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I wonder if a similar change would occur in the brains of native English speakers who learn Chinese or Japanese as adults? After all, it's a whole new way set o
by kochikame 8y ago
I wonder if a similar change would occur in the brains of native English speakers who learn Chinese or Japanese as adults? After all, it's a whole new way set of very different characters to learn and decode.
It may be that once the big shift has occurred when you learned to read your native language, it will never happen again, as you now have the "firmware" to read anything.
- gleenn 8y agoLearning Japanese at the age of 30 definitely bent my brain in new and interesting ways. Certainly when communicating, it made me realize how much of speaking is actually stringing together groups of words to convey meaning and way less about using some perfect syntax or grammar. The whole backwards grammar relative to English also was pretty new and challenging.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAs a native English speaker currently learning Japanese I love just how logical it all is. I'm not sure if it's because I'm from a software development background but I'm finding it so easy to learn. As you suggested in your comment, it's a whole different way of thinking.
- jniedrauer 8y agoI suspect that all written languages have more or less the same impact on our brains. It doesn't matter how ideas are expressed, just that they are expressed. Being able to represent abstract ideas as symbols makes reasoning about them possible in a way that you can never do with spoken language.