
The Benefits of Bilingualism - ColinWright
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html
======
Shenglong
I wonder what degree of bilingualism is necessary. When I speak English, I
think in English. When I speak Chinese, I think in Chinese. When I speak
French, I think in English.

Moreover, when I speak to my parents, I can weave together English and Chinese
to speak in the most efficient and accurate way. Those of you who have two
native languages will probably understand what I mean. Some languages lack
words to describe certain situations, and other languages are much more direct
in describing them. Do we call this amalgamation of languages a third
language, then?

I think there needs to be a distinction based on varying levels of fluency; I
see it as a major contributing factor.

~~~
evincarofautumn
I agree the issue is more nuanced than it’s made out to be. I’m still not sure
there _is_ a useful, clear-cut distinction between native and second language,
at least not for everybody.

I speak English and French natively, but I don’t think in either. I just
think; in words sometimes, but mostly in spatial terms, colours, images,
sounds, that sort of thing. I only started studying Chinese a few years ago,
but I’ve never had the oft-bemoaned second-language problem of thinking in one
tongue and mentally translating to another. Sure, there are words you don’t
know, but you can always just talk around them, right?

~~~
jvrossb
This has been my experience as well. Grew up speaking English and French, am
100% bilingual, could not tell you which I think in. I think thoughts occur at
a level of abstraction one step above language.

When I started learning Chinese I also wasn't constantly translating, I just
had a limited breadth and depth of topics in which could express my thoughts
through Chinese.

~~~
Shenglong
I'm not talking about basic thoughts. I mean, when you trace logic in your
head, one language or another appears.

~~~
frooxie
I disagree. I have complex, multiple-step wordless thoughts.

~~~
Shenglong
You never think in words?

------
kenrikm
I speak English/Spanish once you learn another language you have the ability
of learning others easier. For example because I learned Spanish I can
understand much of Italian and Portuguese without having to study them. Think
of it like learning C and then switching to something like Php yes it's
different but you can make your way around.

~~~
mcdaid
You make a fair point, but learning Italian or Portugese after Spanish is easy
because they all share the same root language Latin.

An eastern language such as mandarin won't be much easier because you have
learnt a second European language.

Computer languages have much more in common and have often copied earlier
programming languages.

~~~
danmaz74
IIRC, studies show that if you learn a second language as an adult, learning a
third one becomes easier (even if it is a completely different one) because
you learned to learn a language. So yes, of course it is much easier to learn
a similar language, but there is also an effect with completely different
ones.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
I used to think along mcdaid's lines, that because I speak English and French
natively German and Spanish were no problem, and because I'd learned Spanish,
Italian was easy.

Then I learned Turkish, and later Arabic. Now I'm with danmaz74: Learning any
language makes learning any other language easier.

Sure, knowing French made Spanish more accessible, but there is large gap
between all of the languages I knew then and Turkish, and I picked it up
pretty quickly. Same with Arabic some time later.

I attribute this to the mental "faculty" or "faculties" involved being
flexible and responsive due to frequent use, rather than to the degree of
similarity between the languages.

On the flip side, "use it or lose it" is definitely also true. I'm back to
being native in two languages with a pretty decent third, because I don't use
the other 4-5 at all.

They'd each come back pretty quickly with suitable immersion.

------
ahalan
>These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching
attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind

I'm trilingual and I can assure you it doesn't help with the ADD problem

~~~
halostatue
My wife would concur with you. Of course, her German is nonstandard enough
that her extended family in Germany calls it AnnaMariaDeutsch.

------
eternalban
For an immigrant such as myself, the interesting turning point is when [one]
stops dreaming in one's mother tongue and begins dreaming in the adopted
land's e.g. (American) English language.

~~~
pbz
I started dreaming in English while I was still learning the language. Same
when thinking about a hard problem. It's in your mind even, or especially,
when you're asleep.

------
israelpasos
I'm quadrilingual and recently I had an interesting discussion with a friend
of mine about other types of languages such as programming languages. I do
think that these count as a form of expression and ultimately improve the
brain's executive function as the article states. Furthermore, they develop
critical and logic thinking.

~~~
Shenglong
I'm currently in a business program, but I'm fluent with several programming
languages. I can't be sure that programming languages are the reason, but I
feel a lot of people around me lack the logical thought process.

Many of them seem to lack the ability to think _recursively_ , and I find
myself having to draw flowcharts, even to explain the most basic if-else
thought processes.

~~~
VMG
maybe you can program because you can think logically, not the other way
around?

------
amitparikh
I've been programming for quite some time, and I find it fascinating how
quickly I can learn, understand, and use the syntax of a new programming
language.

I think there are similar mechanisms going on as compared to linguistics,
particularly neurologically. Maybe all of us programmers are smarter, too,
huh?

~~~
radicalbyte
Programming languages are much easier to learn than natural languages. The
grammars are smaller and they don't rely on learning a massive list of
exceptions like certain language do (such as Dutch, my second language).

~~~
evincarofautumn
Counterexample: C++. The “exceptions” are different, but they’re still there:
inconsistencies and complexities in syntax, API design, and so on. These are
systems designed by humans, subject to the human understanding of language.

Learning a programming language and learning a natural language are _very_
similar, even if the languages themselves differ greatly in their structure
and purpose. The only way to get good at programming is to do a lot of it, so
that the basics become second-nature. It’s the same with natural languages:
you practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and gradually improve
as you repeatedly encounter common terms and structures.

~~~
skrebbel
You watched too much James Bond.

Learning any sufficiently foreign natural language (i.e. any that you can't
understand simply if a speaker of it talks slowly enough) is _significantly_
more time-consuming than for anyone who already knows one programming language
to learn, say, C++ sufficiently to be productive in it.

You're comparing learning a natural language until fluency with learning a
programming language _entirely_. These are very different things. Most people
make mistakes speaking and writing their native language.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I agree with you. Natural languages are typically
larger and more involved than programming languages, so it takes longer to
attain fluency. But they _do_ exist on the same axis. A programming language
can be complex enough to take as long as a natural language to learn to speak
fluently and idiomatically.

------
Nervetattoo
I'm curious if there is a higher percentage of programmers than the population
in general who are bilinguals. After all programming requires us to learn new
languages for talking to the machine, there could be a correlation in ability
to learn machine languages.

Could someone make a poll here?

I speak norwegian and english fluently and dont translate in my head when
using english, but I'm currently in and around central/south america and
learning spanish, and when speaking spanish I at the moment translate from
english so probably a long way to go before I could consider me trilingual.
Whats interesting about languages is that just like programming languages two
different languages are not equally adept for explaining the same situations.

~~~
nihilocrat
I don't feel the analogy is entirely accurate. Imagine having to learn 5 "if"
statements, or 10 ways to say "++". In a spoken conversation, you don't get to
look up the API docs if you forgot something. However, most programmers are
likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and
many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

However, I do feel there's some similarities between constructing a possibly-
correct sentence and seeing if it actually works, and constructing some
possibly-correct code and seeing if it compiles.

~~~
vorg
> most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming
> books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English
> as a common language.

Reading English is a smallish subset of fluency in English, i.e. being able to
also speak, listen to, and write English. Technical specs often use simple
written English, relying on example code. So I'm not sure if what non-English
programmers do can be called "bilingualism".

------
ma2rten
I grew up bilingually (Dutch and German, quite similar languages, but still).
Did that make me smarter? I am not sure.

I do fell I have a natural talent to learn languages - I just don't make use
of it. In school I was always too lazy to learn vocabulary. However, I feel
like I just assimilated the grammatical rules of the English language, without
ever having to do much exercises or making typical grammatical errors that
other students made. Once I was past a curtain point I could just read a text
with new words in it and subconsciously derive their meaning from the context,
without even noticing them. (This can also be annoying from time to time,
because sometimes I'd make wrong assumptions about the meaning.)

So, I would say I was able to learn English more like a native speaker learns
a language. Is this, because I grew up bilingually? Maybe. It is certainly an
interesting theory. Part of it might also be hanging around the internet and
exposing myself to English more then other students.

EDIT: Maybe it's also because I started programming quite early. I started to
program before I learned English, so I had to learn words like WHILE, IF,
INPUT by hard (QBasic, eh). Do other early programmers among you feel like it
had an impact on your abilities to learn natural languages?

~~~
flocial
I'm bilingual too. I found this abstract interesting:

"bilinguals typically have lower formal language proficiency than monolinguals
do; for example, they have smaller vocabularies and weaker access to lexical
items. The benefits, however, are that bilinguals exhibit enhanced executive
control in nonverbal tasks requiring conflict resolution, such as the Stroop
and Simon tasks. These patterns and their consequences are illustrated and
discussed. We also propose some suggestions regarding underlying mechanisms
for these effects. "

<http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/19/1/19.short>

------
gtani
Studies on this, meditation, TDCS, bright lights (the no brainer heh) and
musical training on brain development in young children and brain activity in
adults (written in my 2nd language)

[http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-
six-w...](http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-ways-to-
boost-your-brain)

------
akg
I grew up with Hindi and English, learned Spanish in school and now am
teaching myself German. It seems that I can switch easily between Hindi and
English, but while I am learning German and try to speak Spanish, I confuse
Spanish words for German ones. I am not sure of the neurology that is going on
here, but I am sure that it is the process of building these neural
connections to new languages is what keeps your brain active and perhaps
conditions your brain to make new connections elsewhere as well. Just a guess.

------
orky56
I'd be curious to find out how performance varies by the age in which someone
learns that new language. It's possible that the harmful effects affecting
development only happen in childhood, whereas in later years the benefits may
be more pronounced.

When discussing attention and multitasking, the experts are the ones who are
able to switch tasks in the least amount of time and get going on something
completely different. Perhaps bilingualism helps in this analogous situation
as well.

------
EGreg
Here is a major benefit that bilingualism has given me -- I am able to
converse directly with my developers in Russia and the Ukraine, so I can
connect with them and motivate them better. As a result of the culture fit, I
was able to find good developers more quickly, and save money. The stuff we've
built with the team at <http://qbix.com/about> would have taken half a million
dollars otherwise.

------
aen
I was sufficiently bilingual with English and Chinese at the age of nine or
ten. I've always mostly think in the abstract and images, even before I was
bilingual. I have exceptional spatial IQ so I guess it overrides everything
else. The article is true in the sense it has probably improved my mental
agility.

------
ranit8
Is there any research about learning speech and sign language simultaneously?

~~~
evincarofautumn
I would be interested to read such research as well. I attend Rochester
Institute of Technology (RIT), which is also the location of the National
Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). Anecdotally, the majority of deaf
folks here report thinking in ASL. This is even the case with many English-
speaking people who are hard-of-hearing or have cochlear implants.

~~~
vitno
You literally stole the words right out of my mouth fellow RIT student... I'm
amazed at how often I find us on the interet…

------
tzaman
"I thought English is the only language in the world?" </sarcasm off>

Disclaimer: My primary language is not English.

