[AdrenalinMd]

As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!

I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four languages, I always feel as if I'm lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. I wish I only needed to speak one language, saving my mental capacity for other things. Constantly juggling languages doesn't help.

The main benefit of knowing multiple languages in everyday life is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.

Moreover, all my friends from my country also speak four languages. Unfortunately, I don't hear of people from Moldova faring much better than others.

*My mother tongue is Romanian, but everyone in Moldova also speaks Russian (due to the Soviet past). At school, I learned French and later studied in France. I picked up English mainly through computers and the internet. Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn. I don't feel any advantage in learning a new language either.

I would gladly trade Russian and French over knowing Dutch right now ;o) There are months when I don't speak those two so they are of little use for me anymore.

[rjzzleep]

I find this discussion absurd. Here's a paper that most people have not read and then add their own subjective anecdote to it to confirm their personal opinion.

Has anyone bothered to look at the tests that determine cognitive ability in this context? Here's one(or it's advanced version the double trouble test):

“assess the ability to inhibit cognitive interference that occurs when processing of a specific stimulus feature impedes the simultaneous processing of a second stimulus attribute.”[1]

What this test is basically saying is that being bilingual doesn't give you an edge at playing Lumosity, because as we have learned from past discussion these brain improvement apps don't actually "improve your brain"(whatever that may mean), they just train your performance on certain tasks. Why does measuring concentration relate to being bilingual?

What the personal comment below does in fact try to remind people of indirectly is that being natively multilingual actually makes it harder for a person to be controlled and directed and by extension give you access to vastly different perspectives on a lot of topics especially when those languages stem from different language families.

[1] https://lesley.edu/article/what-the-stroop-effect-reveals-ab...

[isaacfrond]

Hear hear! Exactly my point. Can knowing a second language be a benefit. Well if you like Spanish movies, then being fluent in Spanish will certainly increase you enjoyment. Nobody denies that.

Will it make you a better chess player? The simple answer appears to be: no.

It one my gripes with classical education. What benefit is there of learning Latin? Well, you can read Virgil in the original, and if that is your thing, power to you. Will it make you a better person? No, just no.

(Maybe, you'll have a slight, slight advantage when learning another Roman language. But surely, you would have been much better off to learn French to begin with, if that was the goal.)

[denton-scratch]

> What benefit is there of learning Latin?

I had to do 10 years of Latin; I hated it. I eventually scraped a bare pass on my second try at the exam.

I'm sure my knowledge of my mother-tongue, English, is much enhanced by having studied Latin. To the extent that cognition is verbal[0], knowing your own language better must improve cognition?

[0] I suspect the researchers' definition of cognition is carefully tuned to exclude verbal thinking.

[Planktonne]

If you speak a language that has been influenced by Latin, learning Latin is really useful for understanding our own language.

Additionally, because of the way that Latin is taught, you learn a lot of classical history and philosophy through the process, which - given the impact of Rome on the world - is useful across a wide range of disciplines.

[Kretinsky]

Knowing well Latin makes it easier to learn new languages that inherit from it, both on the vocab side and the grammar side. French doesn't really have declinations, for instance. My wife studied it extensively during her studies, and she can pick new languages much quicker than me due to this.

[denton-scratch]

> Here's a paper that most people have not read

I put my hand up: I didn't read the paper (just the abstract). Their findings surprised me.

I speak (quite badly, nowadays) French and German, as well as my mother-tongue, English. I'm quite sure that my understanding of my own language is greatly enhanced by knowing French and German. And I'd be very surprised if a better knowledge of your native language doesn't enhance at least some aspects of cognition.

But this is a particular constellation of languages: if you exclude modern loanwords, it seems to me that the flow of vocabulary has been mainly from French and German into English, rather than vice-versa.

Decades ago, I did a class in Mandarin (now completely forgotten, except a few phrases). I don't think knowledge of Mandarin improved my understanding of my mother tongue at all.

So my surprise is that the researchers found no cognitive enhancement at all.

Perhaps their cognition test battery excludes those aspects of cognition that depend on thinking with words? It seems to me that I think mainly with words.

[nohaydeprobleme]

As a reader of the research paper, another limitation of the study is that the study did not appear to differentiate between people who learned a second language as an adult, versus people who grew up bilingual.

~~

To add context on how participants self-reported their bilingualism, the authors wrote: "To obtain information about the number of languages spoken, which languages were spoken, and demographic variables (such as age, country of origin, SES, and education), we asked participants to complete a detailed questionnaire. The questions used in the present study are available in Appendix S1 in the Supplemental Material available online."

From the downloaded supplementary material, the only questions asked related to language assessment were:

"5. What language(s) do you primarily speak at home?

"6. How many languages do you speak? Select one: 1-20"

I could not find any other questions related to language assessment.

~~

From the questionnaire, it looks like the researchers did not examine whether studying a second language as an adult to a very high level could confer cognitive advantages. The study possibly treated people who grew up bilingual and didn't acquire a second language as an adult, and also people who self-reported as bilingual but did not reach a high level in the language, into the same group.

The conclusions of the study would be stronger if the researchers examined how the cognitive abilities of monolingual people who undergo training in a second language and practice it to an advanced level, could change their cognitive abilities over time.

In fact, it remains plausible that adult language acquisition could still provide cognitive benefits. Another research paper with conflicting conclusions [1] studied the effect of language acquisition on older adults aged 59–79 years old. The authors of this different study concluded that "learning a foreign-language may represent a potentially helpful cognitive intervention for promoting healthy aging."

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.0042...

[udev]

I also speak the same four languages plus one more.

I do consider there are advantages to speaking several languages.

I learned from English that you can be very precise, but also economical in exposition of complex matter.

I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian. I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.

I learned from French that there are way more words for expressing feelings than I was using before, and also a certain way of having no-pressure intellectual, exploratory conversations, exchanging ideas among peers. It has a certain rhythm and many turns of phrases that work very well for this.

In Romanian you can be incredibly sophisticated (via modern French influence), but also stay close to the agricultural and pastoral roots. The language just has this great dynamic range. Romanian literature has examples of great works that are essentially collaborative, and have hundreds maybe thousands of authors (some likely illiterate), and that were passed along in oral form with various modifications that were finally recorded and published less than two centuries ago, and are very much readable by modern speakers.

===

Bonus: More things that I learned from English are certain expressions that guide you into a (I think) pragmatic world view, e.g.:

  - thinking clearly about hidden assumptions, e.g. "don't make assumptions", is easy in English, but is convoluted and indirect in the rest of languages I speak.

  - what I call "scoped" phrases, e.g. "just because IDEA1 does not mean IDEA2", or "IDEA1, though IDEA2", where English language helps you to avoid exaggerating or generalizing too much, by making it easy to "scope" your statements, but also helps you to be explicit about the boundaries within which your statement is true: "Just because I refused your first request, does not mean I don't want you to try again."

[dbtc]

I read your comment (fascinating!) and the parent, and I'm thinking a language is a tool, and like all tools, what matters most is how you use it.

[aporetics]

When language is a tool, it is a tool like a person is a tool.

[stevenhuang]

Language is a tool for communication.

Having your sensibilities hurt from thinking this somehow detracts from the human condition is quaint but doesn't make the statement any less appropriate.

[type0]

When language is a tool, it is a tool like a person is a fool

[red-iron-pine]

> I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian. I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.

Nabakov didn't feel the same way.

That said, as someone with decent Russian, I do like the language in many ways. I agree that it's a nuanced and powerful language in ways that English isn't; English is so ambiguous and low-context that you can say anything but I love Russian in that I can state things like number, gender, if they go & come back / complete, and do so in a word or two.

See also: high context vs low context languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

In russian, you can express anything using just 5 words and their derivative forms.

[selimthegrim]

But not on federal TV.

[type0]

> I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.

Not all types of Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic, some are different enough to be considered a different language as different as Nigerian Pidgin and British English.

> I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere).

I don't find Russian to be particularly more expressive than any other bigger slavic language, like Polish or Yugoslavian. I would say that it's largely a myth propagated by Russians. It has a bunch of newer loan words from French, German and kept some of its' older synonyms, oh and a lot of archaics from Old Church Slavinic. In that sense it isn't more nuanced than English. One more con is that the convoluted sentence structure makes it an unfriendly language for non native speakers to learn. Phonetics are terrible, a bunch of my friends that had been studying Russian fairly well and still don't know how to pronounce those rarely used words.

How is Russian language used to scare people? If you live in EU and hear a lot of Russian you shouldn't be scared since a lot of them are Ukranian refugees from the East and South. There are very few Russians you should be scared of, except some angry and very drunk ones in tourist resorts, fortunately those aren't coming in droves anymore.

I speak a few different languages, knowledge of languages is overrated if you don't use them regularly. Actually I regret learning some of those, that time would have been better spent on acquiring some technical skills. I have met very few people that are truly bilingual, most of them say they are, but aren't actually equally as good in both. A lot of Ukranians are bilingual btw, but it's easier when two languages are that similar.

[emptystation]

I speak Russian fluently but I wish I didn't. I don't find it beautiful and the information that I've involuntarily consumed in Russian throughout all my life did more harm than good.

Overall, I am fluent in 4 languages, 2 were acquired early from the environment, 1 in my childhood, and 1 as an adult. Only English proved to be truly useful in life and it is the only language that I actually enjoy using. I dream of living in an English-speaking country and never touching any other language again. I know, it's a weird sentiment.

[valenterry]

Thank you, I find those insights very interesting!

[brabel]

> English language helps you to avoid exaggerating or generalizing too much

I speak English and another 3 languages. IMO this is not due to the language itself, it's 100% cultural. English has as much power as any language I know (Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish) to make exaggeration and generalization, it just seems to happen that most English speakers tend to use those less then, say, Brazilians (but probably more than Swedes, I think).

[brabel]

> In Romanian you can be incredibly sophisticated (via modern French influence), but also stay close to the agricultural and pastoral roots.

What makes you think French has a less "agricultural" root than Romanian. Both languages have existed since a time when industrialization was still far in the future... are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation?? This sounds kind of ridiculous to me.

[oblio]

> are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation?? This sounds kind of ridiculous to me.

Look up what the French Academy is doing :-)

Also Romania used to have 50% subsistence farmers until 2000.

[denton-scratch]

> are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation?

I think it's true.

Modern French is derived from a form of French spoken among aristocrats; the Norman Conquest didn't bring to Britain a great influx of peasant French. For a long time, an educated Briton (a) spoke French, and (b) had lived in France, and even been educated there.

[908B64B197]

> peasant French

It's also that until the 19th century and compulsory education there were multiple dialects of French spoken throughout the country. "Royal French" is a descendant of Norman and was the language the bourgeoisie adopted after the revolution and that the rest of the country standardized on.

Same thing happened in the Americans French colonies in Canada and Louisiana; the settlers brought the "Royal" French with them because they were majorly from the north.

[lostmsu]

How do you translate parachute to Russian?

[p1esk]

“Parachute” is identical in Russian, because in both languages it came from French.

[lostmsu]

It was a trick question. Parent said you can translate anything to Russian. That's a rather uninteresting statement in practice given the parachute example. And there are entire kinds of such examples different in nature.

[koyote]

As someone who also speaks four languages, I agree with most of your post but here are some more advantages I can think of:

* Access to more media

I regularly consume newspapers, subreddits and similar in other languages to get different points of view on things. Then there's literature and films (especially the ones that don't have translations)

* Ease of travel (this is highly dependent on the languages you know)

* Connecting with people.

Simply switching to someone's native tongue gives you a familiarity with someone that takes much longer to get if you're speaking their 2nd (or 3rd) language.

* Bragging

Especially in the US/UK you'll get a lot of positive comments from people because they think you're some kind of genius (which the study above disproves...)

Before I started working, I thought knowing this many languages would be helpful in the business world, turns out I have barely ever used them as the working language is always English.

[arcticbull]

I speak three and echo the above. English gets you most of the way in most places, but you can form stronger connections if you can meet others on their home turf instead of making them come to yours.

Might not afford you IQ points but it does afford you diplomacy points.

[cjohnson318]

> Connecting with people.

I have a tiny bit of halting Spanish, but I feel much more comfortable communicating that way than trying drag an interaction along with just English.

[kazinator]

But these are confounding factors related to your socio-economic status. You're probably smarter than someone who is too poor to travel, uneducated, and who will die in the same village they were born. But it's not because you know more than one language.

[leethomas]

> The main benefit of knowing multiple languages is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.

Hah, that's the least of benefits IMO. I'm not sure if you have no interest in the following or just forgot them, but these are things I enjoy: literature in the native language, comparing words and idioms and understanding how different languages influence each other and also how different cultures led to the creation of certain idioms. Conversations with people in their native tongue when I travel and the stories, adventures, and knowledge that unlocks.

To anyone reading this who only speaks English, while I agree with this person and the study that I don't necessarily feel smarter, learning another language is absolutely worth it for the advantages I stated above. My life is more rich because of it.

[pb7]

I am also originally from Moldova and speak the same 4 languages. If I had to guess, this is fairly common in Moldova -- at least in private schools.

I would say there is a very mild advantage, even recognizing vaguely similar words in other languages when traveling. I find Russian to be very useful in a way that French and Romanian aren't.

English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish are the most "useful" as they each unlock a large part of the world that tends to prefer its own.

Edit: Spanish is probably on par with the others.

[AdrenalinMd]

Oh, salut ! (Romanian "salut" not French "salut", lol)

It's indeed still useful when traveling to those countries that speak these languages. But that's mere few weeks per year. English could have worked anyway as everyone is becoming proficient in English.

[AnnaPali]

> Romanian "salut" not French "salut"

I always loved the Romanian joke where someone says "mersi" and then you reply "oh, I didn't know you were French" but I suppose that comes up with many words.

[type0]

I don't agree on French not being very useful it has lost some status but you can get by with it in many places of the World and I would put Hindi and Swahili on that list too.

[rippercushions]

Some interesting thoughts on what additional languages an English speaker would find the most useful for travel worldwide: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native...

But you need to make a lot of assumptions as to what is really the "most useful".

[seri4l]

Add French to the list (unlocking the rest of Africa) and you have the 6 official languages of the United Nations.

[jacooper]

I think Spanish should be on that list tooz since its one of the core languages out there right?

[pb7]

I mentioned it at the end but yeah, probably on par with the others. It "unlocks" all of Latin America minus Brazil and few Dutch/French territories, but even Brazilians speak varying amount of Spanish.

[yonaguska]

I've found that with Brazilians, even if they don't speak Spanish, I can speak Spanish at them and scrape by. It's much easier that me relying solely on English to communicate, fwiw.

[wenc]

I speak 7 (4 acquired as a child, 1 in school, and 2 as an adult) and I find I'm able to understand understand cultural nuances better, which helps me to bridge cultural gaps and have multi-perspectival views on most things. (this is quite apart from the unproven Sapir-Whorf hypotheses stuff about language influencing thoughts -- it's not like that at all). Having multiple languages simply gives me affinity for multiple cultures and helps me pay attention to certain details that are easily missed by people not of that culture.

Being able to live between cultures isn't necessarily something that is prized by many, but having been an outsider in every culture I've ever lived in, this ability has helped me become a chameleon and blend into new cultures (corporate cultures, community cultures etc.) in order to feel a sense of belonging.

So the benefits for me are purely sociological -- I agree that being multilingual confers little advantage in terms of performing executive tasks (which is what the linked article was testing).

[oblio]

You've probably invested thousand of hours in learning all of those languages. Some just by circumstance/luck (maybe something like this? mom speaking 1 language, dad speaking another, both speaking a common language, the place you were in having another secondary language), some through your own efforts.

As always, the real question we can't really test is: what could you have done with probably literal person-years of study/research/leisure time, instead?

[scrollaway]

The investment you’re talking about is likely minimal. They only acquired two as an adult. There is time being spent there but learning a language is a fun and rewarding activity, which tends to become easier the more of them you know.

I speak 5 and had gotten used to being the exception; then I moved to Brussels and it’s normal here to meet people who speak even more, far more fluently than I do.

I was at this board game Meetup and met this young Ukrainian kid the other day. 13 years old. She was speaking fluent Russian and would switch to perfect French to speak to us, while following the conversation we were having in English. Her mom mentioned she speaks Ukrainian, and that her lessons are in Dutch at school. 13 years old - damn.

Anyway yeah when you have a good technique and some experience, learning a new language can be much quicker, and very passive.

[oblio]

There are different levels of investment and different level of expectations, and I say this as someone that speaks 3 languages (Romanian, English, French) and understands a few others at a basic level (German, Italian, Spanish).

Children have a very limited vocabulary and tend to make a lot of mistakes (grammar, word usage and pronunciation mistakes) and those mistakes are easily overlooked, especially by adults, since we tend to try to encourage them. Not the case for adult learners.

The second difficulty level is <<cultured>> native speaker. This is massively more difficult since you need to advance from maybe a basic 5-10-15k words to probably 20-40-60k words.

The investment level for C2 (proficiency according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...) is in the thousands of hours per language, including a ton of deliberate study.

To give you an example of C2, for Romanian you need to be at least a well educated high school student and really understand finer details of Romanian grammar. A native Romanian speaker who hasn't finished at least high school at a good high school is probably a bad C2, despite being a native speaker (or more likely a decent C1).

Now, you obviously don't need to be at the highest level for every language you know, but the gap in effort between levels is huge and people underestimate that. Most people that speak multiple languages are probably somewhere around B1-B2 at most of them. Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.

[scrollaway]

The CEFR is a tool to evaluate proficiency, but it's misleading if you look at it as a "ladder" with "native" at the top". Most adults aren't C2 in their own native language, despite "investing" sometimes hundreds of thousands of hours "learning" it.

This video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj5qPF_puU] by Olly Richards sums up my feelings on the definition of fluency. Personally, I believe even as early as B2 you can call yourself a fluent speaker, because it's roughly the level where you stop struggling to express your thoughts or to understand other people's. But it also depends how you have learned. B2 can look very different depending on whether it was leared in mostly academic vs literary vs spoken contexts.

> Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.

Those tend to be cultural. My native language is French, but I cannot browse /r/france without wondering wtf everyone's talking about. I'm extremely disconnected from French culture as I moved out when I was 14, so I never experienced adulthood in French and I had to learn things like what "Pôle emploi" is or some such. I'm still C2 in French,

I also do make mistakes in English, but I catch plenty of native English speakers make egregious mistakes or not know fairly basic things about their own language. Another commenter mentioned the their/they're your/you're distinction is one that natives tend to mess up more often than non-natives; anecdotally, that seems correct to me.

[oblio]

> Those tend to be cultural.

Language is culture. A large part of language learning is learning culture, expressions, idioms.

If I say"white as cheese" to a Frenchman he won't understand what I mean because the average cheese in France is not white, unlike in Romania.

[GoblinSlayer]

There's a post nearby where people are said to spend their time watching braindead youtube videos. My niece does that too.

[oblio]

You do know that within that spectrum there are thousands of useful and fun activities, right?

It's not "learn a million languages or be a meth head".

[olddustytrail]

Why don't you share some of the amazing skills you've acquired through not learning languages?

[oblio]

I speak 3 different languages, 2 at C2 level and 1 at ~B2 level. I understand 2 more at about B1 level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of...

Remember, always attack the idea, not the person.

[florakel]

Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English. I have lived or worked in countries where those languages are spoken. Each language feels like a unique perspective on life and unlocks the understanding of a new culture for you. When talking to a taxi driver or reading a local newspaper you will be confronted with words or phrases that have no literal translation into your mother tongue. For a moment you are left without clear references and you have to make a significant cognitive effort to understand a concept that does not exist in your native culture (and therefore language). The construction of new references and meanings is what makes learning a new language all worth it. Understanding a new way to describe this world (while ideally living in a different culture) can make you a more empathetic, curious, and serene human being - in opposition to the polarizing black and white thinking that dominates most parts of the world these days.

[tharkun__]

You seem to speak 4 languages so well that at least in one of them you can't count to 5 ;)

Please take this tongue in cheek, as in kind of like the other comment said: for lots of folks splitting that atte tion is detrimental at least in some regard.

Personally I think some diversification in language is good. It "keeps you on your toes". If you never use a muscle it will deteriorate. But you won't be able to exercise all of your muscles equally all the time.

That said I do get your point about viewpoints. It's so easy to just have exactly one if all you speak is one language. Plenty of places in the world today where that is the case. And it's not just the ones we see in the international news all the time.

[nohaydeprobleme]

> "You seem to speak 4 languages so well that at least in one of them you can't count to 5 ;) "

For what it's worth, I counted 4 languages instead of 5, assuming the comment wasn't edited. The commenter wrote: "Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English."

Brazilian Portuguese is a single language as the dialect of Portuguese used in Brazil [1], versus the European Portuguese dialect used in Portugal [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Portuguese

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Portuguese

[tharkun__]

Touché! Does that count as #5 ;)

[florakel]

I guess I was too precise when I wrote "Brazilian Portuguese" and caused some confusion. ;) It is actually quite different from European Portuguese, especially when spoken.

[nohaydeprobleme]

Haha, I suppose this counts. Bon mot.

[wudangmonk]

I really can't relate to most of your points. Words either come naturally as they do for everyone else or you don't use the word in that language therefore you will try to guess it or think of a similar one. This just means that you are not exposed to the same vocabulary in both languages. All my Comp Sci and Math vocabulary is in English because of school/online/talking to others. All my botany and plant knowledge knowledge is in Spanish because its my mother's hobby and that's how I know it. Only if I switch the languages will I struggle with the vocabulary.

The only time when I felt having to use more mental capacity was when I wasn't fluent in the language, the idea of languages being a constant cognitive load is as ridiculous as thinking that you are better off not knowing anything at all due to the toll knowledge takes on your mental capacity.

[notdang]

Don't know how ridiculous it is, but I live in a Spanish speaking country, using English at work, consuming English part of the internet, occasionally using Russian during the day (because of Russian "refugees") and no one around me speaks my native language. There is a cognitive load.

[lIl-IIIl]

I would think that the cognitive load is there because you are speaking a foreign language (whether one or many). I don't think it's debatable that speaking a foreign language day in day out with no one to speak your native language can wear you out.

[IIAOPSW]

I don't see why its ridiculous. Brains are not magically above the constraints of information lookup from a database. The more you know, the more you have to sort through somehow.

[watwut]

That is not how it works? People who know a lot are not in general slower then people who know only a little.

[IIAOPSW]

Have you tested that or are you conjecturing from intuition?

[watwut]

Did you tested it and found people who know a lot to be slower in answering questions then those who know only a little?

Depending on how you define tested, yep, people who I know that know a lot are not slower answering questions that know only very little.

[nohaydeprobleme]

I also don't experience the extra cognitive load of choosing between languages when trying to express ideas, unless I'm trying to learn a new vocabulary word that I'm not familiar with. In specific, I can't relate to the commenter's point that: "When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!"

As objective evidence, I use a software app called Glossika to practice listening and speaking to some extent, where the software plays a spoken English audio phrase and pauses before playing the translated audio. When I see the English for the phrase "The computer crashed" in Spanish track, the Spanish equivalent only comes to mind, and I don't simultaneously think of the French translation—even though I'm later asked to translate the same English phrase in the French track. At the start of each track, I have a certain context in mind (to make responses in a particular language), so I don't personally struggle with having to consciously focus to avoid mixing up words. In my experience, after at most ~20 seconds or so working in the target language, I say the right translations without any extra conscious effort of avoiding the usage of the wrong language.

The same goes for conversation practice. At the very worst—sometimes at the very start of a conversation—I can mix up a basic word. But after about less than a minute or so of speech, I'm think and express only in the language I'm practicing; I don't continually struggle with interference with other languages.

For my personal experience, studying both French and Spanish has even been beneficial for vocabulary acquisition. Learning that "le public" means audience in French made it a lot easier to shortly after remember that "el público" also means audience in Spanish. The sounds in French and Spanish are different, along with the words that typically surround new vocabulary words, so I don't personally struggle with choosing between different word options from different languages.

Speaking French and Spanish also has a separation due to the way that pronunciation physically feels. The back-of-the-throat guttural R in French especially feels and sounds a lot different than the Spanish trilled R with a vibrating tongue near the front teeth—so there is a barrier to mixing up French and Spanish words with these different sounds, as they "feel" very different to say in the mouth and throat. Spanish words also have a "stress" on the second-last syllable or syllable with a certain accent (e.g. Le envió for "I sent it to you" with a stress on the accented ió), whereas French has roughly equal stresses as a "syllable-timed" language [1], so the feelings of speaking the languages are very different, even if the vocabulary can be similar at a first glance.

In summary, I just can't relate at all to the idea of "juggling" between languages from practice with audio programs and conversation practice each week, though I recognize that different people have different experiences.

[1] https://ielanguages.com/french-stress.html

[RajT88]

> Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!

This has been my experience as well. My native language is English, and I do just fine in it. But I've also studied a couple other languages, and when I try to put together sentences, whatever word is closest sometimes pops out.

I almost never find myself accidentally sticking English words into sentences, but I will frequently mix words from my second and third languages. It's brutal.

A friend of mine whose languages are Japanese, English, Spanish and Korean (in that order) told me that learning the third language is the hardest. Once you figure out how to stick to just one language at a time, learning more languages is a lot easier.

[polishdude20]

I wonder if it's different if you've studied the language vs if you grew up with it.

I learned polish from my parents when growing up and English from living in Canada and cartoons. My native tongue is English but I can speak polish fairly well and read and write it. I don't ever feel like I accidentally reach for polish or English words when I need the other.

[mejutoco]

If I understood correctly, the parent poster is saying that he mixes words between their second and third languages, not the native one.

I agree with your interpretation though. My anecdotal experience tells me this happens with studied languages.

[RajT88]

Correct - I have trouble staying 100% in non-native languages.

[zdragnar]

I had the same experience. German was my second, Chinese Mandarin my third. The first two years I was learning Mandarin, I found reading, writing and listening were fine. However, when it came to actually speaking, I was constantly stuttering because my brain wanted to substitute in German words instead of Mandarin words.

My girlfriend at the time natively spoke two languages (English and Hokkien) but was less proficient in both than many people who were only native speakers of one of them. She did, however, manage to pick up Mandarin a whole lot easier than I did.

[Cerium]

My experience is similar, the third language is indeed a problem. When learning the first foreign language in my mind it was "native vs other". Then when adding the third any gaps in my vocabulary would be filled by the previous language in a sort of layered cache approach. Unfortunately it is hardly ever useful to find the right Spanish word when you want a Japanese one.

[RajT88]

"Pan" is about it.

[Kamq]

> I almost never find myself accidentally sticking English words into sentences, but I will frequently mix words from my second and third languages.

Which is perfectly valid english.

[mejutoco]

I sympathize with your point, but it depends.

Entschuldigung, what time is it? Is that valid English?

Auteur, oeuvre, etc. are now English terms, but Remmidemmi?

My take is it is a gradient, and at some point you would be speaking broken English. Far from, mix words and it will be _perfectly_ valid English.

I believe your assertion is more of a rhetorical tool to make a point, and I agree with that point, though.

[Kamq]

> Entschuldigung, what time is it? Is that valid English?

It will be if you use it enough.

Sort of like how schadenfreude got added to english.

[nunuvit]

I don't understand this comment.

[jcranmer]

English has a reputation of excessively borrowing words from foreign languages. I don't think English is actually any more prone to doing this any other languages, but English does have a stronger habit of insisting on using foreign spellings and pronunciations for words.

[nunuvit]

Ah gotcha. I read it completely differently and didn't even think of that. Thanks

[AnnaPali]

Assimil Dutch is an amazing course! It brings you to B2 in about 45 hours of applied study (just doing as the instructions tell you!) I really like Assimil courses in general but the polyglot community widely believes that the Dutch course is their best of all.

Good luck!

[jb1991]

Unfortunately it seems to be out of print, not available anywhere. Maybe the company is going out of business?

[mdp2021]

You forgot the Archive.

https://archive.org/search?query=assimil

https://archive.org/details/dutchwithouttoil00cher

For as long as the dogs will let it exist.

[AnnaPali]

Here it is for $30: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Assimil-Staff/dp/2700517555

You can also find it online, but be sure to find the audio files also. They are essential. Each of the 100+ lessons are like this: After rereading the lesson text with the notes until you can read it without assistance - you then listen to the audio until you can understand the audio without reading the text, then you say it out loud until you can say it at the same speed as the audio without difficulty. So half of the course length involves the audio.

[e12e]

> Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn.

I've heard people that speak many languages fluently claim that it gets easier after the fifth language - so keep at it.

One tip; try as much as possible to stick to switching only between your mother tongue and the new(est) language you're learning - or at least have as many full days as you can where you avoid switching to other foreign languages.

Until you become fluent in the new language (say about a year if living/working in the new language).

[tgv]

Except Dutch doesn't resemble the other languages. The fact that my proudly unpatriotic countrymen (who secretly still believe that The Netherlands is the best place in the world) will start speaking in (broken) English as soon as they pick up a trace of a foreign accent, doesn't help either.

[e12e]

> Except Dutch doesn't resemble the other languages.

I didn't mean five or more "European dialects" I meant five or more different languages. Besides, between French and English there should be some overlap with Dutch - though I agree Dutch seems wierd on the surface:)

Sticking to your broken new language in the face of "helpful English" is hard - at least with friends and co-workers you can make an agreement (all Dutch Fridays, etc).

[tgv]

So here we've got someone who considers Romanian and Dutch dialects, while elsewhere we have someone who considers Brazilian Portugese and Portugese Portugese two languages.

I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (and by knowing, I don't mean travelguide fluency). Such people are rare.

[e12e]

> So here we've got someone who considers Romanian and Dutch dialects

No, but Dutch, English and French are pretty close (hence the reference to Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy").

> I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (...) Such people are rare.

They certainly are! I didn't mean to say i know a lot of people that fit the definition - only that I have heard such people mention that it gets easier after the fifth.

I only know Norwegian/Swedish/Danish (close enough to count as one, one and a half), English, Japanese and some French (and marginal German, Spanish, Italian etc due to limited exposure and the intersection of Norwegian/English/French).

I would have to add something a little different, like Sami, Maori, Russian or possibly Farsi, Arabic to fit in the five languages boat.

[hackernewds]

Exactly, I'll find myself doing translations in my head while speaking in English (my second language). And I find interacting socially much smoother in my native tongue.

I'm not sure if that relates directly to being able to connect deeply with the society of my upbringing, or that there is some hidden neural pattern there? For what it's worth, I've now been speaking English primarily longer than my mother tongue.

[nohaydeprobleme]

A difference might be related to idioms and slang. For example, in English, I might want to say that some commitment "isn't worth it," whereas in French, it might be more natural to say « ça ne vaut pas la peine » (literal translation: it's not worth the pain). Or I might want to say, "that's just the way things are," but the more natural French translation is « c'est la vie » (literal translation: it's the life, or "that's life").

Perhaps in one's native tongue, the idioms and phrases that are fitting to an idea come to mind easily, whereas in a second language, you may need additional effort to find roughly equivalent phrases that are not exact translations.

That may or may not be relevant to the thinking pattern you were mentioning, though I figure the lack of direct translations can sometimes be a barrier to fluency. The idea of "untranslatability" (aka the lack of a direct translation) was also explored last week in an interesting HN discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35629354

[denton-scratch]

> it's not worth the pain

"Peine" isn't just pain; it's also trouble. So I think "It's not worth the trouble" is a better rendition.

/me a native English speaker, who learned French by immersion aged about 6.

[nohaydeprobleme]

That difference between the literal word-by-word translation [1] and the semantic translation is my point of focus.

In English, my suggested translation would be that “It isn’t worth it.” But since this word-for-word translation would feel unnatural (that is, it’s typically better to introduce « la peine » even if the word trouble/pain wasn’t in the original sentence), there can be an extra cognitive load that interrupts fluency.

With enough conscious practice to train this, the translation of common idioms can become automatic. But meaningful translation instead of literal translation of idioms (especially of those more rarely used) can be a potential reason for someone to stop thinking in a target language, and revert to one’s native language to start thinking of the most natural translation for the phrase.

As another example, if I want to say “When pigs fly” in French, my instinct is to stop and use another phrase because the word-by-word translation is probably unnatural. In this case, my instinct is correct, as the proper meaningful translation is « Quand les poules ont les dents » (word-by-word translation: ‘When chicken have teeth’). So, dealing with idiom translation is an added mental effort to translate, which may cause thinking in one’s native language for some people.

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/literal

[denton-scratch]

> Quand les poules ont les dents

See "As rare as hens' teeth". Similar to "as rare as rocking-horse shit".

My French is far from idiomatic; I hadn't come across "quand les poules ont les dents".

[nohaydeprobleme]

The variations of the idiom's translations are definitely interesting. If you're curious to read more about the language variations, Le Figaro has a nice article about the idiom's equivalent in other languages (though they use the variant « quand les poules auront les dents »).

From Le Figaro [1]: « Précisons enfin que notre expression est un idiotisme et qu'elle ne possède pas, par conséquent, de stricts équivalents à l'étranger. Ainsi nos voisins anglais ont-ils l'habitude de dire «quand les cochons voleront», les Espagnols, de lancer «quand les grenouilles auront des poils» et les Allemands, de flanquer un «quand les poissons apprendront à voler». »

English translation: "Finally, let us specify that our expression is an idiom and that it does not, therefore, have strict equivalents abroad. Thus our English neighbors are used to saying "when the pigs fly", the Spaniards say "when the frogs have hair" and the Germans say "when the fish learn to fly."

[1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/expressions-francai...

[dragonmost]

If you have to translate in your head when using your non-native language that you have not mastered the language enough yet. I often think in english nowadays even if it is not my native or my everyday language, no translation required. Each language has advantages in certain contexts.

[TMWNN]

>As someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!

I've heard that there is an unusually high rate of mental illness among European Parliament translators.

[nohaydeprobleme]

For what it's worth, I couldn't find a supporting result after a few quick searches on Google Scholar and regular Google.

At most, I found a systematic review article [1] with the conclusion that interpreters for refugees experience higher levels of emotional and work-related stress, but it seems like this is more of a result of the content being translated, versus the act of translation.

It seems plausible, too, that assuming the claim is true (though I couldn't source an article to confirm this), it may alternatively be a result of the content of the translation or the pressure of the job (e.g. there may be serious consequences if there are mistranslations), versus the act of translation itself.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.7107...

[e63f67dd-065b]

The good (?) thing is that you can absolutely forget languages -- I used to, as a small child, speak both Cantonese and Hokkien fluently; after more than a decade and half of not speaking or hearing a single word, I have now completely lost the ability to do so. I was in Hong Kong right before COVID and was flabbergasted that I literally couldn't understand most of what I was hearing and was completely stuck when trying to speak Cantonese.

I'm not sure if speaking more languages exhausts some kind of mental capacity -- that's not my experience at all. There was a time when I spoke nothing but English for years, a time when I spoke 4 languages, and now I speak both English and Chinese daily; I haven't really observed any differences in my proficiency. My Chinese proficiency has probably gone back up to native status after atrophying in my college years of not speaking a single word.

[maxFlow]

> I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice.

I also speak four languages and mostly agree with your take. I'm native in Spanish; English I learned gaming, and reading Tolkien as a kid. The other two, German and French due to a combination of self interest, education and travel. While I often fantasize about picking up a couple more (namely Norwegian and Japanese), I quickly become disappointed as I go through the motions all over again. It's a huge mental effort for a seemingly low _tangible_ ROI.

Sure, listening to music or reading in the target language and understanding most of it is quite the magical experience, probably similar to what cracking a secret code feels like; but there is no practical gain to it afterwards. It's a bit like reading/writing poetry: an intense but ephemeral enjoyment. More of an art form than anything else really. Unless, of course, you find yourself immersed in the language by way of relocation, then it truly does make sense to learn it. I do get your point with Dutch though: now you've got to figure out a fifth system for conveying an idea you're perfectly capable of saying in four other systems; it gets tiring.

I've been comparing it with programming languages lately. The question often pops up in HN: "what's the best programming language to build a backend in?" -- imagine you already can build a great backend in Python/Go/TS but you start picking up Rust only for the purposes of building said backend, what's the point? Just use whichever language you know best and build the damn thing already. Simple enough right? As is often the case though, this type of analysis is superficial; you may build a fantastic backend in say, Clojure, but then miss out on the opportunities a more popular language with a larger community may have to offer (e.g. Python). Writing Python may not necessarily provide general cognitive advantages over writing Clojure, but it will give you easier _access_ to the entire ML ecosystem, for instance. Does being capable of using more powerful tools help develop cognitive advantages?

I only read the abstract, but even if _Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages_, learning a second language, English specifically, has unquestionably changed my life.

[cpursley]

Every Dutch person I’ve meet in the Netherlands speaks English fluently. Not a reason not to peruse Dutch of course!

But Russian (former Soviet space) and French (Africa) have large population that often have no little English fluency.

Which opens up a lot more cultural doors.

[cpursley]

And French is poised to grow big time with the rise of Africa. While Europe is in population decline into the foreseeable future.

[notdang]

Completely agree with you, I have the same experience, just that instead of French, it's Spanish for me. In French I am not fluent, but it still adds up to the mess.

p.s. adrenalin from IRC?

[GoblinSlayer]

I would understand if it was Finnish, but really Dutch is yet another european dialect. What problem could it hypothetically ever pose to learning?

[_pigpen__]

>lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. Couldn’t you be describing the other end of the Dunning Kruger effect? As an intelligent person, you are painfully aware of the limits of your knowledge?