
Bilingual Education: Potential Brain Benefits - curtis
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/11/29/497943749/6-potential-brain-benefits-of-bilingual-education
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ouid
>"If it's just about moving the kids around," Steele says, "that's not as
exciting as if it's a way of teaching that makes you smarter."

>Steele suspects the latter because the effects are found in reading, not in
math or science where there were few differences.

This seems like evidence that bilingualism doesn't actually make you smarter
with neuromagic, but the investigator chose to instead interpret it precisely
the opposite way.

I think a simpler explanation is that reading is a skill which has a component
that is invariant with respect to the language. Identifying glyphs,
pronouncing the words in your head etc.

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dmingoddd
Fun fact, almost all Indians know 2 languages well. 1 their regional one, 2nd
Hindi.. If they speak english, that's three..

Down south Hindi is less prevelant but 2 languages is like the norm for kids
here..

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curtis
Interestingly enough, I speak a regional language well and English well. Of
course my regional language is also English, which makes bilingualism hard for
people like me!

Actually I'm not just being a smart-ass here, I do have a point. The major
reason that so many Americans are monolingual is that learning a second
language doesn't have much if any day-to-day utility, whereas in India a
second or even a third language may have tremendous day-to-day utility.

~~~
legulere
In the EU you usually have to learn two additional languages to your native
language. It's not hard to find German, French or Spanish speakers outside
their respective countries.

It's not like English is the only useful language.

~~~
curtis
> It's not like English is the only useful language.

True, but in most of the U.S. the number two language isn't all that useful.
Also I should add it's not just a matter of utility, it's also a matter of
opportunity. I mean sure, if you go looking for speakers of another language
you can find them, but it's not ambient. I hear many different languages
spoken here in Seattle, but almost all of these speakers speak English well.

Also I should add that I'm not arguing against bilingualism, I'm just saying
there are practical reasons why it is not so common here in the U.S.

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seanmcdirmid
Ya, and if you try speaking Chinese as a white guy in Seattle, it can get
awkward really fast. It's like, what's the point of you speaking Chinese if we
can all speak English!

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Temasik
if you want an easy language to learn, learn malay

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_language)

proven by chinese,indians,bangladeshis,nepalense,filipinos,burmese, cambodians

~~~
DonaldFisk
Malay has the advantages of being phonetic, using the Roman alphabet, and (I
think) having a simple grammar, but is category 3. A phonetic alphabetic
script is indeed helpful, but grammar isn't much of an issue. Chinese has a
very simple grammar but is notoriously difficult to learn (category 5).

In my experience, the main problem in learning any second language is
vocabulary acquisition, and for that you have to take into account the first
language, which I'm going to assume is English.

Word frequencies follow Zipf's Law, so for any language, you can very quickly
read about half the words on any given page. After twice the effort, you might
be able to read another quarter, and with three times the effort another
eighth, and so on. Most of the vocabulary of any language consists of non-
basic vocabulary with high information content.

So which language should you learn? Obviously if you're going to live in Japan
or Hungary, you have no option but to learn Japanese or Hungarian. But if your
only goal is to learn a second language and you're not too particular about
which one, I'd choose one which shares a lot of non-basic vocabulary with
English. In practice, that means an Italic language: French, Spanish, Catalan,
Italian, Portuguese, or Romanian (all category 1). If you want to optimize on
number of speakers, your best choices are Spanish, followed by Portuguese.
Alternatives to Italic languages are close relatives of English with simple
grammars: e.g. Afrikaans, Dutch, or Norwegian (also category 1). But speaker
of those languages generally speak excellent English.

For more information on language difficulty, see
[http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-
guide/lang...](http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-
guide/language-difficulty)

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chadcmulligan
Any one know if math / programming languages count?

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Broken_Hippo
I've considered this in the past. Though I have nothing to back this up, I
very much doubt it.

1\. Math and programming are limited in their use - they are never primarily
used communicate with other people. They are more like an expansion pack some
people add to their language.

2\. Language itself is more like a programming language for the brain: Without
it, one's development suffers (this is why deaf folks were considered stupid
in the past).

3\. Math and programming languages require tools that are still developing
when people are young. We take years teaching basic maths, for example. People
have to be able to grasp the confines of programming languages - which are
more strict than spoken language. Children really benefit from having the
physical ability to type (for programming) as well.

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dgut
As with everything else, I suspect learning more languages will just make you
good at just that, learning more languages.

~~~
rimliu
Some researchers claim that it helps to create new pathways in the brain which
is useful for a lot more stuff.

~~~
ouid
>Some researchers claim

>helps to

>create new pathways

>a lot more stuff

could this statement be any more vague?

