
The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages - fogus
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bilingual-brains
======
ique
Very interesting article. Can't help but to think about the differences in
countries educational systems. I'm Swedish, here we start studying English in
second (numbers and such) and third grade (start with words and grammar). And
then study it all the way up and through high-school.

Pretty much every Swede of a younger generation is fluent in English. Almost
all people also spend several years in grades 6-9 studying a third language
(Spanish, French or German is required to take if you don't have a learning
disability, then you focus on English with that time instead).

It's easy for practically every country in the world to offer education in
English because you can't live in a modern world without English. But it seems
hard to motivate English speaking nations to study other languages. What
languages would be of enough importance for, for instance, Americans, to make
it obligatory education?

~~~
nfnaaron
It's not much of a perceived advantage to study a 2nd language as an American,
because no matter where you go there's probably someone who speaks English,
and chances are that wherever you go few if any speak the 2nd language that
you studied as a kid.

There's small payoff for an American to study a 2nd language. There's large
payoff for people from non-English speaking countries to study English; it
must be true or perceived as such, because it's such a widespread practice. We
already know English.

I'd like to see Spanish mandatory or commonly studied to fluency, given the
demographic changes in America. It might also encourage us to have closer
relations with Central and South America. I doubt it will happen.

Note: I understand there are many benefits to studying any 2nd language.

~~~
theycallmemorty
Mono-lingual Canadian here with a question for both of you:

What do adolescents in your countries think of learning english?

Most anglophone Canadians start learning french in grade 4, unless their
parents put them in an immersion program at a younger age. In Ontario we were
required to take French until grade 9 and after that the VAST majority of us
stopped because we hated it.

Is it like that with English in other parts of the world? Or is English enough
of a prestige language
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29>) that young
people enjoy learning it?

~~~
jrgnsd
In South Africa we have 11, yes, eleven, official languages, with English
being one of them.

It's easy for most people who's mother tongue is not English to learn it, as
it's everywhere - government, media, advertisements, entertainment, you name
it. So it's a necesity, not a status symbol.

It's also interesting to note that English kids generally struggle to pick up
a second language, even if they live in a community that speaks another
language, just because English is so pervasive, and there's no need for them
to pick up a second language. This despite the fact that you have three
languages at school, at least up to grade 9.

~~~
catzaa
South Africa's national language is bad English :)

While I do think that _everyone_ should learn English in SA, research has
shown that mother tongue education (especially at primary and secondary
levels) are extremely important.

There are a lot of parents doing their children a disservice by sending them
to English schools.

------
yannis
My son is fully bilingual in Afrikaans(sort of a Dutch Dialect) and English.
When he was a toddler he would speak fluently to his grandmother in Afrikaans
and would turn in the same conversation and seamlessly talk to me or his
mother in English. He kept this ability right into about the middle years in
Elementary School. After that this ability somehow diminished and he would
throw English words into an Afrikaans conversation or vice versa. He is
thirteen now and speaks both languages very fluently (but the switching
between the two languages now is more conscious). At the toddler stage it was
as if his brain was combining the two languages into one.

From my own personal experience I noted that, there is a point when you start
to think - in the new language and that is the real turning point. It also
appears sort of in computer languages as well.

When people from different linguistic cultures mix they tend to develop their
own language for example fanagalo [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanagalo>].

This paper from the Center for Applied Linguistics has some good pointers
<http://www.cal.org/resources/Digest/digestglobal.html> as regards to
languages and education.

~~~
kowen
Interesting!

Three of my siblings are bi-lingual Russian/English. At first they mixed
things up terribly, but after their Russian grandmother spent a year with them
they were suddenly able to completely separate the two. Grandma doesn't speak
a word of English, whereas both parents speak both languages, so we speculated
that what they were doing was 'the easiest thing that works'.

When I speak in Norwegian I toss in English words all the time (because I can
get away with it - all Norwegians seem to speak English). In French I don't
leak English into it. In English, I rarely (if ever) slip Norwegian or French
into it.

Where I _really_ get into trouble is when I'm in a conversation with
Norwegians, French, and English-speakers at the same time, because I end up
trying to translate Norwegian to French, French to English, etc, and end up
speaking the wrong language to pretty much everyone involved.

~~~
johkra
Yeah, I know this, it's horrible. My problem is with speaking French, Spanish
and Italian. Only one of the languages is fine, but once there are two or
more, I start mixing words together really badly.

I think it's because those languages are so close to each other - like C++, C#
and Java - which was probably the reason I could become reasonably fluent in
each of them in the first place. I actually learned Italian by "prototypal
inheritance", gradually substituting Spanish words and grammar as I learned
their Italian equivalents while living there.

------
jcl
Don't assume the behavior demonstrated in the article is an advantage... The
study compares _words_ , not _people_ \-- particularly, it does not measure
the speed of monolingual readers at all.

The article headline is jumping to a conclusion that its body does not
support. In fact, the body text is very careful not to claim any sort of
advantage; the current headline is not the original one, and seems to have
been chosen by someone not quite as careful as the article's author. The
subheadline, "Bilingual people process certain words faster than others", is
also wonderfully ambiguous.

It is entirely possible that multilingual readers generally read slower, or
that there exists a class of "anti-cognate" words that trip up multilingual
readers as much as cognates help them.

------
ggruschow
Where's the control group? The study seems to compare two skills in bilingual
kids only. It's interesting, but it doesn't seem to tell us anything about the
advantage of speaking 2 languages.. like single language kids could read 2x as
fast and the results wouldn't change.. or those words may happen to be easy
ones anyway (seems somewhat likely if they happened to occur if those
combinations of letters happened to appear in both languages).

------
rdtsc
Apparently there is also a disadvantage -- a higher risk of developing
stuttering. I know from experience (n=1), but there is some interesting
research on the topic as well:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=stuttering+bilingual+chi...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=stuttering+bilingual+children)

~~~
anuleczka
Interesting -- I've also experienced that. Sometimes it's because I can't
think of the word I want to use in one language, but an equivalent word in the
other language gets stuck in my mind.

More info here: <http://www.stutteringhelp.org/DeskLeftDefault.aspx?TabID=156>

~~~
nwatson
My father is American, approaching 80 years of age, and has been living away
from Brazil (in the U.S.) for the last 25 years. Even so every few English
sentences he pauses to find the English word he's looking for, often saying
the Portuguese word first. Lately he's just been saying the Portuguese word
without bothering to translate, meaning I end up translating a lot of
words/concepts on the side when he's talking to my American wife.

My father spent the "core" of his adult life in Brazil and dealt with every-
day concerns in Portuguese. He traveled a lot away from his English-speaking
family and was immersed much of the time. He practiced his domain expertise
(soul-saving) in Portuguese. In most matters he's just more comfortable in
Portuguese and Spanish, and it certainly shows when he speaks English.

------
ebun
On a related note, the NY Times posted recently about Chinese being on the
rise as the foreign language to learn in American schools:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/education/21chinese.html>

------
eru
Interesting that most of the discussion here makes bilingualism seem like the
pinnacle of achievement.

But I guess I belittle bilingualism because I am fluent in two languages and
strive for three or four.

~~~
Kliment
I'm fluent in four, but the vast majority of people in the US appear to speak
only one. The case is similar in Germany, France and Spain, at least from my
experience. As such, bilingualism is not a pinnacle of achievement (is
anything ever a pinnacle of achievement) but rather a recognition that ANY
other language has value of this kind. Once you get past "I can do just fine
with one." you can go as far as you like. But the step from one to two seems
to be the critical one.

~~~
eru
Yes, I agree.

Most young people in Germany seem to be able to speak at least some English.
Almost all university students do. Bilingualism is prevalent in countries that
have a first language other than English, since everyone accept that learning
English is necessary.

(Disclaimer: I was born in Germany.)

