Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574

43 39 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

kostyk• 13 years ago

That's why i am always broke. P.S. Oh and my native language is Russian.

kleiba• 13 years ago

If I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can't attend a meeting later today, I could not say 'I go to a seminar', English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'.

That seems like a pretty poor (no pun intended) example, given that "I am going to a seminar" uses present tense (present progressive) to describe a future event.

(A different reading of the above quote suggests that the second form is supposed to be "I am going to go to a seminar.")

smugengineer69• 13 years ago

It's a poor Mandarin example also. You would likely say "there is a seminar", or "I intend to go to a seminar". Both are also perfectly valid English examples, I should add, and convey similar time information. There is also an auxiliary, the Mandarin 要, which is used very similar to our "will" in most future situations.

What we call "tense" is actually a pretty fuzzy category, and at a general level is just the "grammaticalization of time reference", meaning the transition of a word from the expression of concrete content to an abstract time-related function word. This in all languages is a constantly evolving process and can occur over a long period of time and to different degrees. English hasn't even fully grammaticalized the notion of the future, as our future and present tenses are morphologically identical.

Which brings up another point: both English and Mandarin lack elaborate morphological change, relying on auxiliaries to convey tense rather than explicit verbal modifications. Where do we draw the line here? At the end of the day, was the collapse of the Roman empire due to the richness of the morphological tense marking of Latin?

SilasX• 13 years ago

>If I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can't attend a meeting later today, I could not say 'I go to a seminar', English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'.

Also, that would be fine grammatically in English, but it would connote "I can't attend because I regularly go to a seminar, which today conflicts with the meeting, and I will go the the seminar in preference to it." If that's not what you meant, though -- say, if it's a one-time thing -- then it would be wrong in the sense of failing to communicate your intent.

vorg2• 13 years ago

> If I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can't attend a meeting later today, ... English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'.

There's also "I'm to go to a seminar".

Jam0864• 13 years ago

This makes perfect sense; we think of programming languages changing the way solutions are designed all the time. That's why we learn so many different ones.

Unfortunately I doubt this will be proven at any time in the near future... it is nearly impossible to isolate this characteristic from other factors.

JumpCrisscross• 13 years ago

Geert Hofstede, an influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified a cultural dimension termed "long-term orientation", defined as "the extent to which a society shows a pragmatic future-oriented perspective rather than a conventional historical short-term point of view" [1]. On LTO the U.S. scores 29, Deutschland 31, and China 118. Respondents in "high-LTO countries" are pragmatic, believing "less in universal guidelines about what is good and evil and more in considering the circumstances" [2]. LTO was the only cultural dimension found to predict per capita economic growth.

The pragmatism probably arises, in part, from the interaction with another cultural dimension: uncertainty avoidance. UAI is "the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these". Uncertainty-avoidance cultures tend to believe that "there is only one Truth and we have it. All others are wrong." On UAI the U.S. scores 46, Deutschland 65, and China 30. While China was shifting from communism to state capitalism Deng Xiaoping asked "what does the color of the cat matter as long as it catches mice?"

Marieke de Mooij found in a 2002 study [3] that LTO cultures "are cash or debit card cultures, not credit card cultures". They also prefer real estate over mutual funds. Interestingly, "a long-term orientation suggests less receptivity to e-commerce" because of a reduced "willingness to pay for convenience".

As an aside regarding cultural blinders, LTO was not detected in Geert Hofstede's original 1981 research. It took the Chinese Values Survey "questionnaire, designed by Eastern minds," which, in turn, "did not detect the uncertainty avoidance dimension" to discover LTO [2]. The original "IBM and Rokeach Value Survey questionnaires, both designed by Western minds, did not detect long-versus short-term orientation".

[1] http://geert-hofstede.com/united-states.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Organizations-Software-Mind-e...

[3] http://home.arcor.de/mba2006/Convergence%20and%20divergence%...

argumentum• 13 years ago

Correlation/causation?

coldtea3• 13 years ago

No, merely Shapir/Wolf hypothesis.

It doesn't even need the correlation part, you can deduce similar conclusions merely from studying each language without real world input.

mieubrisse• 13 years ago

Minor correction I discovered whilst Googling the aforementioned hypothesis to learn more: it's actually the "Sapir/Whorf hypothesis".

archangel_one• 13 years ago

I think you mean Sapir-Whorf. My understanding was that's not been proven to a sufficient extent to use it as any kind of hard evidence that language influences complex decisions like long-term financial planning.

tt293• 13 years ago

I had exactly the same thought after reading the headline and the article did not change that at all.

xijuan• 13 years ago

I don't even want to start talking about all these uncontrolled third variables...Directionality of causality is another issue..

redact2072• 13 years ago

Mandarin, primarily spoken in countries that don't have a pension or adequate health care versus English, spoken widely in countries that generally do have pensions and adequate health care. Also where's the cultural correlation studies? Chinese culture places a huge emphasis on fortune, wealth and luck.

Inufu• 13 years ago

I thought so too at first, but:

> But he says his research has controlled for all these factors, by concentrating on nine multi-lingual countries: Belgium, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Estonia, DR Congo, Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore, and Switzerland.

einhverfr3• 13 years ago

But how does language apply to social class and economic security in these places? I know in Malaysia there are huge differences in this regard between Malay speakers, Chinese speakers, Tamil speakers, etc. and everyone there speaks English as a second language (and maybe Malay as a third if it is not the first language).

Moreover you can't just look at income. You have to also look at overall cultural factors because these decisions and habits are often part of much larger cultural patterns within a specific community.

redact2072• 13 years ago

Thanks for your reply, though I still think the research is flawed. I'm Australian but living & working Singapore, which is right next to Malaysia.

Here, it's a country that's well developed, has a high level of education and does have a pension (called CPF). The average local salary is SGD $2,000 per month and I can tell you the CPF does not provide enough for retirement. There's a back-to-work program that effectively lets those well into their retirement (70s, 80s) go back to work, and heartbreakingly they end up clearing tables, washing dishes or serving down at the local McDonalds.

Culture-wise, Singapore is predominantly Chinese. In fact they're probably more Chinese than China - many of the old traditions that aren't followed in China still happen here like the "Hungry ghost" and "Yu sheng". Come Chinese new year, "red packet" culture is alive and well, with the holiday seen as a chance for your relatives to be happy of all the wealth and prosperity you've accumulated over the year. Have an aunt who lives in near poverty? She'll be so happy that you drive around in a $120,000 car.

Malaysia is a slightly different story. It's split into Chinese Malaysia, and indigenous Malaysia. If you've ever been to Malaysia, you'll quickly understand that there is a need to look after your own family rather than trust anything to the government. It's notoriously corrupt. I stupidly drove a car with Singaporean plates to Kuala Lumpur, and was such an easy target for traffic police where unsurprisingly everything could be fixed by paying a 'fine.' If you get sick in places like this, your ability to get better depends on your ability to pay enough to get the better doctors and get prioritized up the waiting queue. If you're poor, good luck.

So no, I don't accept that the research has controlled for all these factors. I see it as an attempt from a failed linguistics professor to attach meaning where there is none.

cynwoody• 13 years ago

Surprisingly, the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing caters to the Chinese belief in 8 as a lucky number ...

As reported by CNC World, owned by Xinhua:

http://www.cncworld.tv/news/v_show/29294_Year_of_snake_lucky...

WildUtah• 13 years ago

This whole idea is wrongheaded because it has correlation and causation backwards.

The English-speaking world is full of places where it is incredibly expensive to live a decent lifestyle in retirement. Take the same pension that you earned in the Anglophonie and then move to France or Spain or Japan or Taiwan or Mexico and live a comfortable retirement in a supportive community where your friends and family respect your middle-income wisdom and experience.

Or you can stick to the English-speaking world and be faced with the choice of a isolation in a soulless suburb abandoned by work-focused family, emotional abandonment in a nursing home, or paying through the nose for a rare spot in the few community-oriented cities where people of all ages mix the way they do in all other world cultures.

Forget planning your 401(k) and get out those flash cards so you can start practicing.

Devilboy• 13 years ago

You didn't read the article did you

trhtrsh• 13 years ago

According to Chen's theory of time-compresion, a Mandarin speak who tries to say "I will spend money" [in the future], will say "I spend money", and spend money now.

drucken• 13 years ago

It sounds more like time-overlap than "time-compression".

So, your future self is your current self. Anything you do right now is your future.

nnq2• 13 years ago

> English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'.

Isn't "am going" a "present tense". That's how I perceive it a least, and indeed, it gives me the feeling of seeing the "future in the present tense", in the way of weak LTR. My native language is 'weak FTR', thought not in the list of researched ones. But I speak English "close to native" and tend to just "think in English" a lot, especially for topics for which all my learning material was in English. But I never felt "present tense continuous" when used as future anything different than just using the present tense for the future in my native language.

Does this mean that although I speak English close to native level, I actually have a different "understanding/feeling" of it than you true native English speakers?

(of course, to even think along the lines of the study I need tons of "suspension of disbelief" and need to ignore that there are zillions of ignored variables and no freaking way to determine direction of causality at this level! ...but just pretending it makes some sense :) ...)

EDIT: my bad, I looked at the actual paper and saw that my language was evaluated and is "strong FTR", just like English. So our use "present for future" is just like the "present continuous for future" in English, just a "spoken language shortcut" and we also have real proper future sense, like all other latin Languages. Even matches our "almost american style" pattern of spending and saving. I should remember never to start talking after reading an article based on a paper: I'd better shut up before reading the paper as science-reporters always manage to distort or ambiguate stuff... sigh...

einhverfr3• 13 years ago

English tenses are so much fun. She speaks Japanese but right now she's speaking English. The factory makes toys, but right now it is closed for the night.

But when we get to Malay, things get really weird. Malay doesn't have tenses. You express timeframe with additional words. It does however have something like a tense, namely a sort of "bounding" quality but that's not like bounded vs unbounded aspects in English since bounding may occur either in time, in manner, or in social convention. Thus one can reduplicate for emphasis, to imply continuation, to imply reciprocity, or to imply a relaxation of social convention. Consequently we'd reduplicate the verb for "to beat" if we wanted to say "he frequently beats his son" or "give" if we wanted to say "they gave eachother gifts," or "walk" to mean "take a stroll," or "arrived" to indicate that in fact they arrived suddenly and unexpectedly. (Reduplication of nouns looks kind of like pluralization but it also involves an unbounding rather than a true pluralization.)

nnq2• 13 years ago

That's odd, as such a language would benefit most from a "word for letter" writing system like the Chinese one, yet Malay ended up being written in jawi arabic alphabet. I wonder if there are other languages with this type of "mismatch" between the writing system / alphabet and the language structure...

colanderman• 13 years ago

Isn't "am going" a "present tense".

"Going" is a special case of subject+be+gerund. In modern colloquial English, anyone who says "I am going to X," means, based on context, either "I will be going to X soon" (i.e. a committed future action), or "I attend classes at X". If you want to talk about a concurrent action, you have to say either "I am going to X right now," or "I am on my way to X."

Again, this doesn't apply (AFAIK) to any other gerund. e.g. if you say "I am walking to X," it means you are currently in the act of walking to X.

English is weird.

Gormo• 13 years ago

I think that "going" in this sense is originated as an abstract metaphor; its literal present-tense meaning asserts that one is moving in the direction of some destination, and will arrive at that destination in the future. If you say "I am going to Los Angeles", it literally means that you're on your way to Los Angeles, and will arrive in Los Angeles at some point in the future; so if the destination is a verb, you're saying that you're metaphorically "moving in the direction" of performing whatever action the verb describes, and that the action will therefore be performed in the future. It seems that this meaning generally eclipses the literal meaning, so we use different verbs to more precisely describe the act of literally moving toward a physical destination, e.g. "traveling".

einhverfr3• 13 years ago

Oh boy, Chomsky vs Whorf round two hundred and thirty three. Time to grab popcorn.

Some controversies never die and the impact of language on thought and perception is one of them. Anyway time to go grab a beer while my colorless green dreams sleep furiously.

BTW the language/thought and language/perception interactions pose problems on both sides. There is some evidence that how a language refers to directions of relative objects impacts the perception of the speaker regarding direction (and that's a mark against Chomsky) but at the same time, if we accepted the Whorfian hypothesis uncritically than attempts to relabel "crippled" as "handicapped" would have been the end of it and we wouldn't have gone back to "disabled" and finally "persons with disabilities." Of those terms, "handicapped" is the least negative but changing terms did not change really how people related so it's not as simple as that.

I doubt that large-scale and long-term patterns are that dependent on language. It may be that immediate, small-scale patterns are more dependent but as you scale out the sorts of solutions to problems we all have to navigate become much more restrained so I don't think the thesis can be as simple as it is put forward here.

vorg2• 13 years ago

English speakers tend to think of time as going from behind to ahead, whereas Chinese speakers think of time as going from top (上) to bottom (下). It's hard to break the habit of saying "next week"(下个星期) in Chinese when I mean "last week", and many Chinese speakers have a similar problem. In fact, I'd say English-speakers' primary metaphor for time is climbing a mountain, indicating working to move forward in time, making us more likely to save.

free6522• 13 years ago

Actually I am not getting these concepts at all.

Time doesn't move at all. Feb 23 2013 7:32:14AM is always at the same spot.

JBiserkov• 13 years ago

The value Feb 23 2013 7:32:14AM never changes, but the result of the function now() does change from time to time.

I don't know if the above makes any sense to you.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values

ValentineC• 13 years ago

Here's the TEDGlobal talk on the subject by Keith Chen himself, uploaded two days ago: http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affe...

DigitalTurk2• 13 years ago

> "You can find families that live right next door to each other, have exactly the same education levels, exactly the same income and even exactly same religion.

However, because they speak a different language they might have gone to different schools, have a different sense of humor, watch different TV channels, read different newspapers, and be interested in the events or culture of different countries.

Moreover, in a few of the countries listed the different language groups tend to live in different regions, which can have very different economies.

DigitalTurk2• 13 years ago

Here's a gaffe.

The author says that Belgium has large 'Flemish' and French speaking populations, but then when he talks about Brussels he says there are large Dutch and French speaking populations.

In at least one table he lists Dutch and Flemish separately.

Is he suggesting that Dutch speakers in Brussels and Dutch speakers in Flanders really speak a different language? :-D

free6522• 13 years ago

So Chinese people on average should have more savings? That doesn't seem like true, since most of the Chinese elders live with their children...

luketych• 13 years ago

We don't need even need to look at the science formally. We can look at it at a different level. If we know a little about how the brain works then a phenomenon like this might become obvious.

Language affects how you think, there is no question about that. People who have a dirtier vocabulary will think dirtier, people who have a more formal vocabulary with think more formally, etc. If the language you speak makes it harder to talk dirty then you will probably talk less dirty. This will in-turn affect how you think.

There is a native tribe that does not have words for left, right, ahead or behind, but instead they relate every direction to the cardinal directions. So, instead of referring to your foot as your left foot, this native tribe will sometimes refer to it as your west foot, sometimes as your northeast foot, etc. This simple example shows how different your thought patterns can be based on what words you use. These natives will always have in their minds where north is, where any "normal" outsider will have to spend a second or two locating north first. Their brains are almost set up to think in a different way.

Language is complex as hell, but it makes sense that if a word, or expression is used more often in one culture than another, that its speakers will be more influenced by that word or expression. Can you imagine if in English there was no easy way to say "sex"? In English there are dozens of ways to refer to sex and other sexual acts, and many only take one or two syllables. What if the easiest way to refer to sex was to say a 5-syllable word? I bet that would have some influence on how much we think about sex. We might still be able to think of the act of sex easily (the images, memories in our heads), but thinking about/using the word will take too much energy and as a result will be used less. Can you imagine if the word "sex" was used less on TV, in music, etc. simply because the word was too long and no longer fit nicely within the script/lyrics?

Now, it's not too much of a leap to see that having a language where present-tense and future-tense are less distinct from each other will influence the speaker of that language into making less of a distinction between the present & future.

How much influence? Who knows? That, we need formal, nitty-gritty science for.

pfedor• 13 years ago

Language affects how you think, there is no question about that.

Quite to the contrary, it is an old and tired notion which has been refuted and refuted and refuted (see, e.g., the third chapter of "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker) and yet it can't die because some people just find it too appealing to let go.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

Only the refutation is not very convincing. Not everybody agrees to Anglo-Saxon postulates on language.

Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire

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