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In my experience, learning a second language has clogged my brain up a bit. Maybe it’s healthier and more engaged, but it’s sometimes hard to say if it’s truly

In my experience, learning a second language has clogged my brain up a bit. Maybe it’s healthier and more engaged, but it’s sometimes hard to say if it’s truly been beneficial from a cognitive perspective. I’ve certainly been humbled and become more confident in pushing through mistakes made in public. It’s also a really cool skill. But it often feels like my memory for words is like a unordered linked list. Sometimes I get the wrong language and must iterate over the list to find the correct language version.

Baeocystin 7y ago
For what it's worth, I agree with you. I consider myself multisemilingal- English is my primary language, but I have up-goer 5 levels of proficiency in half a dozen other languages. I enjoy it, but I do not feel like it has been a net improvement in terms of cognitive function. If anything, more mental housekeeping is required when I sit down to write in any language, including English. I think many people, even multilingual ones, fail to truly consider what they mean by 'multilingual'. Words and grammar are only the bare surface of what you need to learn- what actually happens is that you grow a different model of mindset and culture, one where the words of the new language have meaning. This only happens over a lifetime of immersion and exposure to the prosaic realities of the language in question.
distantaidenn 7y ago
I somewhat agree. I'm a native English speaker, but I use Japanese daily and learning Korean, now. Sometimes it is a bit of a jumble, but I attribute it more to laziness than anything else. My brain just reaches for the easiest word, and I have to struggle to find the correct one. As a bit of an aside, because of the sentence order and cognates, when speaking Korean, I often first go from English to Japanese and finally can stumble out some broken sentence. Japanese to Korean is almost a one to one mapping when speaking simple sentences, based on both languages being agglutinative and having SOV ordering.

Baeocystin 7y ago

For what it's worth, I agree with you. I consider myself multisemilingal- English is my primary language, but I have up-goer 5 levels of proficiency in half a dozen other languages. I enjoy it, but I do not feel like it has been a net improvement in terms of cognitive function. If anything, more mental housekeeping is required when I sit down to write in any language, including English. I think many people, even multilingual ones, fail to truly consider what they mean by 'multilingual'. Words and grammar are only the bare surface of what you need to learn- what actually happens is that you grow a different model of mindset and culture, one where the words of the new language have meaning. This only happens over a lifetime of immersion and exposure to the prosaic realities of the language in question.

distantaidenn 7y ago

I somewhat agree. I'm a native English speaker, but I use Japanese daily and learning Korean, now. Sometimes it is a bit of a jumble, but I attribute it more to laziness than anything else. My brain just reaches for the easiest word, and I have to struggle to find the correct one. As a bit of an aside, because of the sentence order and cognates, when speaking Korean, I often first go from English to Japanese and finally can stumble out some broken sentence. Japanese to Korean is almost a one to one mapping when speaking simple sentences, based on both languages being agglutinative and having SOV ordering.