4 ms·

Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy

133 points by nativeit 7d ago

UltraSane 7d ago
Learning Lean 4 and trying to prove something using it is extremely mentally stimulating.
bryanrasmussen 7d ago
does this include programming languages which after all are a system of meaning?
- verdverm 7d ago
  probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical) I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain
  - bryanrasmussen 7d ago
    >probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical) I mean if it were that similarity made it not useful then it would surely be that you should only learn languages that are significantly different from ones you already know, but that does not seem to be the case from the admittedly not very detailed article. >I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin right, but they don't say that. Maybe it is learning things different to you. But perhaps it is stimulating the parts of the brain that do the most relating of complicated concepts to each other. In which case it is just learning a bunch of words and what they refer to and how to structure these words together to discourse on ideas. One common thing that is used to keep people from losing abilities in Alzheimer's diagnosis is using complicated skills like knitting, drawing. That is to say practicing complicated skills you already have prevents deterioration, so it seems reasonable to assume learning complicated skills does the same. In which case it ends up being not very amazing information, as that is what I would naturally assume to be the case. Use it or lose it.
- jraby3 7d ago
  Also wondering about instruments and learning to read sheet music.
zulux 7d ago
I had a massive stroke. I should be in a wheelchair. I'm mostly fine now. It's postulated that my multilingual abilities helped, among other things.
comrade1234 7d ago
Before Covid I got my German B1 certificate. I was diligently going to German-speaking meetup twice a week. One of the meetups had a bunch of googlers in it regularly. One of them was a loud gregarious Italian from the north. He was telling me a story about cleaning fish and chopping their heads off with a machete and how he cut the end of his finger off and had it reattached. He seemed nice but a little inept and lacking caution. Covid was starting. In the newspapers it was reported that Zurich had its first case of Covid. They were cautious to not say who it was - no clues at all in the paper. But a friend at Google forwarded me an internal email that said no one at Google had it yet other than someone in the Zurich office who had just been in northern Italy. I stopped going to the meetups. I really should start again but not sure what's going to happen next.
- timr 7d ago
  Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it's probably safe to go to a language meetup.
  - LoganDark 7d ago
    That's not how viruses work. You're not magically immune to flu season just because you've gotten the flu (or flu vaccines) in past years. It's ALWAYS important to keep up to date on your booster vaccines for covid. Even getting one or multiple strains at home won't necessarily help when you travel either.
    - timr 7d ago
      It actually is how the human immune system works, and in particular, there’s a huge amount of evidence that humoral immunity is protective and long lasting for Covid. Worrying about this is roughly the same degree of reasonable as worrying about getting any of the other common coronaviruses that circulate. I know you’re not going to accept this, but there is quite literally no good evidence that boosters for Covid do anything for otherwise healthy people who have already been infected. Regardless, the point is, if you won’t go to a language meetup because you’re worried about this, you’re likely doing far more damage to yourself from social isolation and anxiety than the virus would ever do to you. It’s time to live your life.
jdw64 7d ago
The biggest obstacle to learning a foreign language is that it's so much slower and more frustrating than using your native language, right? Compared to your native-language typing speed, even English typing speed is only half... So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?
- deleted 7d ago
  [deleted]
- birdsongs 7d ago
  The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less. As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is). But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc.. The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media. It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning. It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know. English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.
  - jdw64 7d ago
    Thanks for the advice. For me, reading is fine, but writing and speaking are hard. Especially speaking. What should I do about this? Should I change my environment first, after all?
    - birdsongs 6d ago
      My speaking only got better after speaking a lot with native speakers, just, a lot. And focusing hard on vowel sounds. In Norwegian specifically those kill a lot of understanding. If you can't immerse by living there, I really liked 1:1 online interactions. I paid for an italki instructor my first year here. My writing is still my weakest point. I'm fine with spell check and predictive text on my phone, but my spelling is atrocious without it. That could be improved with spelling practice like we did as kids in our native language, but I just haven't put in the time, due to how common spell check is. Basically just time and effort! Sorry, I know it's not a nice answer. It's just a really hard thing to do, and you have to keep doing it, and a lot of people minimize the effort. Maybe it's easier for some but not most of us.
timr 7d ago
All of the the research I have seen on this topic have been observational retrospective studies, which are worthless and should be ignored. The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language (let alone a third or more) are so large that they cannot be overcome without a randomized control. This stuff is churnalism, right up there with "does coffee make you live longer?" [1]. But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy. I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring. [1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.
- outside1234 7d ago
  And it is only getting easier to learn a language now too. What FINALLY got me over the hump with Spanish was YouTube and discovering resources like Dreaming Spanish (leveled content for comprehensive input that probably exist in most major languages). Content that was fun and at my level. Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.
  - timr 7d ago
    There are so many tools now that didn't exist even when I started. I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example. Or in the case of Japanese, being able to take a picture of text, and select the kanji for lookup. Life. Changing. I'm also old enough to remember when getting listening materials required going to the library for cassette tapes. Today, you can talk with a wide selection of native speakers, listen to essentially infinite audio and video content, and immerse yourself in a culture halfway around the world for the price of an internet connection.
outside1234 7d ago
A second language, almost from the start, will also open up a whole second world for you. When I go to somewhere that speaks Spanish the whole place “jumps into 3D” for me. I can understand what people at the table next to me are complaining or laughing about, I can make small talk with people, I don’t have to follow the “avocado toast” trail that the non-native speakers sort of get jammed into because they struggle off of it. It is a much more human experience when you understand the language. At home, I can watch Spanish movies as well, and listen to music artists I probably might never have heard about like C. Tangana and Rosalia otherwise. It has doubled my cultural landscape for me. After reading the article, I wonder if this isn’t a key secondary benefit to learning the language itself. It gives you a larger variety of things to enjoy in your life.
- nchmy 6d ago
  You get it, friend. It's unfortunate that so few others do as well. There's many expats where I live who have, at best, a completely rudimentary level of Spanish. It is both sad and disgraceful. I prefer talking to locals. I've been getting into Latin music in the past year and absolutely love it. Mostly "classics" though - eg Juan Gabriel en Bellas Artes is sublime - I'm not a fan of most new stuff (though I am sure there's plenty of excellent new stuff, but it's hard to come across when reggaeton and narcocorridos are so popular). Will check out c tangana and Rosalía!
shigawire 7d ago
Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
- testing22321 7d ago
  Yep, I learned Spanish, then French. The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn. Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.
  - fg137 6d ago
    > The trick is to immerse yourself > I spent 2 years in Latin America That is not very accessible to most people.
    - testing22321 6d ago
      Nobody said it was going to be easy. Tons of people work remote from Mexico and Spain.
- timr 7d ago
  Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2. > I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem. Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it. As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
- ninalanyon 7d ago
  In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best. If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time. For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.
dboreham 7d ago
You also get to learn another culture which to some extent prevents you from becoming an a.hole. Lack of foreign language instruction in k-12 education in the USA might be a little correlated with this...
glum64 7d ago
I am trilingual. All of my languages belong to different language groups; I regularly read and write in both directions. I use all of the three languages every day. I can also bulldoze my way through a text in a fourth language given a dictionary and a reference for its grammar. I can read the alphabet of a fifth language (mostly w/o understanding the sounds that I make, but I am told that I get it right). I got there 15 years ago. I seem to be unable to learn anything new since.
- crossroadsguy 7d ago
  These researchers probably forgot to factor in the brain's disk size bottleneck. Maybe they will get there.
- dashee 7d ago
  Good point about the different language groups. I wonder if there has been any research on measuring the scale of the effect by including some sort of distance metric between the languages. Let's imagine your primary language is Spanish: What's the gain if you learn Italian (Romance language) vs German (non-Romance Indo-European) vs Hungarian (non-Indo European same alphabet) vs Japanese (non-Indo European different alphabet)?
globular-toast 7d ago
I don't think it's really possible to learn a new language unless you have to. Sure, you can learn some words and grammar from books and games like Duolingo, but you'll never really learn the language if you don't use it, and you'll only use it if you have to. This is why it's hard for English natives to learn another language: too many people speak our language already. And now people won't be learning computer languages any more either.
- NorthSouthNorth 6d ago
  You can absolutely learn a language even if you don't need to. But it's just a lot harder. I have done it and know many people who have done so too. It's frustrating and slow, but if you figure out a system that works for you, you can do it.
  - globular-toast 6d ago
    How do you stop people speaking to you in your native language?
    - NorthSouthNorth 5d ago
      English is my native language too. Eventually they stop assuming haha. You can pay for an online tutor which I found got me rather far. After like A2 they wont speak English with you anymore (if you ask em too). You do not need to speak to progress, you can get really, really, really far without speaking much, if at all. You'll need to eventually speak of course to get through things like proper pronunciation and just general confidence, but most of my progress came from watching tv, anime, listening to audio books and reading books in the target language (German). I found Audio books by far got me the furthest just due to being able to listen to them on my commute or during sport rather easily but they were limiting in German due to their funny Präteritum case. It's slow and frustrating but things like kindle and lang reactor help a lot. I am only at a point where I feel good about my languages skills after 4 years (2 of which I spent mucking about, and the 3rd was where I got serious). And if it's low stakes, you can lie and say "no english" which works. But I've only done this a few times and felt kinda icky about doing it.
everyone 7d ago
Do programming languages count?
- shermantanktop 7d ago
  Is a programming language a language? I think it probably exercises some of the same cognitive skills, but the vocabulary of a typical programming language is tiny.
cinkhangin 7d ago
I thought it is about programming languages
- OutOfHere 7d ago
  I do think that practicing different programming languages should have a corresponding brain benefit as well.
OutOfHere 7d ago
Note that languages can alternatively also be conlangs (constructed languages). They are in fact a lot more interesting and systematic than traditional human languages. Granted, you'll find no real-life people who verbally speak the conlang outside of arranged group calls within online communities.
david38 7d ago
The only solid thing I’ve seen for brain health is maintaining physical health
- vannevar 5d ago
  Yeah, if your goal is brain health, you're better off spending the time exercising, by a mile. But learning another language may be more enjoyable and certainly has social benefits, so I can understand people choosing it.
ETH_start 6d ago
There are a lot of things you can do to make yourself healthier (both physically and mentally) if you have an organized life and you allot time for enriching activity, whether that be recreation or learning a language or learning a new instrument. The key is to be stable enough in your life where you can comfortably alott that time. For me personally, this kind of stability is always out of reach as I'm always frantically trying to reach the next rung in the career ladder.
aduwah 6d ago
I find that I am having a different personality in each (3) languages I speak, especially in context in a different country. When I switch back to my original language to speak to someone in said country my habits I do in my original country come back for the part and then I revert back. Feels a bit schizophrenic, but I think it is normal for most people. My child is showing similar patterns. To me this is proof that learning a language touches a lot of parts in our brain, not just affect the parts about learning
- oniony 6d ago
  I don't think it's just language. I remember having this happen just by having separate groups of friends. You end up in a situation where the two friend groups meet and suddenly realise that you are two different personalities and that you don't know how to act.
- evilbob93 5d ago
  I knew a German person who was a NLP practitioner who said that he didn't know how to be depressed in English

133 points by nativeit 7d ago

UltraSane 7d ago

Learning Lean 4 and trying to prove something using it is extremely mentally stimulating.

bryanrasmussen 7d ago

does this include programming languages which after all are a system of meaning?

verdverm 7d ago
probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical) I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain
- bryanrasmussen 7d ago
  >probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical) I mean if it were that similarity made it not useful then it would surely be that you should only learn languages that are significantly different from ones you already know, but that does not seem to be the case from the admittedly not very detailed article. >I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin right, but they don't say that. Maybe it is learning things different to you. But perhaps it is stimulating the parts of the brain that do the most relating of complicated concepts to each other. In which case it is just learning a bunch of words and what they refer to and how to structure these words together to discourse on ideas. One common thing that is used to keep people from losing abilities in Alzheimer's diagnosis is using complicated skills like knitting, drawing. That is to say practicing complicated skills you already have prevents deterioration, so it seems reasonable to assume learning complicated skills does the same. In which case it ends up being not very amazing information, as that is what I would naturally assume to be the case. Use it or lose it.
jraby3 7d ago
Also wondering about instruments and learning to read sheet music.

zulux 7d ago

I had a massive stroke. I should be in a wheelchair. I'm mostly fine now. It's postulated that my multilingual abilities helped, among other things.

comrade1234 7d ago

Before Covid I got my German B1 certificate. I was diligently going to German-speaking meetup twice a week. One of the meetups had a bunch of googlers in it regularly. One of them was a loud gregarious Italian from the north. He was telling me a story about cleaning fish and chopping their heads off with a machete and how he cut the end of his finger off and had it reattached. He seemed nice but a little inept and lacking caution. Covid was starting. In the newspapers it was reported that Zurich had its first case of Covid. They were cautious to not say who it was - no clues at all in the paper. But a friend at Google forwarded me an internal email that said no one at Google had it yet other than someone in the Zurich office who had just been in northern Italy. I stopped going to the meetups. I really should start again but not sure what's going to happen next.

timr 7d ago
Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it's probably safe to go to a language meetup.
- LoganDark 7d ago
  That's not how viruses work. You're not magically immune to flu season just because you've gotten the flu (or flu vaccines) in past years. It's ALWAYS important to keep up to date on your booster vaccines for covid. Even getting one or multiple strains at home won't necessarily help when you travel either.
  - timr 7d ago
    It actually is how the human immune system works, and in particular, there’s a huge amount of evidence that humoral immunity is protective and long lasting for Covid. Worrying about this is roughly the same degree of reasonable as worrying about getting any of the other common coronaviruses that circulate. I know you’re not going to accept this, but there is quite literally no good evidence that boosters for Covid do anything for otherwise healthy people who have already been infected. Regardless, the point is, if you won’t go to a language meetup because you’re worried about this, you’re likely doing far more damage to yourself from social isolation and anxiety than the virus would ever do to you. It’s time to live your life.

jdw64 7d ago

The biggest obstacle to learning a foreign language is that it's so much slower and more frustrating than using your native language, right? Compared to your native-language typing speed, even English typing speed is only half... So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?

deleted 7d ago
[deleted]
birdsongs 7d ago
The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less. As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is). But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc.. The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media. It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning. It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know. English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.
- jdw64 7d ago
  Thanks for the advice. For me, reading is fine, but writing and speaking are hard. Especially speaking. What should I do about this? Should I change my environment first, after all?
  - birdsongs 6d ago
    My speaking only got better after speaking a lot with native speakers, just, a lot. And focusing hard on vowel sounds. In Norwegian specifically those kill a lot of understanding. If you can't immerse by living there, I really liked 1:1 online interactions. I paid for an italki instructor my first year here. My writing is still my weakest point. I'm fine with spell check and predictive text on my phone, but my spelling is atrocious without it. That could be improved with spelling practice like we did as kids in our native language, but I just haven't put in the time, due to how common spell check is. Basically just time and effort! Sorry, I know it's not a nice answer. It's just a really hard thing to do, and you have to keep doing it, and a lot of people minimize the effort. Maybe it's easier for some but not most of us.

timr 7d ago

All of the the research I have seen on this topic have been observational retrospective studies, which are worthless and should be ignored. The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language (let alone a third or more) are so large that they cannot be overcome without a randomized control. This stuff is churnalism, right up there with "does coffee make you live longer?" [1]. But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy. I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring. [1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.

outside1234 7d ago
And it is only getting easier to learn a language now too. What FINALLY got me over the hump with Spanish was YouTube and discovering resources like Dreaming Spanish (leveled content for comprehensive input that probably exist in most major languages). Content that was fun and at my level. Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.
- timr 7d ago
  There are so many tools now that didn't exist even when I started. I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example. Or in the case of Japanese, being able to take a picture of text, and select the kanji for lookup. Life. Changing. I'm also old enough to remember when getting listening materials required going to the library for cassette tapes. Today, you can talk with a wide selection of native speakers, listen to essentially infinite audio and video content, and immerse yourself in a culture halfway around the world for the price of an internet connection.

outside1234 7d ago

A second language, almost from the start, will also open up a whole second world for you. When I go to somewhere that speaks Spanish the whole place “jumps into 3D” for me. I can understand what people at the table next to me are complaining or laughing about, I can make small talk with people, I don’t have to follow the “avocado toast” trail that the non-native speakers sort of get jammed into because they struggle off of it. It is a much more human experience when you understand the language. At home, I can watch Spanish movies as well, and listen to music artists I probably might never have heard about like C. Tangana and Rosalia otherwise. It has doubled my cultural landscape for me. After reading the article, I wonder if this isn’t a key secondary benefit to learning the language itself. It gives you a larger variety of things to enjoy in your life.

nchmy 6d ago
You get it, friend. It's unfortunate that so few others do as well. There's many expats where I live who have, at best, a completely rudimentary level of Spanish. It is both sad and disgraceful. I prefer talking to locals. I've been getting into Latin music in the past year and absolutely love it. Mostly "classics" though - eg Juan Gabriel en Bellas Artes is sublime - I'm not a fan of most new stuff (though I am sure there's plenty of excellent new stuff, but it's hard to come across when reggaeton and narcocorridos are so popular). Will check out c tangana and Rosalía!

shigawire 7d ago

Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.

testing22321 7d ago
Yep, I learned Spanish, then French. The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn. Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.
- fg137 6d ago
  > The trick is to immerse yourself > I spent 2 years in Latin America That is not very accessible to most people.
  - testing22321 6d ago
    Nobody said it was going to be easy. Tons of people work remote from Mexico and Spain.
timr 7d ago
Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2. > I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem. Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it. As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
ninalanyon 7d ago
In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best. If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time. For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.

dboreham 7d ago

You also get to learn another culture which to some extent prevents you from becoming an a.hole. Lack of foreign language instruction in k-12 education in the USA might be a little correlated with this...

glum64 7d ago

I am trilingual. All of my languages belong to different language groups; I regularly read and write in both directions. I use all of the three languages every day. I can also bulldoze my way through a text in a fourth language given a dictionary and a reference for its grammar. I can read the alphabet of a fifth language (mostly w/o understanding the sounds that I make, but I am told that I get it right). I got there 15 years ago. I seem to be unable to learn anything new since.

crossroadsguy 7d ago
These researchers probably forgot to factor in the brain's disk size bottleneck. Maybe they will get there.
dashee 7d ago
Good point about the different language groups. I wonder if there has been any research on measuring the scale of the effect by including some sort of distance metric between the languages. Let's imagine your primary language is Spanish: What's the gain if you learn Italian (Romance language) vs German (non-Romance Indo-European) vs Hungarian (non-Indo European same alphabet) vs Japanese (non-Indo European different alphabet)?

globular-toast 7d ago

I don't think it's really possible to learn a new language unless you have to. Sure, you can learn some words and grammar from books and games like Duolingo, but you'll never really learn the language if you don't use it, and you'll only use it if you have to. This is why it's hard for English natives to learn another language: too many people speak our language already. And now people won't be learning computer languages any more either.

NorthSouthNorth 6d ago
You can absolutely learn a language even if you don't need to. But it's just a lot harder. I have done it and know many people who have done so too. It's frustrating and slow, but if you figure out a system that works for you, you can do it.
- globular-toast 6d ago
  How do you stop people speaking to you in your native language?
  - NorthSouthNorth 5d ago
    English is my native language too. Eventually they stop assuming haha. You can pay for an online tutor which I found got me rather far. After like A2 they wont speak English with you anymore (if you ask em too). You do not need to speak to progress, you can get really, really, really far without speaking much, if at all. You'll need to eventually speak of course to get through things like proper pronunciation and just general confidence, but most of my progress came from watching tv, anime, listening to audio books and reading books in the target language (German). I found Audio books by far got me the furthest just due to being able to listen to them on my commute or during sport rather easily but they were limiting in German due to their funny Präteritum case. It's slow and frustrating but things like kindle and lang reactor help a lot. I am only at a point where I feel good about my languages skills after 4 years (2 of which I spent mucking about, and the 3rd was where I got serious). And if it's low stakes, you can lie and say "no english" which works. But I've only done this a few times and felt kinda icky about doing it.

everyone 7d ago

Do programming languages count?

shermantanktop 7d ago
Is a programming language a language? I think it probably exercises some of the same cognitive skills, but the vocabulary of a typical programming language is tiny.

cinkhangin 7d ago

I thought it is about programming languages

OutOfHere 7d ago
I do think that practicing different programming languages should have a corresponding brain benefit as well.

OutOfHere 7d ago

Note that languages can alternatively also be conlangs (constructed languages). They are in fact a lot more interesting and systematic than traditional human languages. Granted, you'll find no real-life people who verbally speak the conlang outside of arranged group calls within online communities.

david38 7d ago

The only solid thing I’ve seen for brain health is maintaining physical health

vannevar 5d ago
Yeah, if your goal is brain health, you're better off spending the time exercising, by a mile. But learning another language may be more enjoyable and certainly has social benefits, so I can understand people choosing it.

ETH_start 6d ago

There are a lot of things you can do to make yourself healthier (both physically and mentally) if you have an organized life and you allot time for enriching activity, whether that be recreation or learning a language or learning a new instrument. The key is to be stable enough in your life where you can comfortably alott that time. For me personally, this kind of stability is always out of reach as I'm always frantically trying to reach the next rung in the career ladder.

aduwah 6d ago

I find that I am having a different personality in each (3) languages I speak, especially in context in a different country. When I switch back to my original language to speak to someone in said country my habits I do in my original country come back for the part and then I revert back. Feels a bit schizophrenic, but I think it is normal for most people. My child is showing similar patterns. To me this is proof that learning a language touches a lot of parts in our brain, not just affect the parts about learning

oniony 6d ago
I don't think it's just language. I remember having this happen just by having separate groups of friends. You end up in a situation where the two friend groups meet and suddenly realise that you are two different personalities and that you don't know how to act.
evilbob93 5d ago
I knew a German person who was a NLP practitioner who said that he didn't know how to be depressed in English