago
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?
celeryd · 1h ago
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.
afiodorov · 53m ago
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.
madaxe_again · 40m ago
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.
afiodorov · 26m ago
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.
heresie-dabord · 1h ago
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.
hiAndrewQuinn · 10m ago
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.
> 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.
FlyingSnake · 23m ago
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.
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.
heigh · 1h ago
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.
SlowTao · 32m ago
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.
timr · 1h ago
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.
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.
tmtvl · 1h ago
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.
polotics · 49m ago
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?
ANewFormation · 2h ago
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.
hombre_fatal · 2h ago
I reckon differences between them are dwarfed by the constraint of which one you're willing to do every day.
basisword · 2h ago
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.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
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.
dehrmann · 38m ago
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.
basisword · 2h ago
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.
keiferski · 1h ago
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.
leidenfrost · 1h ago
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?
FlyingSnake · 15m ago
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.
keiferski · 1h ago
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.
nayuki · 1h ago
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.
dumroll · 1h ago
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.
seszett · 24m ago
> 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.
xvilka · 1h ago
Mandatory mention of Language Transfer project[1].
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.
Groxx · 3h ago
>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)
kgwgk · 2h ago
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.
signal-intel · 2h ago
If your user agent is providing strangers with information you don’t want it to, find a better user agent.
whoisyc · 2h ago
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)
ashwinsundar · 2h ago
“User agent” is a technical term. what ingroup does it signal that you’re part of, by using the term correctly?
signal-intel · 1h ago
The most despicable group of the modern era: folks who expect their own software to act on their own behalf.
whoisyc · 1h ago
Thank you for the snark. I am sure this will work wonders to persuade more people to take their privacy seriously.
No comments yet
noisem4ker · 2h ago
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).
fsckboy · 1h ago
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.
instagib · 2h ago
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.
AdrianB1 · 2h ago
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.
zeroCalories · 1h ago
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.
FlyingSnake · 12m ago
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.
swat535 · 25m ago
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..
BuckRogers · 23m ago
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.
TMWNN · 2h ago
I have heard that hyperpolyglots, such as translators at EU headquarters who work with many languages, are more susceptible to mental illness.
mythrwy · 1h ago
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.
robomartin · 1h ago
> 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.
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.
b0a04gl · 2h ago
it maynot magically boost my IQ or anything but it's surprisingly good at making my brain switch gears faster .like i'm on a call in English and my mom yells from the kitchen in Tamil and i just reply back without even thinking .or i'm writing code, then get a message in WhatsApp in Hindi, i reply, and jump right back into the code without losing track . my brain getting better at handling midstream flips .
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.
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?
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.
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
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).
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?
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
So may it really is about the journey, and any learning is good learning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.languagetransfer.org/
>... 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)
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Firefox + uBlock Origin + EasyList Cookie List
...until Firefox learns to dismiss cookie banners on its own (they're working on it).
"find a better user agent" is not handwringing; "i can't find a better user agent" is handwringing.
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.
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..
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.
Just look at how much mental illness politics seems to produce in people who interact with it less frequently.
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