
Learning a new language improves tolerance - kawera
https://theconversation.com/how-learning-a-new-language-improves-tolerance-68472
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Fr0ntBack
I tend to be skeptical of claims that bilingualism improves any mental skill.
The studies often fail to control for confounding variables correctly. See
this article: [http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-
battl...](http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-battle-over-
bilingualism/462114/)

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grok2
It's likely the real reason is the very act of interacting with another
culture improves your understanding of that culture and makes you more
tolerant. Probably not specific to just learning the language, etc.

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ipnon
The flips-side is that any significant interaction with another culture
requires learning a language, so are they just two sides of the same coin?

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snarf21
Breaking news: expanding your knowledge about new things makes you less closed
minded!

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agumonkey
Sidenote: there should be some kind of global organization to develop non
touristic travelling. Kids seeing other cultures, non neighboring, but not too
foreign at first. Makes you appreciate others and your own much better.

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101101001010
Actually there is one. It's a no profit organization called Afs (afs.org). Its
main purpose is to make adolescents (students between 14-17yo) explore a new
country being hosted in a local family and studying in a local school. The
participant makes a list of 10 (or less) preferred countries to which he'd
like to go but can't choose the city. The latter is chosen depending on the
compatibility with the families disponible in that country. The whole network
of countries and hosting families is composed by volunteers (no economic
benefits) all over the world who share the same goals: discovering and
understanding new cultures. Disclaimer: I went one year abroad with afs and am
currently a volunteer in my country.

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Tharkun
Does not match my experiences. Many of my fellow Belgians are trilingual. If
anything, I noticed a lot less intolerance living abroad in a monolingual
country than I did in Belgium. Your mileage may vary.

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squozzer
I find myself tempted to argue the converse -- that tolerance for different
people drives one to learn a foreign language. Or maybe an underlying
motivation -- for instance, at one time Russian was a useful skill for people
interested in national security work -- might play a more important role.

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lalos
Makes sense, language is a key aspect of a community if you speak the language
you feel identified and usually the community welcomes you.

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s_m_t
Is that really tolerance? All you've done is expanded your in group. You could
still be just as intolerant of your now slightly smaller outgroup.

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xiaoma
That's how it's always been. We've extened our in-groups from family to tribe
to city state to nation / religious group to (for some) all of humanity. But
we still put billions of intelligent, feeling animals through a lifetime of
pain so we can eat them. Perhaps in a few centuries the umbrella of inclusion
will be broad enough to protect all mammals.

The arrow of history flies toward larger and larger in-groups but humans have
always been horrible to those they label as "other".

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pmoriarty
Learning a new language, spending some time living in another country where I
was not a speaker of the language, and just traveling around other countries
has made me really appreciate at a deep level how tough immigrants and
foreigners have it, and how shitty their treatment is even in the most
"progressive" and "enlightened" countries.

I've never felt more embarrassingly like a child and an idiot than when trying
to communicate to someone else using my primitive language skills. I must have
sounded so stupid, with my monosyllabic, one or two word sentences. Yet inside
I knew I wasn't, and had a lot to say, and really wanted to participate in the
conversation on a much more sophisticated level, yet I couldn't.

Experiences like the above made me be a lot more understanding towards people
making the effort to speak my own language when their native tongues are
something else. Of course, I'd always known on an intellectual, abstract level
that people who struggle to speak my language aren't necessarily stupid, but
it's quite another thing to repeatedly go through such experiences yourself.
It's much like the empathy one gets for really sick people when one has spent
a good deal of time as a patient in a hospital yourself, or suffered from some
serious, chronic illness.

I also hated being discriminated against and feeling like a suspect just
because I was different or spoke another language, and hated being forced to
comply with all sorts of discriminatory and protectionist laws. Work permits
are one small example, where I really didn't see why I should be forbidden
from working in another country if I could do the job as well as any native --
except obviously the natives want to unfairly advantage themselves in the job
market. Really annoying.

There are harsher examples, like being treated like dirt at
immigration/customs while the natives get cheerily waved through. Or being
treated like a cash machine by hustlers, thieves, and law enforcement just
because I'm a foreigner.

So, yeah, these and other instances of discrimination were just little tastes
of what being a foreigner in my own country must feel like -- except worse in
many cases, because people are often forced to work menial jobs where they're
treated much worse than I was, getting attacked by xenophobic natives, having
their children bullied because they look different or speak with an accent,
even having a President who got elected based on his hatred of and intention
to deport millions of immigrants, etc.

Being exposed to other cultures, which is an inevitable part of language
learning (except for the learning of artificial languages like Loglan or
programming language, which have no culture) also helps one to be more
tolerant and appreciative of differences.

Food is a great example of this. Many people spend all their lives in their
own country, sometimes not even ever leaving their home town, and only ever
eat the same food they were brought up eating. When you get exposed to other
cultures, you often try their food, and your world is enlarged, expanding your
idea of what's possible and what's good. You might find that once you try it,
you actually like some weird, alien food that you used to turn your nose up
at, or maybe didn't even know existed.

I'm convinced that much of the hatred towards immigrants and foreigners stems
from lack of travel to other countries and exposure to other cultures. Way too
many people are far too insular and provincial, and even in the rare cases
when they do travel to other countries they tend to stick to their own kind
and what they're used to at home, defeating much of the point of leaving home
in the first place.

