SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A new study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex suggests people who speak two languages have more gray matter in the executive control region of the brain.
In past decades, much has changed about the understanding of bilingualism. Early on, bilingualism was thought to be a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. However, it has since been demonstrated that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed "executive control."
This "bilingual advantage" is believed to come about because of bilinguals' long-term use and management of two spoken languages. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated.
I find learning more languages makes it easier to acquire new ones because you get better at it, but idiomatic speech and use of metaphor seem to take a real hit.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Insightful) by throwaway28 on Friday July 17 2015, @08:43PM
Se vera, mi estus stulta. Mi rehaltadis lerni esperanton.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Friday July 17 2015, @09:08PM
Eew, gross.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Saturday July 18 2015, @07:10PM
For all of English's flaws, it has a widely distributed user base of around a billion speakers that Esperanto could never dream of having. Does that make English the Windows of languages? Or is it Linux because each regionalization is the equivalent of a distribution?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @10:45PM
Awesome! That's only the time I've hauled out my Esperanto dictionary since Slashdot interviewed Shatner. Drawing a blank on "rehaltadis" though.
Why did you learn it? Fun, or something else?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by throwaway28 on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:25AM
rehaltadis => re-/halt/-ad/is => stopped, stopped, stopped, quit, quit, quit, gave up a thousand times
I tried learning esperanto twice, in both 02006 and 02011; and gave up three times; in 02006, 02012, 02014.
Since I stopped, I no longer believe in the reasons why I started. Anyway, the most fun reason was,
"esperanto is 4x easier to learn than all other languages. Therefore, if I want to talk to a really cute japanese girl who doesn't speak english; it's considerably more efficient for both of us to learn esperanto, than for me to learn japanese." (Konichiwa, kimi wa daisuke ?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @05:26AM
kimi wa daisuke ?
変態、逃げます！
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @07:36AM
Fere eandem ob causam soleo Latine cum amicis nonnullis fabulari: nam inter Europæos variarum gentium sunt permultæ non solum venustæ sed etiam doctissimæ, quibus cordi sit sermone Romanorum colloqui; neque aliter inter nos ullo commercio fruimur quam Latine, cum raro fiat ut aliam linguam habeamus nobis communem. Hac enim ratione cum Polonis, Theodiscis, Gallis, Hispanis, Russis, Britannis, etiam cum hominibus Coreanis et Mexicanis et Americanis, voluptatem capere colloquendi possum, quæ sine communis atque universali, ut ita dicam, sermonis facultate mihi ignota esset.