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Anecdotally, I learned Japanese. At a later date, I studied Hungarian in a cram school. Two of us learned Hungarian much faster than our classmates- we both ha
by yonaguska 5y ago
Anecdotally, I learned Japanese.
At a later date, I studied Hungarian in a cram school. Two of us learned Hungarian much faster than our classmates- we both had studied Japanese. Most of the students had also studied other languages. Something about learning languages that were so grammatically different from English seemed to help with building mental models and stop "translating" things back and forth from English- which made the language much easier to pick up.
Developing learning techniques does help in learning other things. Learning boring things however, I think that's always going to be hard for me.
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoI have a feeling this anecdote has more to do with the personality of people who have the drive, desire, and passion to self-study Japanese.
- OJFord 5y agoI disagree, a lot of learning a language is transferable, but not because it's 'learning how to learn', just because it's the same. Grammars are largely described using the same system, with different languages using different parts of it (and more or less - Latin quite a lot; English quite little). Learning a second language (that's different enough) exposes you to more of the available grammatical constructs, so when you learn a third there's less that could possibly be new, and probably quite a bit of grammatical overlap with your first or second language.
- nonbirithm 5y agoBut does this specific anecdote generalize to, for example, learning a language and then trying to learn linear algebra? I feel that was the point the GP was meaning to bring up. Languages are fundamentally similar to one another in many ways, so I would imagine there is less you can transfer to learning something where the framework of language-learning no longer applies.