Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

http://ronbarak.tumblr.com/post/22722767367/bilingual-brain-boost-two-tongues-two-minds-by

by hellosmithy • 14 years ago

60 43 14 years ago

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amalag• 14 years ago

Most asian parents speak to their children in their native tongue, most likely the same for all immigrants, including hispanic. I know many friends whose kids spoke only their asian language until they hit preschool where they learned english. Kids pick up languages very fast when they are immersed in it.

ABS• 14 years ago

"spoke only their asian language until they hit preschool where they learned english"

in that case they are not considered bilingual

EDIT: not sure about the downvotes, it's a fact that if you learn a second language at 4 or 5 you are not considered bilingual. Nothing wrong with it, its just the definition

jordigh• 14 years ago

Of course they are. You learn a language as a first language (L1) until the critical age (well, according to the critical age hypothesis, anyways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Age_Hypothesis ).

I was raised in such an environment. Spanish at home, English at school. I did learn Spanish before English, and I remember a time when I couldn't understand English, around age five or six. Now, however, I am bilingual, fully bicultural, I code switch, and it feels like a superpower I only share with relatively few other people (at least for the specific dialects of English and Spanish that I speak). I can adapt to either language and be idiomatic in each, but my most "natural" mode of speech is the one I grew up with: quickly code switching between two very specific dialects of American English and Mexican Spanish, and there are very few people I can do that with.

Actually, multilingualism is far more common than some Angloamericans are usually aware of. The "norm" worldwide, roughly, is for there to be many intertwined languages within a small geographic region, such as in Europe and Asia. America (the whole continent, not just the US) is the odd one out to be such a large expanse with relatively little linguistic variety besides differing dialects, and that's because the only way to impose languages over such vast geographic expanses is by force and conquest. This is what happened in America.

mootothemax5• 14 years ago

Most asian parents speak to their children in their native tongue, most likely the same for all immigrants, including hispanic.

Here in Poland, I've often overheard Vietnamese parents speaking Polish to their child when walking down the road, whether it's a single parent on their own, or both together. I really like it, but do wonder if I'll be looked down on for speaking English to our child when the time comes.

jedihamster• 14 years ago

Anyone ever think of the negative impact. I've seen small local schools flooded with children who haven't learnt English.The extra attention they require slows down learning for the other kids in the class that actually speak English.

Is that fair?

Yoms2• 14 years ago

Speaking as a parent of two children who we have spoken exclusively Spanish to, and who picked up English from their environment, friends, and school. There has not been any impact. And this is coming from the teachers, who are usually extremely surprised to learn that we speak only Spanish at home.

You underestimate the ability of children to absorb knowledge from their environment.

As a matter of fact, if anything, it has been a net positive. Kids at a young age have a huge curiosity about languages and having bilingual kids in the classroom encourages the other kids to learn. My first graders class begged to have my daughter teach them some Spanish, and the teacher set aside some time for her to do so. The other parents heard from their kids, and thanked the teacher for it!

acabal• 14 years ago

I was raised trilingual: born in America to a Colombian dad and Lithuanian mom, so I speak English, Spanish, and Lithuanian. My Lithuanian has gotten a bit rusty since my younger days (mostly out of lack of practice--it's not a language you hear every day), but otherwise I'm fine with all three. Though I can't quite put my finger on it, I have no doubt in my mind that being raised with three languages has had a significant positive impact in how I think. And it's only as I've gotten older that I've realized what a gift that was. When I was young everyone would tell me that, but I didn't believe them because it seemed so natural!

If anything, knowing more than one language makes you better appreciate the commonalities of all langauges. For example English and Spanish are heavily rooted in Latin (English mostly in vocabulary), so you see a lot of words inbetween. Likewise Lithuanian also has a surprising amount of vocabulary lifted directly from Latin. Knowing all three and how these seemingly completely disparate languages are in fact related in many ways fills me with wonder.

devolve• 14 years ago

Me as well, having Romanian parents, being born in Thailand (where they taught me English) and coming to Sweden at age two. Romanian, being the last language I learned well, is the rustiest of course.

But I too feel that one can appreciate the commonalities of all the languages, and that, at least for me, I often can see how languages are built, through the pre- and suffixes, and how they work in a Latin manner. This has helped a lot when I had to learn a fourth language in school (French for 4 years, Spanish for 2 - both being very poor now that I haven't trained).

For these reasons I am shocked that people actually thought that raising a bilingual child would do damage their intelligence, seeing how a lot of smart people have been polyglots - although that was not necessarily something they were raised to be, but still.

gms7777• 14 years ago

Laba diena!

I was bilangual as well. I grew up speaking Lithuanian, and moved to the US at around 7, picking up English surprisingly quickly. My lithuanian is also very rusty, as yes, the only people I ever encounter that speak it are my family (and apparently you).

I was going to come on here and make a very similar point. A few years after moving to the United States, I was involved in a "vocabulary bee", won in my school and did very well at the state competition. This despite the fact that I had been speaking English for less than 3 years, and had no training for the competition, instead answering largely on intuition. I realize now how much knowing Lithuanian helped me largely because of its latin backgrounds.

Later I went on to take several years of spanish, and I had the experience, and noticed it amongst my classmates that the people that picked up the language the fastest were the ones that already spoke more than one language.

narcissus• 14 years ago

Being in Canada, we've been able to put our daughter into French immersion schooling (we only speak English at home... for now!). She's only in kindergarten and so we're finding it really hard to get her to understand the reasons why it's good for her to do this. C'est la vie :)

Although we see all of these awesome benefits in our friends who are bilingual, like I say, it's hard to get her to understand this. Instead, we just tell her how good it will be that pretty soon she will be able to talk with her cousin and our son (who are both about to start school the same way) without parents understanding what it is they're talking about. She likes that idea.

Of course, my wife and I are feverishly trying to learn it ourselves, too!

mathattack4• 14 years ago

I've noticed that in some circles, people compete not on "What care do you drive?" but "How many languages do your kids speak?"

digitalengineer• 14 years ago

Very true! In my part of the Netherlands Dutch is the official language, but the much older and local other language is Frisian. What you see often is students talking Frisian to other Frisians and Dutch to non-Frisians even during the same group-conversation. They don't mean to, but can't help themselves. The "other mind" takes over seamlessly. I've seen Non-Frisians kindly ask if they can just talk Dutch only to hear them speak Frisian after about 20 seconds.

tomp3• 14 years ago

I love learning languages. I chose 12 languages and made a plan to learn each of them for a month, instead of watching TV. That way, in 5 years time, I will hopefully be very happy to have made this decision now.

mathattack4• 14 years ago

Don't you think it will take more than a month? Or are you that solid at learning them already? If so, I'm very impressed!

tomp3• 14 years ago

No, but I don't care. There are some languages that are similar to languages I already know (e.g. Russian to Slovene, or Danish to English and German), some are different (Chinese, Arabic), so they will inevitably take a long time... But I'm not motivated by knowing languages, that is not my goal, learning languages is more important.

In any case, I don't think that the amount of time spent learning matters much, immersion is what is really important. If I ever go somewhere where I'm forced to speak a language for 2 weeks or so, I will learn much more than 6 months studying alone.

jgrahamc• 14 years ago

I learnt French at school and did badly and then as an adult learnt French to a very high standard (I would call myself fluent and not bilingual). Something definitely happened to my brain as my French got really good; it was like I became two different people.

david9272• 14 years ago

Most people think of language as a dictionary of words -- but it's really the codification of a culture. So when you speak it (fluently), you change yourself to express yourself through that culture. The same expression (perfectly translated) can mean different things in different cultures, for example.

I speak two other languages fluently, and I'm a slightly different person in each language. It's really fascinating.

personlurking• 14 years ago

On being a slightly different person, I also speak two other languages which I learned from 18 yrs old and onwards. While I wouldn't say I'm a different person in either of the three, I would say I'm not quite me in the second and third. All the nuances, humor, etc that a person shows in their first language can be lost in translation and therefore being yourself isn't as easy. People are likely to think you are quieter than you normally are (in your own language), basically that you are less of everything you actually are.

It takes a long time, I find, to reach a comfort level in another language that rivals that of how you express yourself in your mother tongue. I've been speaking Portuguese (my 3rd language) at least 50% of the time for the past 7 years or so and I'm still not able to hit my mark, as if it were my own...but I'm close. Btw, these last few years, I speak it 80% of the time.

If I were to venture a guess as to why 'hitting my mark' isn't so easy, I'd say that with most language learners, there's a certain point in your learning where you say to yourself, "I'm fluent enough". Reading and writing, I'm in the 95 percentile in Portuguese but with speaking (seemingly no matter how much I speak), I stay at around 85%.

WiseWeasel2• 14 years ago

Not me; my French self is also a total dick.

mootothemax5• 14 years ago

I've noticed similar as I become more and more conversant in Polish - adapting to new grammatical forms definitely makes me think in a different manner.

That, and a new, huge, appreciation for anyone that learns the easy-to-start, nightmare-to-master, English as a second language.

agrostis• 14 years ago

You might find interesting Anna Wierzbicka's essay on her own experience of bilingualism (http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/pdfs/double-life....). Wierzbicka is a Polish-Australian linguist specializing in semantic universals and their cross-cultural manifestations, so it's kind of an insider's account, but charmingly personal at that.

mootothemax5• 14 years ago

My wife (Polish) and I (British) are currently trying to have a child, and very much want to encourage our children to be bilingual.

I've spoken to a couple of people here who have one Polish parent, one non-Polish parent, and all seem to agree that it's easy enough to keep up the "Mum speaks Polish, Dad speaks language X" game for the first few years. Both said, though, that the real challenge was keeping interested during their teenage years.

That appears to be the challenge; thinking long-term, does anyone have any experience being raised in bilingual households? Did you keep interested past a certain age, and if so, how?

david9272• 14 years ago

Don't worry, they'll already be fully bilingual by about seven. After that, it's a question of it they want to speak it or not, but they will already be bilingual.

If you live in Britain, make sure to back up the exposure to the Polish with films, books, trips to Poland, etc. (If you live in Poland, the opposite, obviously.) Your child needs to get the whole cultural experience, not just your wife speaking.

mootothemax5• 14 years ago

Thanks, that's really encouraging :)

Great point about culture; we're in Poland right now (that might change in a couple of years), and aim to continue visiting both countries for a long time yet. We'll be trying to mix and match as much as possible, so hopefully some from both cultures will rub off :)

mathattack4• 14 years ago

You hit it right. Kids are smart enough to know, "This language is for this person, that language for another person." The key is being strict about who speaks each language, otherwise they get confused. It is very doable, you just have to be disciplined.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

I see several examples here of native speakers of two or more languages in the same language family (e.g., Indo-European). Our example at home is two older children (one who is grown up now, making his living as a hacker) who were brought up as native first-language speakers of both Mandarin Chinese and General American English. My wife is trilingual, growing up in a home that spoke Taiwanese (Taiwan dialect of Minnan Chinese), learning Mandarin as the sole language of school instruction, and learning English beginning in junior high school. Her higher education was in the United States, in the medium of English (of course). I grew up as a monolingual native speaker of General American English (although both my parents had had some foreign language instruction in school, in different languages, and each had living relatives born in the United States who were native speakers of non-English languages). I began learning Chinese, among several other languages, while at university, after learning German and Russian at school.

Oddly, the first language I ever spoke to my wife was actually Japanese, the usual Japanese greeting for a first-time meeting, "はじめまして. どうぞよろしく." Over the years, we have grown strongly to prefer speaking English with each other (from initially mostly speaking Mandarin with each other) because she finds it more congenial to speak what is really on her mind when speaking English. That's a cultural difference between American culture and Taiwanese culture--greater frankness in family conversations in America.

We were quite resolute in speaking Mandarin whenever we were together, whether living in the United States or in Taiwan, as our two older sons were growing up. I would speak to them in English if I was alone with one or both of them. They switched effortlessly from English to Chinese or back as my wife was present or not.

Literacy is HARD to maintain in languages in which the relationship between speech and writing is more remote than in English, as is surely the case in Chinese. I know many, many, many native speakers of Chinese who received their primary, secondary, and even higher educations in Chinese-speaking countries who forget how to write many Chinese characters if they spend a lot of time abroad. Computer input used to be nasty for Chinese, but it is coming along now even in American versions of Windoze. Literature is also more interesting to read if it is uncensored by the government, which gives English-language literature an enormous worldwide draw. But it is definitely life-enriching and thought-provoking to know two or more languages to reasonably high proficiency, and I have enjoyed spending the majority of my life able to communicate in Chinese.

One considerable advantage for the child who grows up bilingual is learning yet more languages as second languages when an adult more readily than do adults who grew up speaking only one language. By diligent study of linguistics, after having some foreign language study (German) that began in elementary school, I acquired enough Chinese to work professionally as an interpreter and a translator, and have enough reading German to be able to do research in that language, and smatterings of other languages. But all the native bilingual members of my family do much better than I do per unit of time in learning languages, so they have many choices before them as occasion arises to learn other languages for various purposes. That helps with second-language acquisition of an understandable pattern of pronunciation, too.

alpine2• 14 years ago

I'm not so sure about the statement that being bilingual reduces the vocabulary. If this is true, this would discourage me from raising a kid to speak two languages... after all, wasn't George Orwell's thesis in 1984 that removing words from the language removed the ability to think? Who would want to do this to a child? Does learning Latin as a second language, or Ruby indeed, restrict your vocabulary? I doubt it.

rcthompson2• 14 years ago

George Orwell was talking about removing important words from the language. For example, removing any words relating to democracy and freedom from the language would prevent people from expressing what they thought they might want the government to give them. This isn't just reducing someone's vocabulary. This is targeted destruction of a language's capacity to express specific concepts. When you learn a language, you learn the important words first.

We can make an analogy to programming languages. The reduced vocabulary (if any) from learning two languages at once can be likened to the fact that when you learn two programming languages you will probably not be familiar with as many modules from each language that you learn, whereas focusing on one programming language would allow you to deeply learn all the modules available. However, you would still fully learn the syntax and most of the core features of both programming languages. In contrast, the analogy to what George Orwell was talking about would be removing features from the core language to the point that it is no longer Turing-complete, and is only capable of expressing "approved" programs. Kind of like HQ9+[1], only instead of "hello world", quine, and 99 bottles, it's "The government is great", "I love the government", and "All power to the government". The plus can still increment the accumulator, but the accumulator represents how much you love the government.

[1] http://esolangs.org/wiki/HQ9%2B

alpine2• 14 years ago

You are absolutely right, he was talking about words that were important to the Party. Words that facilitated criticism, dissent etc. However, my point still stands. If you consider a child with a good vocabulary in two languages versus an excellent vocabulary in one language, which supports the superior reasoning?

jezclaremurugan• 14 years ago

I think if you are not a native English speaker, you get a second language for free! And Indians in general have three languages, their local mother tongue, national language (Hindi) and English.

billpaetzke• 14 years ago

Does the term bilingual limit itself to learning two language's fluently as a child? Or does it include learning a new language as an adult as well? And does it also demand that the person speak both languages with the repesctive native accent?

WiseWeasel2• 14 years ago

It would also be interesting to see how learning a non-phonetic alphabet, like Chinese or Japanese Kanji affects your brain. Learning tens of thousands of pictographs by heart is no easy feat, and I can tell you that bilingualism does not prepare you for that.

chousuke• 14 years ago

Learning kanji isn't quite so hard as people often make it out to be... It's not trivial, of course, but you're off by an order of magnitude. :P A native Japanese person once told more she sees kanji as images, so it probably is different, though.

hkmurakami• 14 years ago

I'm bilingual in English and Japanese (When I am in Japan, people can't tell I'm not from Japan until I tell them).

I seem to have have better than average graphic memory (I remember taking tests and picturing a page in the textbook or a page of my notes in my head, then picturing where the information was on the page, then seeing the info itself on the page).

I have no idea if this is because of learning 2k Kanji characters though.

lars512• 14 years ago

Kanji contain repeated elements ("radicals"), which form something of a graphical alphabet. Learning a new character's form is not too difficult then, you can identify that it's radicals A, B and C, in this kind of arrangement. Basically, it's neatly pre-chunked for memorisation.

The pronunciation of kanji is more difficult than their visual layout, and arguably where most of the burden is in Japanese. A single kanji can have pronunciations it's picked up from several periods in history. In practice, it just means that it might have a handful of different pronunciations in different contexts. Learning all these contexts takes time.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

Nothing impresses me more in people than their fluency in more than one language.

This is the one skill that is so raw and fundamental that it beats hands down everything else a person can ever learn, be it athletics, flying a jet or mastering business management. I worked with a tech support intern who was just starting in the business. He was white, in his early 20s and seemed like of an Irish descent. Then at some point he casually mentioned he spoke Chinese. What blew me away is how instantaneously my opinion of him changed. He jumped from being a smart guy, of which there's a metric ton, to someone I started to respect. Weird stuff, but perhaps it's just me.

antman• 14 years ago

AskHN: The consensus is that each parent speaks his languge so as not to confuse the child. When the parents are taking to each other in the presence of the child, does each one talk to his own language? Or in that case it doesn't matter?

Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

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