
Ask HN: Did knowing or learning a not-so-famous natural language benefit you? - FrancoAustrian
I&#x27;m speaking about human languages, not Programming
======
hazbo
I made an effort to learn Dutch for around 6 months of last year. Although
it's a well known as a language, it's only spoken natively by around 20
million(ish), so isn't massively useful outside of the Netherlands and
Belgium, among a few other places in the world. My first language is English.
I just wanted a second language under my belt and I enjoy spending time in the
Netherlands. The problem with learning Dutch is, most people (that I came
across at least) in the Netherlands are already fluent in English and from my
experience it seemed like they'd much rather just speak to you in English. So
to actually speak Dutch there, it's important to be clear that you don't want
to converse in English and that you're trying to improve your skills. It was
really important to me that I'd speak a bit of Dutch every day, ideally to
native speakers. This requires a bit of effort (as I live and spend most of my
time in England), but it's suprising how easy it is to either find Dutch
people here to speak to and also online.

It benefited me in the sense that I ended up making some new friends out of it
and had a lot of fun just learning (or trying to learn) a second language. I
think learning a new language like this can open up some doors and can help
you meet a lot of new interesting people you'd perhaps not have met otherwise.
I'd love to pick it up again next year. So we'll see.

~~~
gotofritz
For what is worth, it's true of _all_ languages if you are a native English
speaker - everyone wants to improve their English, and for them it's tiring
trying to make sense of your attempts at speaking their language as you are
learning.

Best thing is to pretend you are Finnish or Macedonian or something and say
you don't speak English at all!

~~~
tom_mellior
> everyone wants to improve their English

Your point is certainly valid for many people in many places, but in France I
find it to be mostly false. Most people, even in computer science, will rather
have me butcher French than switch to butchering English themselves.

~~~
gotofritz
Oh yeah, the French are, shall we say, "special"...

------
nfg
I'm by no means perfectly fluent in Irish, but I find it incredibly useful to
have a language no-one understands to speak when travelling to maintain some
privacy. My wife and I were buying clothes in a market Kathmandu some years
ago, while haggling we were able to strategise without the stall holder
knowing a word of what we were saying. Once we were done (and had acquired
some nicely priced clothes) the guy took us aside and asked what language we
were speaking - turned out he'd learned off basic vocabulary (esp numbers) in
a ton of the languages popular with tourists but had been left baffled by us!

~~~
Y_Y
You have to be careful. My cousin and his friends were being rather rude (in
Irish) about a woman on a Belgian train, she managed to keep a straight face
throughout, before lambasting them before leaving.

Ach, ar aon nós, táim an-shásta bheith ag léamh faoi Ghaeilge ar hn. N'fheadar
liom cé mhéad atá anseo a bhfuil in ann sí a labhairt.

~~~
luxpir
> Ach, ar aon nós, táim an-shásta bheith ag léamh faoi Ghaeilge ar hn.
> N'fheadar liom cé mhéad atá anseo a bhfuil in ann sí a labhairt.

I've wanted to learn it properly since I took classes in Paris, but never
really dedicated enough resources to it. I still enjoy watching TG4 and
listening to RnaG/Failté from time to time but never went the distance.
Swedish and French, being so closely related to English, they came much faster
:)

I can just about hack my way through the national anthem, for no good reason
other than it's a cracking song. Maybe when all my free time isn't spent on
'asset building' I'll get back into some of the fun stuff!

Tell me, how do you get on with (Scottish) Gaelic? I understand there's a
large degree of mutual intelligibility between certain dialects and it'd be a
fascinating area to study, like Welsh/Cornish/Breton also. I've seen some BBC
Alba programming aimed at music-lovers/youth where an Irish performer was
interviewed in Scottish Gaelic, replying in Irish. How set-up it was, I don't
know.

~~~
Y_Y
I've watched a couple of programmes on BBC Alba, and understood a good bit. It
was somewhat like hearing Dutch as a German speaker, except maybe easier.

There has been talk of an "Idir-Ghaeilge" reunified language. The Irish online
magazine Nós had a nice article on this recently
[http://nos.ie/gniomhaiochas/teanga/idir-
ghaeilge/](http://nos.ie/gniomhaiochas/teanga/idir-ghaeilge/) (in Irish).

Could become a reality in the unlikely but beautiful event of a post-Brexit
Scotland uniting with Ireland in the "Celtic Union".

~~~
luxpir
Thanks, that's really cool. I'll try to make head or tails of the article and
look a bit more into the reunification. If that could be carried off, interest
levels in the language(s) would potentially rocket.

The example I thought of for mutual-intelligibility btw was
Swedish/Norwegian/Danish - but perhaps it's not that close? With Swedish as a
third language I can still understand most Norwegian TV in general use or
those subject areas I'm more familiar with.

------
tom_mellior
I'm at six natural languages now. I have worked in three of them and could
immediately go to work in my field in a fourth. I could refresh the two others
within weeks to a level where I could go to work in them, with some initial
difficulties.

I would say that, to some extent, knowing several languages helps you with
learning the next one. Not just if it has features that I already know from
other languages, but also if it has new "WTF" aspects. Those become easier to
accept.

What I mean is this. My last relocation was to France, for which I had to
learn French. French has a bunch of things that make me go "WTF", but knowing
that _every_ language has such things makes it easier for me to shrug them
off, accept that French is weird, and carry on. On the other hand, some other
expats I know, who know fewer languages, question everything: Why does French
do this or that? I have the feeling that some people get caught up in such
issues and develop (or reinforce) an internal resistance to learning.

TLDR: Learning languages may make it easier to learn others by making you more
accepting of weirdness.

------
biztos
Depending on whom you ask, Hungarian probably qualifies as not so famous --
although among linguists it's pretty famous, as unlike all its neighbor
languages it's not Indo-European.

Learning it has indeed brought me amazing benefits, chief among them a
Hungarian wife. :-) Seriously though, all human languages have qualities
unique to them, and once you speak a second language fluently you realize that
there are entire ways of seeing the world that are only possible to describe
in that language -- indeed, I believe that for every single natural language
there are things it's only possible to think or conceive in that language.

This is probably less significant if the language is closely related to your
own, but one of the thrills of learning a very very different language is that
it opens your mind to concepts you realize you'd never have remotely
understood beforehand.

As an added bonus, Hungarian is quite beautiful, and the Hungarian capital
city of Budapest is a fantastic town.

So, if you're asking because you are thinking of learning a not-so-famous
language then I encourage you to go for it. But understand that without
immersion you'll never get far, so make a plan to go live in a place where
they speak that language, at least for a year. And once you get there, don't
slack off: some great places with unusual languages can easily accommodate you
in some more common idiom.

------
tel
A friend of mine who has a passion for language tried to get me to learn
Lojban with him for a while. It's a complete waste of time in terms of its
usability. I have never even heard of someone other than this friend who has
spent any time trying it out.

What _is_ interesting about learning a conlang, especially one with such an
interest in being unambiguous, is that it aggressively points out how weird
language actually is. I'm a native English speaker and the sort of person who
just shrugged by all of public school English via the "it sounds good"
argument. I really have no conception of what the structure of English is
except in my own ability to use it.

Learning even just a small amount of Lojban helped connect my ideas of natural
language to similar ones in logic and semantics. It did so even more
effectively than learning Mandarin has even though I've learned far more
Mandarin.

I think if you're interested in turning your analytical eye toward your own
use of language in order to better understand what does and does not make any
sense about it then learning a bit of a conlang is probably a good bet. It's
the next best thing to having a linguist friend.

~~~
shakna
I studied Proto-Indo-European and fit into a similar box. It's entirely
useless, day to day.

But, because it's not one of the earliest languages, and because it's a
reconstruction, it is as simple as it can be.

It can make it difficult to express some ideas, like "innovation".

But it does allow you to understand the function of grammar, and the way we
are limited by the words we have. If you can't express it, then though you may
be able to think it, you can never truly convey it to anyone else. You can
give endless analogies and stories, but no one can grasp the idea until it
becomes a word that they also think.

One last analogy of the journey this opened up for me: imagine that the word
'colour' never existed.

Describe the Northern Lights.

------
k__
I tried to learn Japanese once, only for half a year.

I think it benefitted me, even if I didn't learn much.

It let me look a bit deeper into Japanese culture. The politeness is baked
deeply into the language and the sheer amount of Kanji told me that a Japanese
person has to constantly be on track to not forget even the most important
ones.

On the other hand Japanese seemed antiquated. 3 sets of symbols and one of
them has thousands of items. The gramma seems kina straight forward, but the
sentences simply get too long fast.

I speak German and English, which aren't drastically different. But while
learning Japanese I found out how different languages really can be.

English is a bit compacter than German, no "der/die/das", just "the". Most
words are not capitalized, no compound words, etc. but English is A LOT
compacter than Japanese.

~~~
spacemanmatt
I studied only an entire year (2 semesters), and I have a fairly different
view of Japanese. A Japanese person exerts no more effort to 'be on track'
with their native language than anyone else. I'm not sure what you mean about
sentences getting too long too fast. As a first semester student, perhaps more
experience would better-inform your sense of sentence complexity.

~~~
bitwize
Japanese expends a lot more syllables to say the same thing that English can
say in fewer. Even more if you use the polite form (e.g., speaking in a
business context, train announcements, etc.) Grandparent post was not the
first person I've observed to notice this.

Japanese syllables are often shorter than English syllables, and a native
speaker can articulate then quickly and fluently, but it seems to take much
more linguistic "mass" to say a thing in Japanese compared to its English
equivalent, unless you use a blunt direct form.

~~~
vvillena
Yup, Japanese is a machine-gun language. Spanish, too.

~~~
tellarin
No no no. Finish is a machine gun language. And a broken one at that.
Everything sounds like ratatata ta ta. PS: Too long working for Nokia, I
guess. ;)

~~~
bitwize
Finnish and Japanese have enough in common (agglutinative, SOV word order,
double consonants and vowels) that some linguists think they might be
distantly related.

Listen to some spoken Japanese; you might find it sounds a lot like Finnish.

------
tobltobs
Learning Latin in school helped me to understand what this grammar thing is.
Before I didn't even understand/cared about the grammar rules of my mother
language, so learning Latin did improve my German.

------
sandesp
I came from several not-so-famous languages to learning English and I am not
the right specimen for your questions. However, I wanted to say that learning
a completely different language has changed my understanding of what
communication is. I started understanding how spoken words are just tags to
ascribe abstract ideas that both the speaker and the listener can relate to.
At the same time, there are parts of the communication that gets lost and
that's why people are not completely understood-something quite common in the
internet. Learning a language can help bridge that gap in communication and
most importantly, help an individual get a better perspective of the culture
the said language is attached to. Because, as it is repeatedly said most of
the human communication happens through body-language and tone alone which is
only possible in a face-to-face interaction with good attention and focus from
both parties.

------
colanderman
Was stuck in the Paris train station at 5 AM at the end of a Eurail-pass trip.
Needed to get a tram ticket to get to the airport in ~1 hr. Tickets cost €18
in _coins_ , or a chip card; I had only paper money. After ½ hr of panicking,
I found a shop that had just opened and I asked the shopkeep, while holding up
a paper bill, what basic (and probably incorrect) French I remembered from
high school:

"Avez-vous du coin?"

Caught the plane with 3 minutes to spare.

------
fishnchips
I studied in Copenhagen and did some Danish courses which at the time I
considered a total waste of time since pretty much all Danes I knew spoke
perfect (if sometimes heavily accented) English. I used it once when I got
lost in Iceland and the only person we could find in the vicinity was an old
lady who didn't speak a word of English. Danish though, even as rudimentary as
mine, was just fine.

------
mattmanser
Fluent or just basic? Personally I think it's not worth it unless you really
commit to trying to get fluent. I "learnt" Latin + French at school and it's
basically useless knowledge that's drifted away in the years, I can barely
understand even the most basic French now.

As for knowing it fluently, my Mum and various of her friends are all Dutch
living in the UK. Many of them earned some money from it in some way,
including:

    
    
        - doing translations
        - getting jobs in the local port because they were bilingual 
        - teaching night classes in the language
        - emergency translator for customs
    

And that's Dutch, where even 20 years ago a lot of them spoke English
fluently. It can be useful.

My friend's wife is a US Bulgarian who speaks French and got a grant from her
uni to go to Bulgaria this summer to interview Bulgarian software companies (I
think including Chaos/XCom maker Julian Gollop who lives there now).

Then again I know others who never use their 2nd or 3rd language.

Basically, it opens doors to experiences if you want to leverage it.

~~~
interfixus
It baffles me how anyone can consider Latin 'useless knowledge'. I know of no
other language which opens so many doors to so many European languages, and
most certainly to English as a second one.

~~~
tom_mellior
Latin grammar doesn't help you with English grammar, of course. Latin
vocabulary can help you with English vocabulary, but the effort of learning
Latin, then transferring that knowledge to English, is much larger than the
effort of just learning English.

I had some Latin in school, and yes, from time to time it comes to mind when
encountering a new French or Italian word. But even if you want to learn
several Romance languages, I'd guess that just learning them and
recognizing/exploiting relationships is easier than _also_ learning Latin. It
does add a common denominator, but it also adds a lot of cruft.

------
maga
I grew up as a bilingual since early age. One of my languages was an ancient
language only spoken by about a million people who all spoke other, more
popular, languages rendering their own language pretty useless in economic
terms. Yet there are few things I think this gave me.

I believe growing up as a bilingual with two completely different languages
gave me an edge in learning other languages when compared to my monolingual
peers. When we started learning a foreign language in school, my monolingual
peers didn't seem to grasp just how different the languages can be. All
through school they tried to apply the grammar and phonology of their native
language to the language they were learning. For me it was always a given that
even similar sounds like consonants are often vastly different, that words can
be in whatever position they have to, not just where I'd like them to be.
Though, truth be told, I had no preferences in that matter to begin with since
I was constantly switching in my mind from one language to another with a
different word order. I am quadrilingual today, and I am not even a big fan of
learning languages per se.

This might be far fetched, but I think it also made me more organized and
disciplined, or at least it helped to do so early on. This mental context
switching forces you to pay attention to the details for one thing. For
another, it also gives a sense of "protocol" early on. You understand that you
should speak one language to some people and another to the rest. In process
you see that this thing is even more subtle because you have to choose styles
withing the same language to match the social situation.

Last but not least, knowing the languages gave an early access to two
different and often clashing cultures. This, I believe, made me less
judgmental and more accepting of other people, at least when it comes to
cultures. Not because it was the moral thing to do, but because noticing all
the commonalities and differences between people became an exploration on
itself for me as a kid. I am genuinely curious about people that are different
from me, either by origins or mindsets. Being a typical white nerd and health-
junky, I am easily bored by other nerds and health-junkies, but give me an
alcoholic and I can talk to him for hours straight despite never being drunk
myself.

------
soulchild37
Learnt a bit malay and indonesian during my school time, I got hired as a
programmer recently because I can code decently and translate english to
malay/indonesian for the targeted countries.

------
jonathanstrange
I had a Japanese conversation course for only 1 year at the Japanese embassy
in Berlin. I forgot everything except "tenki wa ii desu ne". Still it was a
very good experience, because the politeness system built into the language is
very interesting and there were many other interesting phenomena (like
particles for count systems, topic marker, etc.) that helped me later for my
work in the philosophy of language and semantics. I also learned a lot about
Japanese culture in that short year.

------
Finnucane
Partly as a result of the current political climate, I've decided to try to
learn Yiddish, which doesn't currently have a large number of native speakers,
in the US at least. I've never been very good at learning languages (nearly
failed French and Latin in high school (both required), took a course in
Japanese that did not go well). But if nothing else, I can probably use it to
annoy neo-nazis on the internet.

~~~
ahoka
You want to annoy neo-nazis by learning a dialect of german?

------
lowken10
My first job was at a large casino as a systems analyst. The casino switched
CMS software and went to an AS400 RPG based application named ACSC. I took it
upon myself to learn the database of the application and also to learn RPG
programming (shudder).

This lead to my first software development position at a large international
bank.

I worked as an RPG developer for three years then I pivoted to SQL Server/C#.

So yes knowing a not so famous language benefited me.

~~~
biot
You're being downvoted, but the original uncorrected title was "Ask HN: Did
knowing /learning a not-so-famous language benefited you?" (copied and pasted
from browser cache) and didn't have the caveat that this was not a programming
question. So have an upvote for an interesting story in the spirit of the
original question.

------
crgwbr
I'm going into year 4 of learning Vietnamese (75MM natives speakers vs
English's ~400MM). I wouldn't say it's helped me professionally, but I do
think it's benefitted me personally. If nothing else, learning a language
causes you to meet lots of people you never would otherwise and makes it
easier to empathize with people from a completely different background and
culture.

------
dejv
Sometimes it is just fun, I used to speak some Behasa (Malaysian and
Indonesian or vice-versa) and it was helpful to read menu in local restaurant
or be able to speak with locals. I picked up some Berber when I was
backpacking in Morocco and it did open tons of doors in countryside.

But honestly it doesn't benefit me currently other than some trivia knowledge.

------
jonsen
I lived ten years in the Faroe Islands. You can do just fine with Danish, but
learning to read and understand spoken Faroese was of course a great
advantage. Too old to learn speaking it, but conversations where I spoke my
mothertongue and the other part their mothertongue worked great.

------
drc37
At my university when I was attending, they were using PowerBuilder to teach
object oriented programming. It landed me my first job at a big oil and gas
company supporting a legacy app.

------
epmatsw
Interested in the answer to this. I'm interested in learning Catalan, but the
reward to effort ratio seems a bit low to justify it.

~~~
landhar
As someone that speaks five languages (one of them being Catalan), I have to
concede it's the less useful. And only get to use it when I travel back to
Spain.

But that being said, I find that there's never a good reason not to learn a
new language if you are in a situation where you're going to be exposed to it
on a semi-regular basis. So if that's why you're considering learning Catalan,
I would recommend you to go for it. Even though it's by far the least useful
language I know, I still think it's been a rewarding investment.

Some reasons why I consider it was rewarding, in no particular order: \- It
sometimes helps me infer the meaning of a word I've never heard/read before.
\- I've read a some good books from Catalan authors. \- I sometimes enjoy
playing a game where I try to find words that share the same root in most of
the latin languages I know but not in one of them (e.g.: for 'window', it's
'finestra' in italian and catalan, 'fenêtre' in french but 'ventana' in
spanish !). This seems dumb, but it's actually my favorite reason for learning
new languages.

------
davidw
People in my former home of Padova were always amused that I could speak some
of the local dialect.

------
TheRealPomax
Can you explain what you mean with "famous"?

