7 ms·

Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage?

49 points by smonusbonus 12y ago

ArekDymalski 12y ago
Hmm, a nice exception from Betteridge's law of headlines.
- Retric 12y ago
  I read that as a qualified no. the advantage is neither global nor pervasive, as often reported Learning anything generally has task specific advantages on related activities. EX: Getting good at a FPS game has carry over to other FPS games. And, Language touches a lot of bases, but there is no evidence it helps say learning to surf.
  - kaybe 12y ago
    Well, the article only discusses cognitive advantages, but there is the very real advantage of being able to communicate better and with more people. They can teach me how to surf, for example. And I am able to discuss with all of you, which is nice. Learning a language can be at least as powerful as learning how to code. (Especially if you start with non-English as a first language.)
    - bigpeopleareold 12y ago
      My Life Goals: 1. Learn the language of the surfers. 2. Learn to surf.
vinceguidry 12y ago
I'd be interested to find out if having programming skills grants a similar advantage concerning dementia.
HarryHirsch 12y ago
What's it with the anti-intellectualist strain in America? Learning a foreign language at any decent level means becoming acquainted with the literature written in that language and with the culture of the country where the language is spoken. Learning that kind of stuff is good for you. Even if it doesn't translate into increased material wealth.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  > Learning a foreign language at any decent level means becoming acquainted with the literature written in that language and with the culture of the country where the language is spoken. When your first language is English, both of these things are often possible without actually knowing other languages.
  - Tharkun 12y ago
    How do you mean? Translated literature loses a lot of nuance. And it's hard to be immersed into a culture when you don't speak the language.
  - TillE 12y ago
    Even a very good translation is not the original. It's basically a separate work. I mean, I've heard some lovely poetic German translations of Shakespeare. But it's not Shakespeare, not really.
    - junto 12y ago
      Funnily enough, some would argue that Shakespeare in modern English also isn't real Shakespeare! Check out the original prenounciation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
      - mikeash 12y ago
        I've seen it argued (IMO pretty convincingly) that people who don't speak English get a more authentic Shakespeare experience than those of us who do. English speakers almost always get Shakespeare in the original language, which is nominally English but in reality is just on the edge of understanding. There's a strong current of "this is really different!" any time you get actual Shakespeare, and it really makes the stuff feel unnatural. Whereas people who speak, say, French get Shakespeare translated into modern, idiomatic French and it's much more natural that way. The original isn't necessarily the best or even the most authentic.
rdtsc 12y ago
Wonder if any studies controlled for income level and economic situation. Many bilingual kids might have had additional advantage such as families with parents that get jobs in other countries, or in general could move to other countries. If they learned it in school, maybe they went through a better educational system. For me it was a combination of educational system and just being a country were multiple languages were spoken routinely. On the the personal level. I feel that I am able to reason sometimes at a higher abstraction level because I know 3 languages. In other words many concepts are less tied to particular words in particular languages, rather they move up a level, and then there are mappings to individual languages. This is not unlike learning multiple programming languages. If you know C# and Java, and C++ you probably have a solid understanding of OO concepts and can just map them to idiosyncrasies in those languages. If you can even move up and learn a functional languages like F# or Haskell and there is a whole new abstraction level you can reason about. But if you only and ever know Java, there is a higher chance you'd think more in Java's syntax rather than at a higher level.
geebee 12y ago
This is a good article. It doesn't dampen my enthusiasm for learning a second language and getting immersed in a different culture. To me, it's so clearly rewarding that I don't need to worry too much about whether it benefits me. However, now that I have kids and read the various upper middle class liberal-ish publications, I've learned so much about what my kids need to be doing. They need to learn an instrument, learn to read music, lean not to rely too much on reading music, develop executive function through certain sports and physical activities such as dance, skateboarding, tennis, or form-based martial arts, play team sports, study math in a less abstract way, learn the abstractions of math, learn to program, learn visual arts in a tactile way, play in nature, learn to swim, engage in at least 5,000 words of abstract dialog and language, and… well crap, I forgot some I think. Oh, now I remember - my kids should also not be over scheduled. got it? good. Something tells me that if you take, uh, a couple of these things, you're probably good. Kind of like how doing pushups also builds your triceps. You don't actually have to do 50 different exercises, one for each known muscle. Languages? Hell yeah, languages. They're great. Go for it. You could also do some of those other things.
- VLM 12y ago
  "However, now that I have kids and read the various upper middle class liberal-ish publications, I've learned so much about what my kids need to be doing" I can summarize your long list to being whipped up into an anxious frenzy in a fit of Pavlovian conditioning, fall for every piece of clickbait that passes under your mouse cursor, earning a couple ad networks, and the authors, a couple pennies. If you feel bad about not living up to an impossible ideal and feel thats the wrong way to treat people, the advertisers are thrilled because its easier to sell to freaked out people, meanwhile the feminists would like a word with you involving the strategies for mass market advertisements aimed at women.
- zwieback 12y ago
  Yup, same goes for parents. I don't feel like I have to be perfect at every parenting task. If I'm pretty good at 40% of parenting and my wife is pretty good at another 40% someone else can pick up the remaining 20%.
nostromo 12y ago
Freakonomics did an interesting podcast on this: http://freakonomics.com/2014/03/06/is-learning-a-foreign-language-really-worth-it-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/2014/03/06/is-learning-a-foreign-lan... Their conclusion was that bilingualism doesn't increase your earnings potential commensurate with all of the study required to become bilingual. (They focused on economic and not cultural value.) The exception was English. If you don't speak English, you will make much more if you learn English. They also discussed how supply-side is important in the market for bilinguals. In the US, learning Spanish will not increase your income by much, but learning German might.
- pluma 12y ago
  The obvious question would be whether this works differently for languages learned as a child vs as an adult. For me the "cost" of learning English as a second language in school was negligible (even if you factor in all the hours actually spent in class) because a lot of the learning was actually passive or even recreational (e.g. watching movies, playing games). OTOH, learning a second (or third) language later on would have required much more investment. I actually tried several languages in university and eventually decided that I just didn't have the time or interest to learn any of them properly (i.e. the cost would have been too high and the immediate return extremely low with long-term return also being questionable).
  - cbr 12y ago
    To figure the "cost" of learning a language in school you need to count what else you could have been learning with that time.
    - pluma 12y ago
      Sure, but realistically that's not as "expensive" as it would seem. It's not like you could replace it with just about anything (it'd have to be a class that could realistically be taught instead, requiring a realistic syllabus, a sufficient availability of capable teachers and sufficient demand). And if you want to be properly realistic, you'd have to limit the alternatives to what would have been available alternatives in school if it was an elective. And if considering alternatives outside school, you also have to factor in the overhead (whereas in school you're already paying that anyway). Besides, it's naive to treat cost as simply a measure of time. In some cases time spent in school is much more intense than outside of it. In other cases it's the opposite.
dlwj 12y ago
I think the advantages and disadvantages are minor compared to other influences. Many poor immigrants for example speak 2 languages. Yet rich well travelled people also speak 2 languages. This debate is only possible in the U.S. ... the majority of the world speaks at least 2 languages.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Really, there isn't a single other country on the planet where only a minority is bilingual? This strikes me as rather unlikely.
  - hnhg 12y ago
    The UK.
- guelo 12y ago
  About half the world speaks more than one language at some unknown level of proficiency. The most popular second language worldwide is English because it is important for business. Since Americans already speak english they have less economic incentive to learn a second language.
bwanab 12y ago
My kids are both bilingual. My wife and I are both American, so it was strictly a choice that we made on the basis of having a desire to bring up children that had a less parochial look on the world. Raising children bilingual (i.e. sending them to a bilingual school) at an early age, they both became bilingual with relatively little pain. We never viewed this as a means to increasing their earnings potential (at least not a direct consequence - it's always possible that they alleged mental benefits of bilingualism has some effect) and I have no way to make a judgement as to whether it will. They both do very well in their school work, but once again, I can't determine if bilingualism had anything to do with that. At this point neither of them has any desire to pursue any opportunities that would use their bilingualism, but they're still both teenagers and that could change at some point.
shenoyroopesh 12y ago
I can speak in 4 languages and just about manage to converse in a fifth. There are definitely advantages to knowing more languages than one: 1. People love you if you can speak their language without forcing to search for a common language; you can build a rapport much more quickly. If you love to travel, this will definitely help! 2. Different languages force you to think in different ways. Different languages have different constructs and vocabularies/concepts not even present in English. For e.g. in Marathi/Hindi, the word "sit" can be translated in 2 different ways depending on the respect you show to the other person. 3. If you have any interest in cultural history, learning the local language will help a great deal. Plus I think being able to think in different languages is just wonderful! I can't describe how boring it would be if I could think in only one language. Do these translate to monetary gains? Hard to tell. Does it help me lead a more fulfilling life? Yes, I definitely think so! Having said that, I definitely want to learn more languages. 4 is really less in India, there are plenty of people who can speak more.
unsignedint 12y ago
I moved to US from Japan when I was 13 years old. One thing I have benefited for sure is the sheer amount of information I have access to. While there are a lot of overlaps as translated versions of the work is often available between Japanese and English pair, it is certainly easier for me; actually, this makes searching for information relatively easier. I have an option to take a jump in a language in order to narrow down the information I'm looking for. The only thing I can think that I missed is some of the social implications (or cues, if you will) in each language. (Maybe drastically more so in English, as I haven't had chance to infuse them.) Not that I have much of problems speaking to other people, and reading documents in either language, it's just when there are hidden implications within.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- olalonde 12y ago
  I used to be billingual (french and german) as a kid. I remember literally translating passages of german books/articles a few times for school assignments. It was easy not to get caught.
ukigumo 12y ago
I have to say yes! I was born in Portugual, so Portuguese and Spanish was all I heard growing up. But then I went into a german school and picked up German and English. Later I picked up French and finally Dutch. My wife has a pretty similar language history so it's quite fun to speak our own version of Esperanto to our daughter and see what language she'll pick up first! Workwise, I would be miles behind where I am right now if I hadn't picked up English at an early age. I've read somewhere that people who reason in a non-native language are able to maintain a more rational (less emotional) train of thought and that certainly seems to be the case with me, but if for no other reason, I suggest you should pick up a second language because it will increase your potential earnings! (see the economist's article below). http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-study?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/whatisaforeignlanguageworth http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-stu...
jrapdx3 12y ago
The article provides a summary of research on a very complex topic and it appears as usual there's no simple "answer". It seems a pretty safe bet that bilingualism confers some advantages, though the challenge is to try to differentiate just what those are and aren't. The researcher's problem is the enormous overlap of factors affecting cognitive function. For example, psychiatric disorders are quite common and associated with deficits in executive functioning, which we might reason affects capacity to become bilingual in the first place, thus a variable to be controlled. However it's also been shown that biological relatives of psychiatrically disordered individuals have similar (if less severe) deficits. Dispersed into the general population, it's difficult to screen for the potential confound, injecting a subtle and essentially incomputable bias into the comparisons of bi- vs. monolingual individuals. Similarly, the association with earlier or later onset of dementia is extremely difficult to parse. We're back to the usual pulpit re: correlation vs. causation. It could be argued that bilingualism is one indicator of advantaged systemic integrity. There are no doubt many other signals of such advantage. Dementia could be the outcome of an intrinsic lack of fitness in the Darwinian sense.
vorg 12y ago
> Bilingualism, in other words, seems to have a protective effect on cognitive decline Do I really need to say it?... "Those whose cognition will decline slower seem to be more likely to become bilingual".
hurin 12y ago
> In 1922, in “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. The amount of times this particular proposition has been quoted and rehashed by ignorant people in completely irrelevant contexts is staggering. (On the plus side it saved me the ~ twenty minutes that reading the rest of the article normally would have taken)
veidr 12y ago
The TL;DR for this article: "Yes, there are significant cognitive benefits to being multilingual, including staving off dementia in old age, but the benefits may be sometimes overstated."

49 points by smonusbonus 12y ago

ArekDymalski 12y ago

Hmm, a nice exception from Betteridge's law of headlines.

Retric 12y ago
I read that as a qualified no. the advantage is neither global nor pervasive, as often reported Learning anything generally has task specific advantages on related activities. EX: Getting good at a FPS game has carry over to other FPS games. And, Language touches a lot of bases, but there is no evidence it helps say learning to surf.
- kaybe 12y ago
  Well, the article only discusses cognitive advantages, but there is the very real advantage of being able to communicate better and with more people. They can teach me how to surf, for example. And I am able to discuss with all of you, which is nice. Learning a language can be at least as powerful as learning how to code. (Especially if you start with non-English as a first language.)
  - bigpeopleareold 12y ago
    My Life Goals: 1. Learn the language of the surfers. 2. Learn to surf.

vinceguidry 12y ago

I'd be interested to find out if having programming skills grants a similar advantage concerning dementia.

HarryHirsch 12y ago

What's it with the anti-intellectualist strain in America? Learning a foreign language at any decent level means becoming acquainted with the literature written in that language and with the culture of the country where the language is spoken. Learning that kind of stuff is good for you. Even if it doesn't translate into increased material wealth.

w1ntermute 12y ago
> Learning a foreign language at any decent level means becoming acquainted with the literature written in that language and with the culture of the country where the language is spoken. When your first language is English, both of these things are often possible without actually knowing other languages.
- Tharkun 12y ago
  How do you mean? Translated literature loses a lot of nuance. And it's hard to be immersed into a culture when you don't speak the language.
- TillE 12y ago
  Even a very good translation is not the original. It's basically a separate work. I mean, I've heard some lovely poetic German translations of Shakespeare. But it's not Shakespeare, not really.
  - junto 12y ago
    Funnily enough, some would argue that Shakespeare in modern English also isn't real Shakespeare! Check out the original prenounciation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I've seen it argued (IMO pretty convincingly) that people who don't speak English get a more authentic Shakespeare experience than those of us who do. English speakers almost always get Shakespeare in the original language, which is nominally English but in reality is just on the edge of understanding. There's a strong current of "this is really different!" any time you get actual Shakespeare, and it really makes the stuff feel unnatural. Whereas people who speak, say, French get Shakespeare translated into modern, idiomatic French and it's much more natural that way. The original isn't necessarily the best or even the most authentic.

rdtsc 12y ago

Wonder if any studies controlled for income level and economic situation. Many bilingual kids might have had additional advantage such as families with parents that get jobs in other countries, or in general could move to other countries. If they learned it in school, maybe they went through a better educational system. For me it was a combination of educational system and just being a country were multiple languages were spoken routinely. On the the personal level. I feel that I am able to reason sometimes at a higher abstraction level because I know 3 languages. In other words many concepts are less tied to particular words in particular languages, rather they move up a level, and then there are mappings to individual languages. This is not unlike learning multiple programming languages. If you know C# and Java, and C++ you probably have a solid understanding of OO concepts and can just map them to idiosyncrasies in those languages. If you can even move up and learn a functional languages like F# or Haskell and there is a whole new abstraction level you can reason about. But if you only and ever know Java, there is a higher chance you'd think more in Java's syntax rather than at a higher level.

geebee 12y ago

This is a good article. It doesn't dampen my enthusiasm for learning a second language and getting immersed in a different culture. To me, it's so clearly rewarding that I don't need to worry too much about whether it benefits me. However, now that I have kids and read the various upper middle class liberal-ish publications, I've learned so much about what my kids need to be doing. They need to learn an instrument, learn to read music, lean not to rely too much on reading music, develop executive function through certain sports and physical activities such as dance, skateboarding, tennis, or form-based martial arts, play team sports, study math in a less abstract way, learn the abstractions of math, learn to program, learn visual arts in a tactile way, play in nature, learn to swim, engage in at least 5,000 words of abstract dialog and language, and… well crap, I forgot some I think. Oh, now I remember - my kids should also not be over scheduled. got it? good. Something tells me that if you take, uh, a couple of these things, you're probably good. Kind of like how doing pushups also builds your triceps. You don't actually have to do 50 different exercises, one for each known muscle. Languages? Hell yeah, languages. They're great. Go for it. You could also do some of those other things.

VLM 12y ago
"However, now that I have kids and read the various upper middle class liberal-ish publications, I've learned so much about what my kids need to be doing" I can summarize your long list to being whipped up into an anxious frenzy in a fit of Pavlovian conditioning, fall for every piece of clickbait that passes under your mouse cursor, earning a couple ad networks, and the authors, a couple pennies. If you feel bad about not living up to an impossible ideal and feel thats the wrong way to treat people, the advertisers are thrilled because its easier to sell to freaked out people, meanwhile the feminists would like a word with you involving the strategies for mass market advertisements aimed at women.
zwieback 12y ago
Yup, same goes for parents. I don't feel like I have to be perfect at every parenting task. If I'm pretty good at 40% of parenting and my wife is pretty good at another 40% someone else can pick up the remaining 20%.

nostromo 12y ago

Freakonomics did an interesting podcast on this: http://freakonomics.com/2014/03/06/is-learning-a-foreign-language-really-worth-it-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/2014/03/06/is-learning-a-foreign-lan... Their conclusion was that bilingualism doesn't increase your earnings potential commensurate with all of the study required to become bilingual. (They focused on economic and not cultural value.) The exception was English. If you don't speak English, you will make much more if you learn English. They also discussed how supply-side is important in the market for bilinguals. In the US, learning Spanish will not increase your income by much, but learning German might.

pluma 12y ago
The obvious question would be whether this works differently for languages learned as a child vs as an adult. For me the "cost" of learning English as a second language in school was negligible (even if you factor in all the hours actually spent in class) because a lot of the learning was actually passive or even recreational (e.g. watching movies, playing games). OTOH, learning a second (or third) language later on would have required much more investment. I actually tried several languages in university and eventually decided that I just didn't have the time or interest to learn any of them properly (i.e. the cost would have been too high and the immediate return extremely low with long-term return also being questionable).
- cbr 12y ago
  To figure the "cost" of learning a language in school you need to count what else you could have been learning with that time.
  - pluma 12y ago
    Sure, but realistically that's not as "expensive" as it would seem. It's not like you could replace it with just about anything (it'd have to be a class that could realistically be taught instead, requiring a realistic syllabus, a sufficient availability of capable teachers and sufficient demand). And if you want to be properly realistic, you'd have to limit the alternatives to what would have been available alternatives in school if it was an elective. And if considering alternatives outside school, you also have to factor in the overhead (whereas in school you're already paying that anyway). Besides, it's naive to treat cost as simply a measure of time. In some cases time spent in school is much more intense than outside of it. In other cases it's the opposite.

dlwj 12y ago

I think the advantages and disadvantages are minor compared to other influences. Many poor immigrants for example speak 2 languages. Yet rich well travelled people also speak 2 languages. This debate is only possible in the U.S. ... the majority of the world speaks at least 2 languages.

mikeash 12y ago
Really, there isn't a single other country on the planet where only a minority is bilingual? This strikes me as rather unlikely.
- hnhg 12y ago
  The UK.
guelo 12y ago
About half the world speaks more than one language at some unknown level of proficiency. The most popular second language worldwide is English because it is important for business. Since Americans already speak english they have less economic incentive to learn a second language.

bwanab 12y ago

My kids are both bilingual. My wife and I are both American, so it was strictly a choice that we made on the basis of having a desire to bring up children that had a less parochial look on the world. Raising children bilingual (i.e. sending them to a bilingual school) at an early age, they both became bilingual with relatively little pain. We never viewed this as a means to increasing their earnings potential (at least not a direct consequence - it's always possible that they alleged mental benefits of bilingualism has some effect) and I have no way to make a judgement as to whether it will. They both do very well in their school work, but once again, I can't determine if bilingualism had anything to do with that. At this point neither of them has any desire to pursue any opportunities that would use their bilingualism, but they're still both teenagers and that could change at some point.

shenoyroopesh 12y ago

I can speak in 4 languages and just about manage to converse in a fifth. There are definitely advantages to knowing more languages than one: 1. People love you if you can speak their language without forcing to search for a common language; you can build a rapport much more quickly. If you love to travel, this will definitely help! 2. Different languages force you to think in different ways. Different languages have different constructs and vocabularies/concepts not even present in English. For e.g. in Marathi/Hindi, the word "sit" can be translated in 2 different ways depending on the respect you show to the other person. 3. If you have any interest in cultural history, learning the local language will help a great deal. Plus I think being able to think in different languages is just wonderful! I can't describe how boring it would be if I could think in only one language. Do these translate to monetary gains? Hard to tell. Does it help me lead a more fulfilling life? Yes, I definitely think so! Having said that, I definitely want to learn more languages. 4 is really less in India, there are plenty of people who can speak more.

unsignedint 12y ago

I moved to US from Japan when I was 13 years old. One thing I have benefited for sure is the sheer amount of information I have access to. While there are a lot of overlaps as translated versions of the work is often available between Japanese and English pair, it is certainly easier for me; actually, this makes searching for information relatively easier. I have an option to take a jump in a language in order to narrow down the information I'm looking for. The only thing I can think that I missed is some of the social implications (or cues, if you will) in each language. (Maybe drastically more so in English, as I haven't had chance to infuse them.) Not that I have much of problems speaking to other people, and reading documents in either language, it's just when there are hidden implications within.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
olalonde 12y ago
I used to be billingual (french and german) as a kid. I remember literally translating passages of german books/articles a few times for school assignments. It was easy not to get caught.

ukigumo 12y ago

I have to say yes! I was born in Portugual, so Portuguese and Spanish was all I heard growing up. But then I went into a german school and picked up German and English. Later I picked up French and finally Dutch. My wife has a pretty similar language history so it's quite fun to speak our own version of Esperanto to our daughter and see what language she'll pick up first! Workwise, I would be miles behind where I am right now if I hadn't picked up English at an early age. I've read somewhere that people who reason in a non-native language are able to maintain a more rational (less emotional) train of thought and that certainly seems to be the case with me, but if for no other reason, I suggest you should pick up a second language because it will increase your potential earnings! (see the economist's article below). http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-study?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/whatisaforeignlanguageworth http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-stu...

jrapdx3 12y ago

The article provides a summary of research on a very complex topic and it appears as usual there's no simple "answer". It seems a pretty safe bet that bilingualism confers some advantages, though the challenge is to try to differentiate just what those are and aren't. The researcher's problem is the enormous overlap of factors affecting cognitive function. For example, psychiatric disorders are quite common and associated with deficits in executive functioning, which we might reason affects capacity to become bilingual in the first place, thus a variable to be controlled. However it's also been shown that biological relatives of psychiatrically disordered individuals have similar (if less severe) deficits. Dispersed into the general population, it's difficult to screen for the potential confound, injecting a subtle and essentially incomputable bias into the comparisons of bi- vs. monolingual individuals. Similarly, the association with earlier or later onset of dementia is extremely difficult to parse. We're back to the usual pulpit re: correlation vs. causation. It could be argued that bilingualism is one indicator of advantaged systemic integrity. There are no doubt many other signals of such advantage. Dementia could be the outcome of an intrinsic lack of fitness in the Darwinian sense.

vorg 12y ago

> Bilingualism, in other words, seems to have a protective effect on cognitive decline Do I really need to say it?... "Those whose cognition will decline slower seem to be more likely to become bilingual".

hurin 12y ago

> In 1922, in “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. The amount of times this particular proposition has been quoted and rehashed by ignorant people in completely irrelevant contexts is staggering. (On the plus side it saved me the ~ twenty minutes that reading the rest of the article normally would have taken)

veidr 12y ago

The TL;DR for this article: "Yes, there are significant cognitive benefits to being multilingual, including staving off dementia in old age, but the benefits may be sometimes overstated."