
Bilinguals better at multitasking, researchers find | KurzweilAI - Swizec
http://www.kurzweilai.net/bilinguals-better-at-multitasking-researchers-find
======
RiderOfGiraffes
To all the people commenting here:

Firstly, I'm deeply envious of anyone who is genuinely bilingual. I've worked
pretty hard, and still only have a smattering of other languages. I've never
really had the chance or reason to develop fluency in anything other than my
native tongue, so cherish your ability. You probably can't - from the inside -
realise quite what advantages it bestows.

And that's my second point. Many of you are saying that you don't think it's
significantly affected your ability to multi-task, but _you can't know._ This
is why science demands proper double-blind randomized trials. You don't know
what you would be like without your bilingualism, so you don't know how - or
if - it's affected you. Maybe without your bilingualism you'd be a lot worse
at multi-tasking. Or a lot better. You can't tell.

I have various skills, and I believe that some have helped, and perhaps some
have hindered, my programming, but I certainly can't tell.

See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2244178> where there's a report
that bilingualism seems to delay the onset of Alzheimer's.

------
hrktb
In my personal experience, I won't easily switch between languages (it takes
on or two seconds at best), but when I finished switching I am 100% focused on
it. I don't think about the other languages except when a concept can't be
properly expressed in the current one.

In computer terms, it's more like a fetching a page on the swap on a page
fault than accessing several contexts at the same time.

I guess translators would be more aligned on the model presented..But how
common would it be?

~~~
psykotic
> In my personal experience, I won't easily switch between languages

For me the trickiest is switching fluently between the sound systems of
several languages in a split second. Suppose I'm speaking in American English
and mention a double-barreled word like "Stern-Brocot tree" which contains a
German and a French name. In that context it's very difficult to maintain
proper pronunciation even though I can pronounce the parts perfectly well
individually.

~~~
_delirium
In those cases I usually try to pronounce the words with an accent of the
language I'm speaking in, rather than the way they were in the source
language. Sometimes this actually takes more work if I know both languages,
but I find it makes me more understandable, and helps keep me mentally "in"
the language I'm speaking. For example, if I mention an American city while
speaking Greek, my instinct is to pronounce it as in American English, but
it's more colloquial and easier to understand if I pronounce it with Greek
phonology. So for example, I'd pronounce Chicago roughly as see-KAH-gho (i.e.,
how you'd pronounce Σικάγο), George Bush as Tzortz Bous, etc., rather than
switching to an American phonology for one word or phrase.

~~~
psykotic
Yes, that tends to happen automatically if you speak fast.

I'm fastidious on this question because I hear most foreign names utterly
mispronounced by English speakers, so I try to do my small part in rectifying
it.

~~~
_delirium
I guess I don't really consider adapting a word or name to the sound system of
the target language to be "mispronunciation". When speaking Greek, I use Greek
phonemes, and when speaking English, I use English phonemes, which seems to be
how most native speakers do things in their own language. I mean, since I
speak both natively I _could_ mix the phonemes, pronouncing Greek names in
English as if I were speaking Greek and vice-versa, but it would seem weird
and affected, like I was showing off that I knew multiple languages.

If anything it's something of a marker of non-native speakers; native English
speakers who learn Greek as a foreign language will often slip back into
English phonemes to "correctly" say the names of people or places from
English-speaking countries rather than adapting them to Greek phonemes,
whereas Greeks typically don't (not even Greeks who speak fluent English).

~~~
psykotic
There are two levels of mispronunciation. If you pronounce 'Hermite' in
English so it rhymes with 'thermite', you have no excuse. It's ignorant and
plain wrong. If you pronounce it with a silent 'H' and use the right ending
sound and as close approximations to the vowels and intonation as your
language will accommodate, that's perfectly fine; I do that too.

It's the difference between ignorance and knowledge, carelessness and respect.
That still leaves room for pragmatism and plain speech.

~~~
_delirium
I sure hope, then, that you correctly pronounce the initial 'p' in Greek names
starting with a 'pt' and 'ps' consonant cluster, rather than omitting it like
an ignorant American! (Do you pronounce the 'p' in _Ptolemy_ , or mispronounce
it as if it were written _Tolemy_?)

For good measure one should pronounce it in words like _psychology_ as well,
but I suppose the pronunciation error there has been sufficiently fossilized
that it's now an English word with a new pronunciation. Perhaps the Hermitian
will suffer the same fate as the Ptolemies and psychologists?

~~~
psykotic
That's where pragmatism comes in! Some words are grandfathered into the
language and that's that. For names of people that have yet to be entered into
dictionaries, I fight my little fight to have their pronunciations conform
more closely to the original.

To prove my dedication to pragmatism, when I first moved to the US many years
ago, no-one was able to pronounce my one-syllable first name, to say nothing
of my last name. After a week or so I gave up and started introducing myself
as 'pair'. When I later lived in Korea, a country whose language is deficient
in diphthongs, I introduced myself as 'pae-uh' and wrote my name accordingly
in Hangul.

~~~
_delirium
Ah ok, I think I see what you mean--- you're willing to adapt for phonemes
that don't exist, but not otherwise. It seems that's easiest to do when going
between scripts, because the transliteration step lets you rewrite the word
phonetically in the new language, as close as possible. But between languages
like English and French that share a script, you have to keep the same
spelling, which then will typically imply a different pronunciation in the
target language, unless you apply special "remember, this was a loanword"
pronunciation rules.

An alternative would be to do transliteration even when going from
Latin->Latin languages, taking a French word and respelling it so it reads
phonetically in English, but I suspect people would like that even less. I
believe French actually does do a little bit of that when borrowing English
words, but in that case there's an official language academy to invent the new
spellings.

~~~
psykotic
Yes, you got it.

In my mind there is also a difference between fully adapted words like
psychology and foreign technical words such as techne, gnosis and episteme the
way you might use them in a class on Plato. This second class of words, along
with names of people, should ideally have their sounds conform more closely to
the originals. Of course, words will often start in the second class and drift
into the first class. That's how language evolves.

------
Torn
I'm fully bi-lingual french-english and yes, I can 'think' in both languages,
but I wouldn't say my simultaneous multitasking is that great. When focusing
on complex problems I tend to tune absolutely everything else out.

------
DjDarkman
I'm Hungarian-English-Romanian(intermediate) speaking(in order of capability).
Hungarian is my mother language, Romanian is the government's language and I
learned English around the age of 4-5(I don't remember exactly).

I thought multi-tasking is a programmer/freelancer skill. There were times
when I undertook 5 projects the same time. I was helped by the fact that not
all clients were in the same timezone, though I still had to quickly shift
between projects and I had no problem with that, I didn't feel that it was
anything special.

About information filtering: I go trough HN's full RSS feed along with other
news sources I have in my Google reader.

I think the mind manages to create some sort of independent representation of
thoughts, sometimes I can't remember if I have seen a movie in English or
Hungarian.

------
TGJ
I would think that it has to do with finding the corollaries between words
from each language. It would simply be the way a person has, by a side effect
of learning two language, trained themselves to think differently than most
people.

The ability to receive information about one subject and relate it to another
has always set people above the common straight line thinker.

------
kloncks
Arabic and English here.

My favorite question to ask people who speak different languages is, "Which
language do you dream in?"

~~~
DTanner
I only dream in images, my dreams don't have any sound.

My question for you now, "Do you dream in colour or black and white?"

~~~
kloncks
Colour, almost always.

------
mtrn
I grew up bilingual and although I sometimes felt 'snappier' than other kids,
when I was young (don't you get bored with just one language?) - I today enjoy
single-tasking.

------
Swizec
Personally I'm fairly fluent in English and Slovenian (to the point of having
published short stories in both languages in magazines) and I have to say I
don't even differ between the languages anymore. Most of the time I'm not even
aware which particular language I'm listening to and it's happened before
where I was watching a programme in Slovenian and thought the actors were
talking English.

However I can't say this has beneficially affected my ability to multi-task. I
certainly seem to _try_ multi-tasking a lot and can't even not do it, but as
to whether it's effective or not, I couldn't really say. People around me seem
to dislike me doing it (especially when I hold multiple conversations with
them at a time), but it's just the way my brain works. I can't not do it.

This makes achieving a state of flow somewhat hard, which sucks terribly.

------
leon_
I'm tri-lingual and I suck at multitasking :)

