

Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds - hellosmithy
http://ronbarak.tumblr.com/post/22722767367/bilingual-brain-boost-two-tongues-two-minds-by

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acabal
I was raised trilingual: born in America to a Colombian dad and Lithuanian
mom, so I speak English, Spanish, and Lithuanian. My Lithuanian has gotten a
bit rusty since my younger days (mostly out of lack of practice--it's not a
language you hear every day), but otherwise I'm fine with all three. Though I
can't quite put my finger on it, I have no doubt in my mind that being raised
with three languages has had a significant positive impact in how I think. And
it's only as I've gotten older that I've realized what a gift that was. When I
was young everyone would tell me that, but I didn't believe them because it
seemed so natural!

If anything, knowing more than one language makes you better appreciate the
commonalities of all langauges. For example English and Spanish are heavily
rooted in Latin (English mostly in vocabulary), so you see a lot of words
inbetween. Likewise Lithuanian also has a surprising amount of vocabulary
lifted directly from Latin. Knowing all three and how these seemingly
completely disparate languages are in fact related in many ways fills me with
wonder.

~~~
devolve
Me as well, having Romanian parents, being born in Thailand (where they taught
me English) and coming to Sweden at age two. Romanian, being the last language
I learned well, is the rustiest of course.

But I too feel that one can appreciate the commonalities of all the languages,
and that, at least for me, I often can see how languages are built, through
the pre- and suffixes, and how they work in a Latin manner. This has helped a
lot when I had to learn a fourth language in school (French for 4 years,
Spanish for 2 - both being very poor now that I haven't trained).

For these reasons I am shocked that people actually thought that raising a
bilingual child would do damage their intelligence, seeing how a lot of smart
people have been polyglots - although that was not necessarily something they
were raised to be, but still.

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tokenadult
I see several examples here of native speakers of two or more languages in the
same language family (e.g., Indo-European). Our example at home is two older
children (one who is grown up now, making his living as a hacker) who were
brought up as native first-language speakers of both Mandarin Chinese and
General American English. My wife is trilingual, growing up in a home that
spoke Taiwanese (Taiwan dialect of Minnan Chinese), learning Mandarin as the
sole language of school instruction, and learning English beginning in junior
high school. Her higher education was in the United States, in the medium of
English (of course). I grew up as a monolingual native speaker of General
American English (although both my parents had had some foreign language
instruction in school, in different languages, and each had living relatives
born in the United States who were native speakers of non-English languages).
I began learning Chinese, among several other languages, while at university,
after learning German and Russian at school.

Oddly, the first language I ever spoke to my wife was actually Japanese, the
usual Japanese greeting for a first-time meeting, "はじめまして. どうぞよろしく." Over the
years, we have grown strongly to prefer speaking English with each other (from
initially mostly speaking Mandarin with each other) because she finds it more
congenial to speak what is really on her mind when speaking English. That's a
cultural difference between American culture and Taiwanese culture--greater
frankness in family conversations in America.

We were quite resolute in speaking Mandarin whenever we were together, whether
living in the United States or in Taiwan, as our two older sons were growing
up. I would speak to them in English if I was alone with one or both of them.
They switched effortlessly from English to Chinese or back as my wife was
present or not.

Literacy is HARD to maintain in languages in which the relationship between
speech and writing is more remote than in English, as is surely the case in
Chinese. I know many, many, many native speakers of Chinese who received their
primary, secondary, and even higher educations in Chinese-speaking countries
who forget how to write many Chinese characters if they spend a lot of time
abroad. Computer input used to be nasty for Chinese, but it is coming along
now even in American versions of Windoze. Literature is also more interesting
to read if it is uncensored by the government, which gives English-language
literature an enormous worldwide draw. But it is definitely life-enriching and
thought-provoking to know two or more languages to reasonably high
proficiency, and I have enjoyed spending the majority of my life able to
communicate in Chinese.

One considerable advantage for the child who grows up bilingual is learning
yet more languages as second languages when an adult more readily than do
adults who grew up speaking only one language. By diligent study of
linguistics, after having some foreign language study (German) that began in
elementary school, I acquired enough Chinese to work professionally as an
interpreter and a translator, and have enough reading German to be able to do
research in that language, and smatterings of other languages. But all the
native bilingual members of my family do much better than I do per unit of
time in learning languages, so they have many choices before them as occasion
arises to learn other languages for various purposes. That helps with second-
language acquisition of an understandable pattern of pronunciation, too.

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digitalengineer
Very true! In my part of the Netherlands Dutch is the official language, but
the much older and local other language is Frisian. What you see often is
students talking Frisian to other Frisians and Dutch to non-Frisians even
during the same group-conversation. They don't mean to, but can't help
themselves. The "other mind" takes over seamlessly. I've seen Non-Frisians
kindly ask if they can just talk Dutch only to hear them speak Frisian after
about 20 seconds.

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mootothemax
My wife (Polish) and I (British) are currently trying to have a child, and
very much want to encourage our children to be bilingual.

I've spoken to a couple of people here who have one Polish parent, one non-
Polish parent, and all seem to agree that it's easy enough to keep up the "Mum
speaks Polish, Dad speaks language X" game for the first few years. Both said,
though, that the real challenge was keeping interested during their teenage
years.

That appears to be the challenge; thinking long-term, does anyone have any
experience being raised in bilingual households? Did you keep interested past
a certain age, and if so, how?

~~~
david927
Don't worry, they'll already be fully bilingual by about seven. After that,
it's a question of it they want to speak it or not, but they will already be
bilingual.

If you live in Britain, make sure to back up the exposure to the Polish with
films, books, trips to Poland, etc. (If you live in Poland, the opposite,
obviously.) Your child needs to get the whole cultural experience, not just
your wife speaking.

~~~
mootothemax
Thanks, that's really encouraging :)

Great point about culture; we're in Poland right now (that might change in a
couple of years), and aim to continue visiting both countries for a long time
yet. We'll be trying to mix and match as much as possible, so hopefully some
from both cultures will rub off :)

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tomp
I love learning languages. I chose 12 languages and made a plan to learn each
of them for a month, instead of watching TV. That way, in 5 years time, I will
hopefully be very happy to have made this decision now.

~~~
mathattack
Don't you think it will take more than a month? Or are you that solid at
learning them already? If so, I'm very impressed!

~~~
tomp
No, but I don't care. There are some languages that are similar to languages I
already know (e.g. Russian to Slovene, or Danish to English and German), some
are different (Chinese, Arabic), so they will inevitably take a long time...
But I'm not motivated by _knowing_ languages, that is not my goal, _learning_
languages is more important.

In any case, I don't think that the amount of time spent learning matters
much, immersion is what is really important. If I ever go somewhere where I'm
forced to speak a language for 2 weeks or so, I will learn much more than 6
months studying alone.

~~~
mathattack
Immersion is the right path. But wouldn't be better to spend each of the next
12 years in a different country (feasible if you're a top programmer) rather
than swapping every month?

Again, if you're a prodigy it can work.

Or is this all a parallel to learning technical languages?

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tomp
It would be better, if my goal was to _know_ these languages. But, as I've
said, I don't much care about that. Learning languages is an intellectually
stimulating, past-time activity. If I learn something, great. If I don't, also
great.

Also, I don't like planning too far ahead. Usually, I draw the limit at about
1 month, so 12 years is a very very long period of time.

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huhtenberg
Nothing impresses me more in people than their fluency in more than one
language.

This is the one skill that is so raw and fundamental that it beats hands down
everything else a person can ever learn, be it athletics, flying a jet or
mastering business management. I worked with a tech support intern who was
just starting in the business. He was white, in his early 20s and seemed like
of an Irish descent. Then at some point he casually mentioned he spoke
Chinese. What blew me away is how instantaneously my opinion of him changed.
He jumped from being a smart guy, of which there's a metric ton, to someone I
started to _respect_. Weird stuff, but perhaps it's just me.

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billpaetzke
Does the term bilingual limit itself to learning two language's fluently as a
child? Or does it include learning a new language as an adult as well? And
does it also demand that the person speak both languages with the repesctive
native accent?

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mathattack
I've noticed that in some circles, people compete not on "What care do you
drive?" but "How many languages do your kids speak?"

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WiseWeasel
It would also be interesting to see how learning a non-phonetic alphabet, like
Chinese or Japanese Kanji affects your brain. Learning tens of thousands of
pictographs by heart is no easy feat, and I can tell you that bilingualism
does _not_ prepare you for that.

~~~
lars512
Kanji contain repeated elements ("radicals"), which form something of a
graphical alphabet. Learning a new character's form is not too difficult then,
you can identify that it's radicals A, B and C, in this kind of arrangement.
Basically, it's neatly pre-chunked for memorisation.

The pronunciation of kanji is more difficult than their visual layout, and
arguably where most of the burden is in Japanese. A single kanji can have
pronunciations it's picked up from several periods in history. In practice, it
just means that it might have a handful of different pronunciations in
different contexts. Learning all these contexts takes time.

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jezclaremurugan
I think if you are not a native English speaker, you get a second language for
free! And Indians in general have three languages, their local mother tongue,
national language (Hindi) and English.

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amalag
Most asian parents speak to their children in their native tongue, most likely
the same for all immigrants, including hispanic. I know many friends whose
kids spoke only their asian language until they hit preschool where they
learned english. Kids pick up languages very fast when they are immersed in
it.

~~~
jedihamster
Anyone ever think of the negative impact. I've seen small local schools
flooded with children who haven't learnt English.The extra attention they
require slows down learning for the other kids in the class that actually
speak English.

Is that fair?

~~~
Yoms
Speaking as a parent of two children who we have spoken exclusively Spanish
to, and who picked up English from their environment, friends, and school.
There has not been any impact. And this is coming from the teachers, who are
usually extremely surprised to learn that we speak only Spanish at home.

You underestimate the ability of children to absorb knowledge from their
environment.

As a matter of fact, if anything, it has been a net positive. Kids at a young
age have a huge curiosity about languages and having bilingual kids in the
classroom encourages the other kids to learn. My first graders class begged to
have my daughter teach them some Spanish, and the teacher set aside some time
for her to do so. The other parents heard from their kids, and thanked the
teacher for it!

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jgrahamc
I learnt French at school and did badly and then as an adult learnt French to
a very high standard (I would call myself fluent and not bilingual). Something
definitely happened to my brain as my French got really good; it was like I
became two different people.

~~~
david927
Most people think of language as a dictionary of words -- but it's really the
codification of a culture. So when you speak it (fluently), you change
yourself to express yourself through that culture. The same expression
(perfectly translated) can mean different things in different cultures, for
example.

I speak two other languages fluently, and I'm a slightly different person in
each language. It's really fascinating.

~~~
personlurking
On being a slightly different person, I also speak two other languages which I
learned from 18 yrs old and onwards. While I wouldn't say I'm a different
person in either of the three, I would say I'm not quite me in the second and
third. All the nuances, humor, etc that a person shows in their first language
can be lost in translation and therefore being yourself isn't as easy. People
are likely to think you are quieter than you normally are (in your own
language), basically that you are less of everything you actually are.

It takes a long time, I find, to reach a comfort level in another language
that rivals that of how you express yourself in your mother tongue. I've been
speaking Portuguese (my 3rd language) at least 50% of the time for the past 7
years or so and I'm still not able to hit my mark, as if it were my own...but
I'm close. Btw, these last few years, I speak it 80% of the time.

If I were to venture a guess as to why 'hitting my mark' isn't so easy, I'd
say that with most language learners, there's a certain point in your learning
where you say to yourself, "I'm fluent enough". Reading and writing, I'm in
the 95 percentile in Portuguese but with speaking (seemingly no matter how
much I speak), I stay at around 85%.

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antman
AskHN: The consensus is that each parent speaks his languge so as not to
confuse the child. When the parents are taking to each other in the presence
of the child, does each one talk to his own language? Or in that case it
doesn't matter?

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alpine
I'm not so sure about the statement that being bilingual reduces the
vocabulary. If this is true, this would discourage me from raising a kid to
speak two languages... after all, wasn't George Orwell's thesis in 1984 that
removing words from the language removed the ability to think? Who would want
to do this to a child? Does learning Latin as a second language, or Ruby
indeed, restrict your vocabulary? I doubt it.

~~~
rcthompson
George Orwell was talking about removing _important_ words from the language.
For example, removing any words relating to democracy and freedom from the
language would prevent people from expressing what they thought they might
want the government to give them. This isn't just reducing someone's
vocabulary. This is targeted destruction of a language's capacity to express
specific concepts. When you learn a language, you learn the important words
first.

We can make an analogy to programming languages. The reduced vocabulary (if
any) from learning two languages at once can be likened to the fact that when
you learn two programming languages you will probably not be familiar with as
many modules from each language that you learn, whereas focusing on one
programming language would allow you to deeply learn all the modules
available. However, you would still fully learn the syntax and most of the
core features of both programming languages. In contrast, the analogy to what
George Orwell was talking about would be removing features from the core
language to the point that it is no longer Turing-complete, and is only
capable of expressing "approved" programs. Kind of like HQ9+[1], only instead
of "hello world", quine, and 99 bottles, it's "The government is great", "I
love the government", and "All power to the government". The plus can still
increment the accumulator, but the accumulator represents how much you love
the government.

[1] <http://esolangs.org/wiki/HQ9%2B>

~~~
alpine
You are absolutely right, he was talking about words that were important to
the Party. Words that facilitated criticism, dissent etc. However, my point
still stands. If you consider a child with a good vocabulary in two languages
versus an excellent vocabulary in one language, which supports the superior
reasoning?

~~~
rcthompson
Judging from the other comment threads here, I would guess the two languages
with good vocabulary in each.

