Item — HN Reader

It absolutely adds advantage to those interested in literature, it allows you to see your first language outside itself and generally increases your understanding of your first language. I would consider that a cognitive advantage but it is not exactly an advantage for the general public. Interestingly (at least to me) I have found programming languages* even more beneficial in this sense which I also find ironic, stem sorts often seem to miss the nuances of spoken/written language but as a humanities sort the hard line logical brutality of programming languages has given me valuable perspective on the nuances of the spoken languages.

*I apparently forgot what this footnote was for, like I said, I am a humanities sort

4 comments

Sounds like these were some kind of raw cognitive tests. I'm certainly in the camp that bilingualism is helpful in all sorts of ways, and is almost an objective way to be "smarter" - but if the paper's legit, presumably bilingualism doesn't automatically boost other cognitive functions (somehow I picture those things where you have to say which shape comes next)

>Sounds like these were some kind of raw cognitive tests.

Absolutely. Outside some niche areas being bilingual is not going to make you better at general problem solving, will come in handy on occasion in that you will see the problem from a perspective that you would not have without a second language but generally will not add much. Like I said, I am a humanities sort so these sorts of things tend to trigger me. I think for the majority of people a second language should be a pragmatic choice, not about some vaguely suggestive idea of increased cognition but directly about what learning that language will offer them.

And it also helps wonders in acquiring a third language, which can be very useful in its own right. When all you know is the language you were raised with adding another is hard work, once you have that second one the next one is so much easier. But I readily believe that knowing another language isn't suddenly going to make you better at math or physics or geography. It wouldn't make much sense, if anything I would expect you to be less good at other subjects because you've just filled up a bunch of your brain with knowledge leaving less room for other things assuming your storage is finite.

> isn't suddenly going to make you better at math or physics or geography

There are other forms of intelligence. Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those. Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.

> There are other forms of intelligence.

It obviously wasn't meant as an exhaustive list.

> Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those.

I've yet to have my other languages besides English help me with studying of other concepts unless they were strictly locally focused. Even my French didn't help in Canada where it is more used as a means of exclusivity than one of inclusivity and communications.

> Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.

It might be. But the vast amount of information in English is such that you'll never exhaust it. I read about France in French and about Germany in German mostly because I can, not necessarily because I have to, the same subjects (in the news) are usually also available in English. And as for texts that are only available in say Chinese, French or German: I am aware that I will have to forego anything only available in Chinese because the expected pay-off from learning Chinese at my age is so low that I will spend my time in some other way. But if I were much younger I might give it a go.

But I doubt if it would make me any more intelligent.

There's always more to read in any language, but I'm not looking for more, I'm looking for the best, and they are certainly best read in their original languages. Shakespeare in Spanish can't be the same. I want to read Descartes in French, the great philosophers in Mandarin (or whatever form of Chinese they wrote in), etc.

You can assert there's no value to you, but many assert otherwise. I'm not sure there's value in our individual assertions.

Also, there's a lot of evidence that language drives cognition; that how we perceive and think about the world is constrained and influence by our language, and that other languages enable us to see and understand the world in other ways.

I would probably say if you are going to go to learning a third language than you would probably have been better off studying linguistics instead of that second language which will make all language acquisition easier. But hindsight, how many learn a second language with the intent of learning a third or forth? and once you learn that third you probably are going to have a decent intuitive grasp on linguistics even if you can not maintain a discussion with a linguistics major.

How is studying linguistics supposed to make language acquisition easier?

Linguistics is the academic study of languages.

My toddler is learning three languages growing up (English, Mandarin, German). She picks them up just fine, because she hears them spoken around her; I don't think she'd benefit from learning linguistics instead.

That's a cool combination.

German comes from my side, the rest comes from Singapore.

Seeing young kids fluently switch between a bunch of unrelated languages never ceases to amaze me.

The same way in that a CS PHD is going to be able to pickup programming languages better and more quickly than someone who has learned C++ and python, they understand the underlying mechanics of language, what makes it work. But a toddler is something different, they primarily mimic and play with the language gauging function on result, how do people react to what I say. Learning languages from a young age is why the OP study shows no cognitive advantage and why people with only a single language tend not to have a good understanding of their language, it is a part of them.

But I was mostly speaking of peers, the sort who would be posting on HN, don't think we have many toddlers on the site. Learning multiple languages from a very early age seems to result in the languages being a single language from the perspective of the speaker, they have different situations in which they speak in different ways much like the average monolingual will speak more formally in a job interview compared to when they are out at the bar. Second and third, and etc languages are very different things between those that learned them from the start and those that learn them later in life.

> The same way in that a CS PHD is going to be able to pickup programming languages better and more quickly than someone who has learned C++ and python, they understand the underlying mechanics of language, what makes it work.

... have you ever actually met anyone who got a PhD in CS? Because first off, very few people will actually study the "mechanics of language" in doing a CS PhD. If you're studying compilers or formal methods or maybe software engineering, sure, you'll study up on programming language semantics; but if you're learning AI or operating systems or computer architecture, you're very unlikely to touch those semantics. But even assuming you have someone who has actually taken those graduate-level courses (and I have!), it's not actually helpful for learning new languages. Learning semantics is essentially learning how to give meaning to the expression "a + b" (there are many ways to do this, and they have different tradeoffs), but if you want to learn a language, all you really want to learn is that "a + b" adds two numbers together, let's move on.

There's a similar gap between learning languages and being a linguist. As I understand it, most linguists are not polyglots (actually, I think a majority of them may be monolingual!), and most polyglots are not linguists. The linguist is the person who will tell you that English doesn't have a future tense: instead, you indicate the future by using specific helping verbs in the present tense. Anyone instructing English as a second language will slap the linguist on the head for being an idiot and tell you that the future tense in English is the "will X" construction.

> The same way in that a CS PHD is going to be able to pickup programming languages better and more quickly than someone who has learned C++ and python

Huh? This is about as convincing to me as the claim that learning linguistics makes it easier to learn a human language. It's also sort of a non-sequitor.

Someone who understands python and C++ would be trivially able to understand a massive swath of modern programming languages. I see little that having some deeper theoretical background would help.

And in human languages, even more so than programming, theory is almost irrelevant to regular practice. As the upstream comment says, we learn by practice, not by memorizing and applying rules.

>Someone who understands python and C++ would be trivially able to understand a massive swath of modern programming languages. I see little that having some deeper theoretical background would help.

Yes, they will be able to quickly pickup related languages with relative ease just as someone who knows a romance language will be able to pickup other romance languages without much difficulty. But that person who knows C++ and Pynthon with nothing of the underlying workings will have a more difficult time learning assembly, Forth or Lisp than a related language just as the person who knows a romance language will have a more difficult time learning Swahili than another romance language. Not a non-sequitor at all. When you look at CS or linguistics and how they relate to the languages they deal with what they really are are the study of what those languages have in common and understanding that will decrease what you need to learn when learning new languages.

Understanding a language and using a language are very different things and this is why toddlers can pickup languages with more ease than others, they do not care so much about understanding, and this is the primary limitation of our first language(s) and why being bilingual offers little cognitive advantage for most people.

I don't really know much about linguistics or linguists (though I would certainly believe that linguists find picking up new languages easier), but I don't think the analogy holds for a CS graduate.

PhD graduates don't have magic in-depth knowledge about programming languages. PhD graduates (in any field, really, not just CS), choose to dive very deeply into a very specific topic in their field. They do not just "go to more CS classes". They spend time becoming an expert on a very narrow topic. And for a CS PhD, that very likely would not be "general principles of programming language design".

I would not expect your average CS PhD to be any better at picking up new programming languages than a CS undergraduate.

Also, you asserted downthread:

> Understanding a language and using a language are very different things and this is why toddlers can pickup languages with more ease than others

No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition. As people age, their brain's change to optimizes learning skills for other tasks, and language acquisition skills usually suffer.

>PhD graduates don't have magic in-depth knowledge about programming languages.

No magic involved, they generally have a good understanding of how a computer functions which means they can relate a language directly 1:1 to what the computer is doing instead of relating it to what another language they already know does or by simple trial and error.

>No, toddlers pick up languages faster than adults because their level of brain development is more receptive to language acquisition.

Toddlers are in the 12-36 month range, they primarily mimic and use language on simple cause and effect terms, if I say this than this is the result. They do not understand the concept of language or languages and if you teach them with multiple languages they do not see them as separate languages they see them as a sound and a result. We develop those distinctions and understanding of meaning during childhood and adolescence.

Natural language acquisition uses specialised circuitry in brain, and doesn't really run on general logic / intelligence, like programming languages do.

That's why analogies between the two are of limited use at best.

The rest of your comment isn't really wrong. I even agree with most of it. It's just not really relevant to your point.

> Learning multiple languages from a very early age seems to result in the languages being a single language from the perspective of the speaker, they have different situations in which they speak in different ways much like the average monolingual will speak more formally in a job interview compared to when they are out at the bar.

Last I checked the research was still open on that one. What you are saying might work as a gross simplification, though.

> Second and third, and etc languages are very different things between those that learned them from the start and those that learn them later in life.

Yes. And exactly when you learn them and in what context also seems to make some context.

Where I grew up, a small EU country just knowing the local language would be super limiting. Here we learn Dutch, English, German and French in high school, and I picked up some Polish while living there. I'm not exceptional at all here and I'm nowhere near where someone who studies linguistics is.

The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual.

Second language acquisition research is a joke, you cannot transform your learning by deep diving on it.

And way too many linguists are barely capable of learning languages to fluency, it's not common for them to be polyglots. Being able to understand the hardest grammatical concepts in say Polish, Arabic, or Hungarian in a half hour doesn't imply one has any capacity to acquire those languages (producing output in real time involves none of the mental calculus done when grammar is consciously processed as a set of rules, except for a little editing after the fact in the "monitor" part of the brain, you can only fluently produce grammar, words, and prosody that have been acquired.).

So to me the claim is out there.

> The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual.

Who is that?

I suspect they meant Chomsky.

I thought so as well, but a quick web search suggests that Noam Chomsky speaks English and Hebrew.

(It's a shame that Noam Chomsky is the most famous linguist, because he's so far from the best or most relevant one.)

Sure, and if you learned linguistics you would have been able to pick up those languages more quickly with a better understanding. But like I already said, most should learn languages for pragmatic reasons, what it offers them, not for some vague reasons. I guess my point was that there would be advantage to having people study linguistics in high school instead of a second (or third or whatever) language, give the students the ability to understand language instead of a language that many just forget after highschool. This changes with where you are in the world, some like yourself need more than one language just to get by but I do not think that rules out the utility of learning language in a more foundational/fundamental way.

You may well have a point. But: I know several people with a degree in linguistics and while it may help them to have a better idea of the structure and deeper understanding of languages in general it doesn't seem to help them at all in day to day communications with people in other languages. They tend to get hung up at the details of grammar and the finer points of sentence structure whereas what matters is to keep up the flow of information. Function over form any day. You see the same with music: people that know a ton of music theory can be very good musicians. But there are plenty of musicians who have a fairly shallow understanding of the theory but they pick up an instrument and start making music rather than to wonder about the theory behind it.

Language and music have a lot in common in that respect, it's perfectly possible to be proficient at either without having a very deep understanding of the theory as long as you are willing to put in the hours, and having that deep understanding is - as far as I've been able to discern - absolutely no guarantee for being good at making music or communicating with other people. It may help some but I doubt that it is the kind of thing that works for everybody in the way that you assert. It's hard enough to get kids to learn a new language, even if it has some direct applicability. Getting them to learn an abstract science which lays a foundation that they then may be able to apply to learning another language may well be one demand too many.

Still, for whoever it works it may be worth the extra investment in time and effort.

>it doesn't seem to help them at all in day to day communications with people in other languages.

Humanities sorts are terrible at communicating with those who are not humanities sorts, just as most doctors and lawyers are terrible at communicating their specialties to the laymen. I am not talking about studying linguistics to the ends of getting a degree in it but in a more pragmatic sense, if you want to learn a bunch of languages than it is very useful to learn what all those languages have in common so you do not have to relearn the same thing in new contexts, you just learn the contexts.

>Language and music have a lot in common in that respect, it's perfectly possible to be proficient at either without having a very deep understanding of the theory as long as you are willing to put in the hours

They do but becoming proficient is different than success. Satie and Bukowski were proficient but not at all ignorant but plenty have success while being ignorant. It is that pragmatism thing again, what are your goals, learning music theory will probably not help much if you want to become a success in a popular music genera but it could be very useful if you want to become a success across genres. Where do you want to shift the ignorance and the knowledge? what will be of most use to your goals.

So, that may not be what you are talking about when you 'talk about studying linguistics' but - and this is in a way very funny because it is exactly the point of this whole discussion and yet we seem to have a misunderstanding right there - it is what other people will interpret when they say that you should 'study linguistics'. Maybe not to the point where you'd get a degree in it but even as an extra field during your high school studies.

And in my experience your CS degree example simply fails: CS does not prepare you at all for dealing with the various programming languages and their implementations of various concepts. The parts of CS that would apply to that bit you can pick up in a few weeks by reading some books and even then you're going to be dealing with implementation details most of the time by the time you want to apply that knowledge.

If you understand variables, assignment, control structures (if, for, while, pattern matching etc) and abstraction mechanisms (subroutines, functions) then you've got the bulk of it. But it isn't going to help you more than a little bit in tackling a mid sized Java, Rails or C++ project.

If you were going to design a new programming language or write a compiler for an existing one then it may well help, and also if you are going to be working on novel data structures or to try to improve what's already there.

Being a linguist or studying linguistics may well help me to read works in dead languages or maybe to analyze other people's writings. Because that's the kind of stuff that I see the linguists around me do that seems to actually use their skills.

If there would be a single bit of advice that I could give to someone that intends to study multiple languages then it would probably be: take a year or two of Latin. Even though it is a dead language that little bit of foundation will help you gain a much easier entrance into other languages all over Europe (if those are the languages you intend to learn).

If you are going to study in language areas outside of that region, say Asia then I have no idea what would help other than to move there an immerse yourself for a couple of years.

Connections across cultures and broader abilities to empathize are exactly what a general public or a society needs to be healthy. Humanities should not try to assert its worth in utilitarian terms; by playing that game it has already given up its own.

I agree with programming's effect on natural languages, and I think it goes both ways. Programming makes me a more precise punctuator, while Shakespeare makes me comment in couplet.

> It adds advantage to those interested in literature

That's a specific skill though, as distinct cognition generally