
How Learning a Second Language Changed My Life - cyunker
http://www.chadfowler.com/2009/8/2/how-learning-a-second-language-changed-my-life
======
patio11
I'd be hard pressed to name any 30 seconds in my life more consequential than
these:

Counselor: "Wow, that's a lot of AP credits. Well, you've passed out of 3 of
the 5 classes freshman CS majors are supposed to take. We don't have enough CS
classes you're qualified for to fill the rest of the schedule. What are you
going to take?"

Me: "I don't know, I'm thinking a language. Do you have a list of the ones the
school teaches?"

Counselor: "Yep, page XXX."

Me: " _scans list_ Oh, Japanese sounds fun. High tech country, lots of money,
few English speakers. Sign me up."

Counselor: "I studied it in college, too. Its a "#%"%."

Me: "I'm up for a bit of a challenge."

I loved every minute of it, added another degree on, and here I am ten years
later in Nagoya looking at a stack of bug reports filed against the university
entrance exam administration system.

~~~
plinkplonk
"and here I am ten years later in Nagoya looking at a stack of bug reports
filed against the university entrance exam administration system."

So what would you recommend as a course of _self study_ in Japanese? ( I
assume such a thing is possible. I could be wrong)

Anything on the Internet is fine of course and I can buy any books available
on Amazon, but I can't really go back to school or attend classes (no good
Japanese teachers/schools where I live).

~~~
patio11
Candidly, I wouldn't.

If you put a gun to my head I'd say find yourself a copy of Japanese the
Spoken Language with the CDs and drill them until your ears bleed. In
particular, make sure you practice production (i.e. talk, talk, talk, if you
don't sound like the CD keep talking until you do, then drill some more). The
lack of somebody to tell you "You're saying everything... wrong" is one of the
largest problems with self-study.

The largest is that almost everyone gives it up.

~~~
plinkplonk
"Candidly, I wouldn't.

Thanks! What if I wanted (primarily) to read, write and understand (spoken)
Japanese? (vs speak without mangling pronounciation) Would that be equally
hard? Iow can self study get me to the point where I can watch a video clip or
movie in Japanese and not have to look at the subtitles?

~~~
patio11
So can I level with you for a moment?

Nine times out of ten, when someone in my social circles asks me how to study
Japanese, it is because they have some vague idea of enjoying
anime/manga/video games in the original. ( _Especially_ when they start
suggesting "Well, I don't need to actually be able to read anything, I just
want to be fluent" or the converse.)

Without specific reference to you, approximately 98% of the people I know who
went into Japanese with that objective gave up before they achieved any useful
level of proficiency. (And one now works at SquareEnix, living the otaku
dream.)

Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means
blocking off nights and weekends for the next _several years of your life_
because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going
to be work.

Two years from now, your fingers will bleed from writing practice, you'll know
a few hundred characters, and this snippet from Wiki:

米国Googleは人類が使う全ての情報を集め整理すると言う壮大な目的をもって設立された。独自開発したプログラムが、世界中のウェブサイトを巡回して情報を集め、検索用の索引を作り続けている。約30万台のコンピュータが稼動中といわれる。検索結果の表示画面や提携したウェブサイト上に広告を載せることで、収益の大部分をあげている。

will still be _mostly impenetrable_ to you. That is 6th grade Japanese.

I strongly suggest you find your driving motivation to learn the language
which will get you through moments of despair like that one. Which you'll have
plenty of, because learning languages is BLOODY HARD WORK.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I am fairly decent at Japanese. I can read 6th grade
level Wikipedia articles. Yay. I can also give technical presentations to
engineers and discuss outsourcing strategy with C-level executives. And you
know what? I have a veritable mountain of HARD WORK ahead of me.)

 _can self study get me to the point where I can watch a video clip_

Self study can get you to the point where you'd appreciate exactly how much
you just asked to be able to do. (Here's a trivial example: I watched Monsters
vs. Aliens yesterday. All of the military characters speak a cartoony parody
of what Japanese translators think Japanese people would think sounds like
what Americans think macho military types sound like. Were you planning on
learning fake military Japanese? )

(Five second fake military Japanese lesson: 諸君 (Shokun) means "you", in the
sense of a form of address used by a military officer to address his
underlings as a body. An American writer might substitute "gentlemen", as in
"Gentlemen, it has been an honor and a privilege serving with you. _stirring
music_ "

This word has no practical use in Japanese aside from signaling that you're
trying to talk like you're military (or nationalist). Because this little
factoid is 99.95% useless, you are unlikely to ever encounter it in a
textbook.)

~~~
plinkplonk
"Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language
means blocking off nights and weekends for the next several years of your life
because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going
to be work."

Great answer, thanks!

Just for some context, I speak read and write about 7 languages (4 Indian
languages - 3 contemporary, one ancient - Sanskrit) and 3 European languages
(English, French and German) fluently, (fluently == I can read and write
classical works, can be airdropped into a country speaking the language and be
fine, but no one really speaks Sanskrit anymore of course :-D ) and can speak
(but not read and write) a couple more Indian languages.

From my experience of learning all the languages I _do_ know, I know that they
are "work" to learn and don't have any illusions of learning Japanese being
"easy".

I took 3 plus years of classes in both French and German for example, but I
_can_ imagine someone who puts in _serious_ self directed effort (and knows a
language in the "family" already - Sanskrit grammatical structures are close
to the the ones in German, for example with the verb coming at the end of a
long sentence,and several word "running together" and so on) learning either
of these from instructional material (books + cds), listening to
radio/mp3/videoclips/ newspapers + dictionary +grammar book + Internet
discussion and so on, to the point where they may have strong accents, but
they _can_ read, write and listen to radio broadcasts etc.

Now I've learned only languages within the Indo European (English, French and
German) and "Indian" langauges (though the South Indian languages belong to a
different family than Sanskrit and Hindi which are "North Indian").

I enjoy learning languages and was considering learning a non-European, non-
Indian language "just for fun". So yes, the motivation was "for fun" but
without the illusion of learning languages being easy, or with an anticipated
"giving up" before a few years of effort.

So anyway I was considering Arabic or Hebrew or one of Chinese/Japanese.

Unfortunately I don't have teachers/classes nearby and I _think_
Japanese/Chinese etc may have additional difficulties than say, French or
German due to their scripts and tonality and general mind-bendingness(at least
I think they are mind bending!).

I was just asking you whether you think the combination of all other possible
resources (books, cd, dvd, internet discussion, video clips etc) could get one
to a point of reasonable, non-perfect-pronounciation-but-can-read-and-write-
and-understand fluency in Japanese, effort over a few years being a given, for
someone gifted at languages.

I take it you are saying "no, not likely".

Fair Enough!

Thanks again! The great thing about HN is that it is so easy to tap into so
many knowledgeable people.

~~~
tel
Asian languages pose a difficulty to those of us only familiar with European
languages, certainly. I cannot speak for Japanese directly, but at the highest
level Chinese presents the (really quite large) challenges of a writing system
where thousands of words are completely orthogonal and there is little (but
not zero) connection between a word's written form and its pronunciation; a
spoken language that depends on tonal motion to convey meaning at the word
level similarly to how an English speaker modifies the connotation of a
sentence using tone; and the concept of a language built around slightly
different motivating philosophies such as outlining things chronologically
instead of descriptively as English does. To my knowledge Japanese shares the
first one, not the second, and has the added difficulty of an extremely
pervasive system of honorifics which greatly modify the spoken language.

That all being said, if you keep an open mind Chinese isn't that difficult to
learn. Characters will, after you learn several hundred, begin to form
something which feels not unlike a vast alphabet (many people recognize the
idea of radicals, but this extends to characters which are collections of
other characters though not really radial/phonetic style). Speech is
definitely going to be difficult for a long time and you will probably
experience a lot of frustration if you think for any instant it'll be
comparative to learning a language you've already got a foothold on. Finally,
while you might have a slightly easier time than me with an Indian cultural
background, I pretty firmly believe that language and culture are inescapably
bound and if you don't have that and don't get a chance to experience it your
learning prospects will be crippled.

So yeah. It's not easy. Then again, if I were in your position I'd pretty much
jump into one immediately. If you learn Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua) you could
probably jump into some of the more common dialects (Cantonese/Guangdonghua)
or Korean relatively quickly. I'm not sure if the same thing happens with
Japanese.

------
tel
I absolutely agree with all of the points Chad makes here! I just recently
returned from a 3 month stay in China after studying Chinese for two years and
feel the same.

An interesting story was when I met another American traveler in a hostel in
Shanghai. He was clearly loving his time exploring China, but every time we
spoke I felt so bad for him. He was absolutely shackled to the parts of town
where he could safely tread or easily find. I would spend a day wandering
through streets, major and minor, dipping into shops or checking out maps to
find new locations. I could fearlessly walk into a restaurant and have some
idea of what I would be getting into. Best of all, I could ask anyone to help
me out or just to tell me about their country -- and in a place like China,
with thousands of years of rich history, people love to tell you wonderful
stories about their country.

When you speak someone's language, they feel comfortable around you. They're
willing to help you out or listen to you try to explain things you're not
quite capable of. There's an immediate reciprocation of the effort you put
into that immersion in their warmth and desire to help. Better, if you go
somewhere where foreigners are less common (seated train rides in China are a
particular example) everyone is excited to meet and share with you.

All of these things are pretty much inaccessible if you don't speak the
language. So, as stereotypical as the desire to stop being monolingual is for
your average American, absolutely do learn another language and then go use
it.

You can't imagine how tiny a chunk of the world you live in until you do.

------
mpk
I'm always reminded of an anecdote my father told me.

Once, when he was working abroad in Australia, a faxed document arrived in
French, which no one else on site could read. So he translated it to English.

This prompted a coworker to comment "How nice, you speak two languages!" So he
reminded this person that he was, in fact, Dutch - he could speak that as
well.

"Oh, that doesn't count, it's your native language!"

....

~~~
dkokelley
He should have asked the coworker how many languages he spoke.

~~~
mpk
The coworker only spoke English. My dad made some remark about his coworker
not speaking any language at all, but I figured you'd get that from the
context.

I mean really - that's pretty easy from here on out, right?

~~~
dkokelley
Very straight forward. The point was to see the coworker realize on his own
that by his own standards he spoke no languages at all.

------
idlewords
To anyone considering a second language, I would recommend choosing one that
is widely spoken somewhere where you can't get by with English - it will
unlock a whole new part of the world for you.

You might also consider studying a non-Indo-European language. It will take
more time, but the experience is the linguistic equivalent to discovering
functional programming after a lifetime of seeing procedural code.

~~~
FraaJad
which Chad did by learning Kannada, a Dravidian (a non-Indo-european)
language.

~~~
idlewords
Wow, you read the article too?

------
pbhj
Here in Wales schoolchildren are forced to learn a minority language in
school. Welsh Language is given a very prominent position - it's only spoken
in Wales (and bizarrely in a small area in Patagonia). I'd sooner have my kids
learn a language they can use to communicate with other people that can't
speak English - it's possible that there are perhaps a couple of kids now that
haven't been taught English, Welsh all but died before being resurrected as a
[false] part of nationalist pride.

I find it very strange, I'd sooner Hindi or Urdu or Mandarin or Japanese or
Spanish. Something useful. They may as well be learning Ancient Sumerian (I'd
still probably prefer that).

Not all second languages are equal.

~~~
euccastro
A language that your kids can identify with as their own and practise everyday
will do more for their further language learning ability than an 'useful'
language that they'll gloss over in the classroom and seldom get to practice
with natives.

Also, if that 'false' nationalism perchance catches on, your English-Sumerian
speaking children might end up feeling like half foreigners in their own
country. I've seen that kind of thing and it's sad.

~~~
pbhj
It's catching on, the gov spend millions on it. There's a lot of anti-English
[people] sentiment which feeds into not speaking English (just because of the
name of the language _rolls-eyes_ ). Gov jobs require it, despite not needing
it. Middle classes use it to get kids into Welsh school and away from the poor
performers and chav-y types.

There are more daily Urdu and Mandarin speakers in the city I live in than
Welsh speakers. Indeed, I work in a store and the only welsh language I hear
is from educators speaking to their kids.

It's probably the thing that would/will push me to move or seek alternative
education (eg home-ed). I don't see Welsh language as being important enough
to be a part of every school lesson.

~~~
euccastro
What you call "not speaking English" I'd just call "speaking Welsh". Your
framing such self affirmation gestures negatively, as an aggression to the
other, only shows your bias. The world will hopefully keep one more language
around thanks to the people that make that perfectly legitimate choice. In any
event, I bet any adversary feelings towards the English language are not due
to the name but to the fact that it's been dislodging Welsh out of existance,
as your reasoning illustrates.

A Gov employee should be expected to know all official languages in the
country where she'll be serving. Especially if she is going to have to face
public.

Considering to move or home school your children only to keep their minds
uncontaminated by Welsh sounds more like political or social prejudice than
actual educational concern. Trust me, knowing Welsh will only make it easier,
not harder, for them to learn Urdu and Mandarin. In Spain, students from
nations with one or more languages of their own average a higher proficiency
in foreign languages (including Castillian, AKA Spanish) than those of
monolingual provinces.

------
yread
There is a saying in czech (and in some culturally close languages as well)
that goes like "Kolik řečí umíš, tolikrát jsi člověkem".

I was totally stuck with the translation but google says it could be something
along the lines of "You live a new life for every new language you speak. If
you know only one language, you live only once" or shorter "How many languages
you speak, so many times you are a human being".

~~~
pjonesdotca
The way I heard that quote was "You receive a new soul every time you learn a
new language"

~~~
delackner
What a delightful, and in my limited experience, true idea. Having spent
stretches of my life thinking mostly in english, then mostly in french, and
now mostly in japanese and english, there is a noticeable influence on the
basic kind and character of thoughts I have in each of the three. It isn't
huge, but each has its own thought coloration and has concepts that are more
easily expressed than the others.

Most fun for me now is talking with someone else that speaks all three, and
watching the conversation just naturally blend them. Sometimes the blending is
black/white (several sentences in one, then a statement in another state-
changes the conversation into another language) and other times it ends up a
mish-mash of two.

------
poshj
I speak Indonesian and Javanese as my native language, "forced to learn"
Japanese, English, Malay, and a bit of Chinese here in Japan. Contrary to
common opinion, I regret that I learn and speak a lot of languages because I
don't feel adequate enough in any of them, even my native language. Being able
to use a lot of language really broaden your view, but at the same time, you
will incline to develop multiple personalities/conscious in your effort to
speak like the native. I find it difficult to express myself in a "constant"
way regardless languages, hence the feeling of inadequate.

~~~
euccastro
I was raised in Galician but taught to read and write in Castillian (Spanish),
and grew up in an environment where almost all media, signs, labelling, ...,
were in Castillian. Programming related learning and work has taken most of my
studying since my teen years, and I did that exclusively in English. Because
of this, I estimate English is already the language in which I've done most of
my reading and a fair share of my writing.

I can relate to what you say, because for quite a time when trying to express
myself formally I used to end up resorting to a lot of transliterated
Castillian constructs and phraseology. Other times, ideas would come in
English and I'd try and find a Galician equivalent. I only got past that after
a conscious decision to immerse myself in Galician and Portuguese literature.
Sometimes I still feel like learning my native language as a second language.

And I'd be at a loss if I had to talk about programming related concepts in
anything but English. I'd have to reinvent the vocabulary as I go. My own
scribbled notes for personal use are written in a patois that is mostly
Galician generously sprinkled with English.

------
ivanyv
Nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks that.

I learned English when I was about 12, in part thanks to my passion for
computers and in part because I had great teachers (in public school!). It's
been one of the greatest gifts I've been given.

I know very few people who understand it. I do tell many how life changing it
is, and how it greatly opens up your world and your mind... but mostly they
look at me bewildered:

"why would I learn that? I'm doing fine!" or, "Nah, too difficult, and I don't
have time"...

It's a shame, to not be able to share so many things I've learned with the
people I care about, and to know how much they're missing. Ignorance is indeed
bliss I guess.

I wouldn't even be here on HN if it wasn't for this.

------
jacquesm
Most 14 year olds in Europe study 2 sometimes 3 foreign languages.

It's very hard to stay mono-lingual in this environment. And then there are
all the children that have parents from more than one country. It's not rare
to see them growing up fluently tri-lingual.

------
dmix
<http://smart.fm> is a very useful service for learning a second language
(especially Japanese), highly recommended.

------
pbhj
I always got non-first language words confused. What interested me was when I
was relearning French and learning German (to read patent docs) after having
learnt sign-language (as my 4th studied language) I could think of words in
sign when I was trying to find the right French word. It's kinda weird to
think of a word and have an action come to mind.

~~~
holygoat
I have a similar anecdote — getting muddled between French and German when
learning them back-to-back at school — but bringing sign into the mix blows
mine away!

~~~
delackner
Makes a lot of sense actually. Just today I was forgetting the name of someone
I had just written down in the morning, and visualising the japanese
characters of their name as I had written them brought the name into clarity.

------
Mz
As a child, I wanted to be fluent in six languages. I speak a little German
and read and write a little French. I know a few words of Russian and a
smattering of Spanish. I have gotten some use of those, mostly German because
I have German relatives and lived there for a time. But I never became as
fluent as I wanted and it never opened up social opportunities like I had
fantasized it would -- opportunities like the author of this article
experienced. For me, learning a little HTML, XHTML and CSS have done far more
for my ability to reach out to other people and therefore has done far more
towards widening my horizons. I'm not particularly fluent in those either, but
they get a good deal more use than the human languages I dabble in. It has had
the unexpected side effect that I no longer bitterly regret not becoming
fluent in six human languages.

------
Pistos2
This article showcases that a critical component of attaining fluency in a
language is immersion. Many linguists insist that language cannot be separated
from culture. Another important ingredient in language learning is practicing
output; i.e. not restricting yourself solely to input (reading, listening).

------
sown
My university forced me to take a second language for a CS degree. The
department was located in Arts/Sciences, not engineering where it belonged.

It was a perilously stupid waste of time. It required 14 credit hours. 14
credit hours of learning a language I will never speak to anyone ever again
and never had any interest in learning. The only thing the language
requirement does now is make the CS degree at my alma-matar less competitive
since I would have taken more CS/Math/EE electives.

21 or 18 hours of humanities is enough. I'll get down-modded for being this
way but I don't care. This was the reality of the situation. It genuinely hurt
me. The only way it changed my life was make me miss out on interesting
elective classes, like AI or computer music and I also didn't have enough time
(in semesters) to do undergraduate research.

~~~
jasonkester
Give it time, man. Your priorities will change. Ten years ago you were
complaining that you'd never use any of that silly Math they were forcing you
to learn.

It took me 5 years before I appreciated the German I learned in high school. I
was in Bangkok airport and met a German woman that didn't speak a word of
English. She asked me something, and I _understood_ it. I opened my mouth and
a complete sentence came out in a language that I'd never truly believed that
people actually spoke in real life. That was the moment I got it.

So yeah, wait and see. Ten years from no I won't be surprised to find you
backpacking across Guatemala, burned out on writing code, and thanking that
stupid university for forcing you to learn a foreign language.

~~~
sown
> Ten years ago you were complaining that you'd never use any of that silly
> Math they were forcing you to learn.

No, I wasn't. I minored in math.

> Ten years from no I won't be surprised to find you backpacking across
> Guatemala

And no, I won't. One of the ways to make the pain go by faster was to go to a
language school in Mexico. Worse two weeks of my life in recent memory.

------
vijayr
The easiest way to learn a second or third language, would be in school. Many
Indian schools are English medium, but kids learn at least one more language,
as their 'second' language. Sometimes Hindi, sometimes Sanskrit or even a
foreign language like French. In addition to it, we learn our mother tongue
(assuming Hindi is not the mother tongue), so its easy to be trilingual.

There is one disadvantage though. Kids don't get to choose the language, its
pretty much decided for them by their parents. When we learn as adults, we can
pick and choose - depending on our goals.

~~~
FraaJad
The three language system exists in all South-Indian states. I studied
Kannada, English and Hindi from grade 5-8; Sanskrit, English and Kannada from
8-10; Sanskrit and English from 11-12. So that's 4 languages in 8 years :)

------
dbul
Kannada has a rep of being one of the hardest languages in India.

I love the secret language bit. I always speak Japanese in public and it is
great fun. Once, though, I met a couple at an event and I recognized them from
a time I was at a starbucks speaking about very personal affairs in Japanese.
It turns out they were from Japan. Embarrassing.

~~~
FraaJad
Kannada is no harder to learn to learn than any other Dravidian or Indo-
european languages.

If kannada is difficult to learn, the same can be said of Telugu, whose script
is close to kannada. And Hindi which also follows the same script rules
(forming composites from consonants and vowels using Devanagari script). This
is so much true that Sanskrit is often printed in Kannada script in my state
without any loss in phonetics and "spelling"

Tamil might be harder to learn as it is not phonetic. there is no unambiguous
way to write 'ha' and 'ga' for instance. Mohan (a proper noun) is written
mokan and called mogan.

So says a native kannada speaker who can speak 3 other languages, read 4 and
comprehend a couple more.

~~~
kragen
My experience from learning English, Spanish, Portuguese, some Japanese and
French, and a little bit of Chinese is that mostly-phonetic writing systems
are not actually difficult at all. I suspect I could learn the Kannada script
well enough to read aloud fluently in a day or two, but learning Kannada well
enough to speak it in conversation would take me at least three months,
probably more like three years.

My talent for scripts is very unusual, but I think that any person could
probably learn a phonetic script in maybe a few weeks at most.

~~~
djuedemann
"My talent for scripts is very unusual"

Your humility is very refreshing Mr Kragen.

~~~
kragen
Your sarcasm is noted, but misplaced. I came in first in the school spelling
bee every year throughout my childhood (until 8th grade, where I came in
second), without drilling for it, competing with kids who did drill for it, so
my disclaimer is just being realistic.

It's not a particularly important talent, since as I said, orthography is far
from the most important part of learning a language; if it were, I might feel
embarrassed about bringing it up.

But in context, it's important to point out that my experience with learning
scripts probably doesn't generalize that well, and normal people's experience
will be an order of magnitude worse. If you have a way I could have explained
that without either sounding conceited (to you) or simply not mentioning my
experience at all, I'd like to hear it.

------
socratees
That's pretty awesome. The fascinating thing is how his life changed just
because of his interest in a second language. What if he had learned just
french or spanish?. I think taking a different path than others sometimes pays
off well. Also reminds me that luck favors the one who is well prepared.

------
tokenadult
My whole life was entirely changed by the decision to try learning Chinese
after elementary school lessons in German (also a heritage language in my
family) and secondary school lessons in German. The East and West can meet--
just learn the language of the other side. I strongly recommend to everyone to
give an earnest try to learning a language you don't speak as a native
language, especially if your language-learning efforts can be paired with
lengthy foreign residence. There is a lot to learn from speaking to everyday
people who grew up in another country and who don't share your cultural
assumptions.

------
darkxanthos
I love that these types of articles make it to the front page of HN. It's not
about being shackled to technology but using technology where you need to to
free you and enrich your life. /swoon

------
indraneel24
"we’ve discovered...when you even try to say “Hello” or “Thank you” in their
language."

I'll attest to that, even though I live in the states. While this article I
was proud of both the author and my own Indian heritage. Learning languages is
a great thing to do, it's just a shame not all of us have the time to do it.
Makes me sad that my high school was forced to cut Latin from the curriculum —
it's a very interesting language to learn.

------
billswift
I've read that "joke" many times before. MOST people around the world are
monolingual, there are just fewer multi-lingual people in the US.

~~~
tokenadult
According to the book The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign-
Language Crisis by United States Senator Paul Simon,

[http://www.amazon.com/Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-
Forei...](http://www.amazon.com/Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-Foreign-
Language/dp/0826404049)

the United States is EXTREMELY unusual in its degree of monolingualism among
native-born people. The book said that the United States is the only country
in the world, for example, in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. academic
degree without gaining a working knowledge of a second language.

~~~
xiaoma
The book is wrong. People here in Taiwan can get PHDs without working
knowledge of a second language, depending on the school and department.

Recently, some English-only programs have been popping up and foreigners here
are getting advanced degrees from Taiwanese universities without learning any
Chinese. Amazingly, quite a few of those foreigners are getting degrees in
_Taiwan Studies_ , without the ability to understand much of anything
Taiwanese people speak or write.

Monolingual PHD programs aren't limited to Taiwan, either. In mainland Chinese
schools, 100% mandarin programs are even more common. I've also had the
acquaintance of a Japanese physics post-doc with what couldn't possibly be
construed as a "working" knowledge of English.

~~~
tokenadult
_People here in Taiwan can get PHDs without working knowledge of a second
language, depending on the school and department._

Thank you for mentioning the example of Taiwan, the country where I have lived
longest outside the United States. Let me first agree with you that I should
have reported the book's statement as "earn a Ph.D. academic degree without
being expected to gain a working knowledge of a second language," which more
accurately represents what the book said, and takes into account cases in
which the Ph.D. candidate does the bare minimum of what is required before
giving up on language study.

Let me ask some questions about current conditions in Taiwan. Isn't 大一英文
(first-year university English) still a routine course for university students
in Taiwan? And isn't English still one element of the college entrance
examination in Taiwan? And isn't English still a compulsory subject in
secondary schooling in Taiwan? (And, after all, isn't that the language we are
writing to each other just now, although it appears we could both write in
Chinese?)

But the situation of bilingualism in Taiwan is more nuanced than that. Most
people in Taiwan in my generation learned a second language in primary school.
They learned Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese) even though their home
language was either Taiwanese (in most cases) or Hakka or some other non-
Mandarin Sinitic language, or one of the non-Sinitic aboriginal languages of
Taiwan. Most people in Taiwan my age (Baby Boom generation) or younger are
proficient in Mandarin, but two generations ago very few people on Taiwan
spoke Mandarin at home. That's a major example of a huge amount of second-
language learning in a Third World poor country.

Accepting your correction that some people get Ph.D.s without MEETING the
expectation that they should learn a second language (which is how I should
have said what the book said in the first place), I still find it baffling
that in the United States there are large numbers of young people who pursue
higher education who never even consider enrolling in any second language
course, and who have not taken any such course in high school. Study of
Spanish is quite widespread in the United States, with French, German, and now
Chinese following behind, but there do seem here genuinely to be more people
farther along in higher education who have never, ever studied a foreign
language than there possibly could be in most other countries, where taking a
test in an acquired language is usually a routine part of college entrance
testing. I have had the appalling experience of meeting United States
professors of Chinese history who can't speak Modern Standard Chinese well
enough to talk their way out of a paper bag (I've met others who speak well),
so I think the Ph.D.-ready standard even in related disciplines here is not
high by world standards.

------
tallanvor
Learning a second language as an adult, while difficult, is definitely
worthwhile.

As an American in Norway, I'm struggling to learn Norwegian for many reasons,
not the least of which being that pretty much everyone here speaks English
very well and doesn't mind switching to English. Still, I'm continuing to work
on it and hopefully will be fairly fluent within a couple of years.

------
jrockway
The same applies to programming. (And I don't mean learning C# if you already
know Java.)

~~~
icey
Yeah, we might as well cut straight to the Sapir-Whorf chase

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

~~~
makmanalp
Executive summary of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The languages we speak and think
in have certain inherent cultural understandings that affect our perception of
things. Reading the whole thing is recommended though.

~~~
tokenadult
Agreeing with the author of the submitted article that learning a new language
is a wonderful thing, and agreeing with you in your capsule summary of the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity hypothesis), I have to
respectfully register disagreement with the strong version of that hypothesis.
Most people are stuck in their thinking because of evolutionarily developed
cognitive illusions that are not language-specific.

<http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1>

Many people can be very creative and think thoughts that have never been
thought before by their fellow language-speakers even if they are resolutely
monolingual. And many of the features of language that might seem to be the
most influential on human thought (e.g., whether or not a language has strong
concord for grammatical gender) in practice don't seem to lead to any
differences in thinking.

That said, even though the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is
wrong, it's still a good idea to learn a new language. That does, at the very
least, expose a reader or listener to authors or speakers from a different
cultural tradition, and that does tend to result in new ideas and new
approaches to identifying and solving problems.

------
torpor
I am Australian, living in Austria. My two year old son speaks German and
English now. It is an _awesome_ thing to see him understand English speakers,
and reply in German, and vice verse. I also speak German, but he is really
teaching me things about the language already that I never knew I'd
comprehend, after 10 years of speaking German myself already.

Once he gets older, I want to move us to somewhere in Asia, perhaps India, and
give him another language to speak, which we will learn together. I can't
think of a greater gift to give your child than another language, personally.
It really truly opens the world to him.

Of course, I'm a programmer. Language is my bread and butter. To be truthful,
I'm a bit ashamed that I haven't learned as many human languages as computer
languages, but there is still time for that.. ;)

~~~
jacquesm
Downmodded?

------
321abc
A fantastic book about learning languages:

How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on
Your Own

by Barry Farber

\- [http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Any-Language-
Inexpensively/d...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Any-Language-
Inexpensively/dp/0806512717)

which is available as a PDF here:

\-
[http://fld.hit.edu.cn/english/webedit/uploadfile/20085121524...](http://fld.hit.edu.cn/english/webedit/uploadfile/2008512152454548.PDF)

Some articles on the TPR method for language learning:

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/tprmax.htm>

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/krashentpr.htm>

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/ashertpr.htm>

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/ashertpr.htm>

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/firstday.htm>

More great articles on language learning here:

\- <http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/articles.htm>

~~~
idlewords
Anything with "quick" and "easy" in the title automatically discredits itself.
Language learning can be a lot of fun, but it's on a par with learning to play
a musical instrument, or build furniture. You're going to spend a long time on
it, and you're going to spend a long time sucking at it.

~~~
m0nty
I'd second the recommendation for Farber's book. It doesn't try to hide that
you will need to work, but the work can be enjoyable and productive - that's
the sense of the word "easy" in this context, rather than "work-free". It also
recommends some techniques for memorisation and has some great anecdotes from
Farber's own language-learning experiences.

