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Thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making
- MightyBuzzard 3y agoThinking in words of any language is entirely too slow for anything except plotting out a sentence. I'll stick to thinking in abstract concepts.
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- fidotron 3y agoExactly. The hysteria about LLMs has betrayed how many people never make the leap and are constrained to thinking in the words and structures already familiar to them. It is also incredible the extent to which abstract visualization is looked down on by our current academic fashions.
- incrudible 3y ago[flagged]
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- MightyBuzzard 3y ago[dead]
- dazc 3y agoMy Spanish teacher used to tell me not to try and translate everything in my head but to just think in Spanish. This seemed ridiculous to me at first but, over time, I understood what she meant. Put simply, you can't have a conversation in Spanish if you are mentally translating every word as you go. No Spanish speaker is going to hang around that long. I never did get to that stage but can appreciate the concept.
- mandmandam 3y agoPeople thinking in other languages also work stuff out abstractly sometimes. I'd say it's likely that learning new languages can improve your ability to work in abstract concepts. Something about the different forms of grammar, and deep paradigm shift in outlook implicit in the language (aka Sapir-Whorf). For example, the Mayan languages were fantastic for closely describing nature, compared to English, and (probably as a result) their astronomy was incredible.
- sitkack 3y agoBeing forced to translate from a language you are proficient in, one you possibly think sublingually in, forces one to move from system 2, to system one. Esp if the destination language has a much higher precision for the arguments you are making.
- toss1 3y agoBasically, it seems that thinking in a second language involves or engages more thinking and less "reflexive" responses. So, if one were to choose to learn/renew a language that encourages better thinking, which ones are best? Anyone have any examples with multiple languages and feeling that one or another helped them think better? (I'm currently choosing a language to learn/relearn among the EU languages, so interested in suggestions - thx)
- bibanez 3y agoGerman for sure, as a romanic language speaker. I don't know for sure what I would recommend if your mother tongue is English. Maybe German as well!
- svilen_dobrev 3y agotry a) something very different b) something close (but not too much) note, words/notions themselves, is different beast from constructs, both may give or take abilities
- mandmandam 3y ago> if one were to choose to learn/renew a language that encourages better thinking, which ones are best? Honestly it probably doesn't matter all that much. European languages are all pretty connected, in the scheme of things, and have much more in common with each other than you'd expect at first or second glance. That said, Spanish seems a safe bet, as per tfa. Coupled with the fact that so many people speak it, you could certainly do worse. I'm currently learning it, with the help of some lion's mane, and it does feel like a worthy pursuit. If I had to guess at a real answer to your interesting question though, I'd have to guess Russian. They've had a ridiculous amount of high-quality thought and literature, relative to their resources and population size.
- e12e 3y ago> among the EU languages I suspect learning a language that is actually substantially different has a more profound effect - so assuming your native language is English - maybe Finnish, Basque or Gaelic?
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- bavarianbob 3y agoI'd also posit that thinking improves decision-making.
- dazc 3y agoI'm not sure about that, the more I think about things the less likely I am to come to a firm decision. I have gotten to the stage now where I just accept the decision may turn out to be wrong but it won't be the end of the world if it is, I'm not in charge of anything that dangerous.
- Swizec 3y agoAll decisions are bets, [the right kind of] thinking just improves the odds.
- haswell 3y agoThe trouble is in learning how to distinguish between unhelpful overthinking and the [right kind]. I think it's necessary to balance thought with awareness of emotions and intuition. To listen to the gut, which is also an intelligent signal, but doesn't translate to verbal thought. Thinking more and thinking harder often creates an illusion of some kind of progress or of triangulating on the best decision. And this can be the case, but can also lead to a kind of decision paralysis and/or overconfidence in a decision (I thought really hard about this, so it must be better) when we don't actually have enough underlying knowledge to justify the decision. If we could measure such a thing, I'd love to see a plot of decision accuracy vs. time spent reaching the decision. This will highly depend on one's deeply ingrained biases. I'm overly pessimistic, so thinking more helps me temper my pessimism and reframe when needed, but thinking too much eventually leads me back to where I started.
- bavarianbob 3y agoI find that writing my thoughts is my antidote to this problem. Circular paths of thought are quickly squashed and I have something to visually audit when I ask myself if spending more time thinking will likely enable me to make a better decision.
- kashyapc 3y agoMeanwhile, as I started to learn my 5th language (French), I just came across this article[1], where it claims studying a new language can "interfere" with other languages you know. To selectively quote: "[...] we can conclude that learning words from a new language does come at the cost of at least retrieval ease for words in previously learnt foreign languages.’ In one of the experiments, learning the Spanish versions of words also seemed to make participants slightly less accurate when recalling those words in English. [...]" Although I can confirm the small effect from my own experience, it doesn't faze me. For me, the upsides far outweigh a slight delay in retrieval ease. [1] https://psyche.co/ideas/will-studying-a-new-language-interfere-with-any-others-you-speak https://psyche.co/ideas/will-studying-a-new-language-interfe...
- saiya-jin 3y agoI dont believe it neither (on my 4th/5th, french too). There is often new mental model required, ie with French you need to catch first parts of words since ends are not pronounced, and other quirks. German has these uber long words. Grammar is always a bit different. Ordering in sentences. And so on. Overall it increases neuroplasticity, best starting as kids when brain is more adaptive. Big gains, regardless if there are some miniscule disadvantages overall.
- Aerroon 3y agoI definitely have this problem sometimes. I know what I want to say but the only word that pops into my head is in the wrong language.
- hutzlibu 3y agoIn traveller communities it is quite common to just say them in a different language - then you have a beautiful language mix where people stilm mostly understand each other. It just gets akward, when you interact with ordinary people again ..
- throw1234651234 3y agoI think this aspect of it is common, but overall the "negative" effects are very minor and shouldn't stop anyone from trying to learn a language.
- Swizec 3y agoI am native level fluent in 2 languages – Slovenian and English – and this feels true to my experience. There’s a lot of stuff I can critically think about in English because the words don’t carry much/any emotional weight. They’re just abstract concepts, very easy to be coldly objective. Meanwhile talking about work stuff in Slovenian is near impossible because most of my career has been in English. It’s like the concepts just don’t exist in the Slovenian part of my brain. This gets really trippy when the same word in each language feels like it carries different connotations and baggage. The translation is same but the meaning is different because the correct where you’d use each word is different.
- htss2013 3y agoYes this is the most disorienting thing about using a non native language. You're aware that you aren't able to convey intended connotation or comprehend it. So even if you are perfectly capable of all the right denotation, you're still missing an entire layer of communication. It's even more difficult when a language is spoken in different cultures. Eg, British, American and Australians probably have different connotations associated with the same words. Distinguishing between using a synonym out of custom vs intentionally for a different connotation is very difficult. It's not like there's a connotation dictionary you can refer to.
- morjom 3y agoAs a Finnish person who almost fluked Swedish class I wish I would've taken it more seriously. Knowing a language or three at that seems like a big up in life.
- webnrrd2k 3y agoIf you're willing to accept math as a language in the same sense as the article uses, then this effect applies to the sciences, where people regularly translate problems into the non-native language of math to gain clarity.
- zen_1 3y agoThe Arabic in the header image is about as fucked up as possible. The letter ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). The word ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). Somehow they also managed to get the letters not to connect to each other. Great job Guardian! 10/10
- LordShredda 3y agoThe image was probably made in photoshop. It's 2023 and some programs still can't render decent RTL unicode.
- BasedAnon 3y agobut GIMP can, score one for open source!
- gus_massa 3y agoThere is a site to explain the differences "Help! Is This Arabic?" https://isthisarabic.com/ https://isthisarabic.com/ HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949146 (635 points | 6 months ago | 299 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544990 (80 points | December 2021 | 20 comments)
- ComplexSystems 3y agoThis isn't exactly the same, but someone needs to make a similar site for English text for products being exported from Asian countries. It is totally baffling to me just how bad the Engrish is on some of these products I get on Amazon: product specs, manuals, and etc vary from "slightly off" to "almost unreadable." It's actually something I have been curious about for a long time: why is it like this? The people who make these products have to spend millions and millions of dollars setting up factories, hiring people, putting things into production, etc. But somehow they don't have a budget for a bilingual college student intern to translate a bunch of copy to English better than "using this product will bring a great joy." Why? I would be super interested in some journalist figuring out why this happens. Of course, there's always the viewpoint of "why would they need to translate better? It's just money that they don't need to spend, and this works for their business." So I will make a super strong claim: ChatGPT can now do nearly perfect mass translations of this stuff for free, in theory simultaneously increasing translation quality and reducing costs. Despite this, for whatever reason, I predict that the average translation quality on Amazon won't improve within the next few years. Anyone want to take the other side of that bet?
- karmakaze 3y agoNot only spoken languages but math and music could also be included though the specific areas of improvement or resilience could very. I have learned several languages early on but find my thinking/imagination to be less word-language but rather shapes, connections, motions, and other not easily mapped to word things.
- abeppu 3y agoI'm reminded of anecdotes from Murakami, who tactically wrote pieces of his work in English, and then translated back to Japanese, and preferred the style of the result. He also mentioned later learning of Hungarian writer Agota Kristof, who learned and wrote in French, and had a direct style with short sentences. This is only to point out that in addition to the objective, empirical conclusions described in this guardian article, there are also sometimes aesthetic and subjective benefits. https://lithub.com/haruki-murakami-the-moment-i-became-a-novelist/ https://lithub.com/haruki-murakami-the-moment-i-became-a-nov...
- valyagolev 3y agoAgota Kristof wrote one of the most intense, alienating, haunting works I've ever read (the notebook trilogy). but all the time i was reading a thought was nagging that her name is a play around agatha kristie
- NalNezumi 3y agoThe article comes of as a bit... Fluffy. But it's psychology after all, so maybe that would be expected. But I wonder. From the article: >The foreign language effect does not depend on the particular features of the language that someone speaks; instead, it is concerned with the general experience of moving from a first to a second language. It feels so weird to me. It feels so weird that according to this, (own example) a Swedish person that learned Norwegian would have similar effect as someone that learned say, Japanese. The latter just so happens to be me. (native in both) But Norwegian(bokmål) and Swedish(rikssvenska) is so similar that I can hardly believe any "learning a second language" effect occur. If it does, I think claiming that a deep-Texan learning British cockney/posh accent, or Scottish accent, also have the effect mentioned. Certain languages are just so similar that there's just major overlap. While with others, there's just expressions that is impossible to convey. But here somehow national border based categorization of languages seems to be enough to show the effect? I can't help but question if this is just one of the psychology bogus like the "decision fatigue" that had ample evidence until it was almost completely disproven.
- _Microft 3y ago> It feels so weird that according to this, a Swedish person that learned Norwegian would have similar effect as someone that learned say, Japanese. Is that from the study itself or is it an own example? For what it's worth I'd not consider the pair of Norwegian and Swedish as languages foreign to another. They are basically dialects. The same goes for the pair of German and Austrian imo.
- NalNezumi 3y agoAn own example. The quoted part is from the article. And yes I would consider the same. But if the quoted part is to be believed, the implications are that the same effect occur between Austrian and German, as would Afrikaans to Mongolian
- mlindner 3y agoThis seems really wrong given the tremendous number of aircraft accidents and near-accidents that have been caused by speakers of one language not understanding the language spoken by controllers very well. Using a different language adds cognitive load, not the other way around.
- monadgonad 3y agoYou're talking about a completely different phenomenon.
- agumonkey 3y agoFunny, as trying different programming languages rewire your brain deeply, so does trying different human languages. Different vocabulary and grammars will shed lights on different patterns in interesting ways.
- gsuuon 3y agoI wonder how much of this has to do with learning the second language when you're older and more mature? You end up without the childhood emotional baggage or subtle misunderstandings that come with learning at a young age.
- nik282000 3y agoI maintain a number of machines which came with non-english wiring diagrams. Trying to learn a language while diagnosing issues with a machine does not improve either activity.
- rongenre 3y agoThis makes me think of my experiences in Europe. In my native language (English), I can twist and weasel with the language to keep from committing to... anything. It has -- too many degrees of freedom available to me. With German, though [where I'm intermediate], I don't have that flexibility. My conversations are really straightforward and what comes out is simple enough that I can express it. I'd say that this does come at the cost of understanding and expressing nuance and condition, but maybe that's actually helpful.