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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @05:42AM
Your post would be well described as "a crock of shit."
There's a hell of a lot more to fluency than a vocabulary. Fluency requires (among other things) cultural knowledge and not just memorization of a list of words. This is true even for related languages, not just for radically different languages.
The problem with many Americans is not that they only speak one language. It's that they think there's something wrong with speaking more than one language.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:26AM
There's a hell of a lot more to fluency than a vocabulary. Fluency requires (among other things) cultural knowledge and not just memorization of a list of words. This is true even for related languages, not just for radically different languages.
If you know English, you can become proficient in Spanish by just memorizing a thousand words or so and remembering to put some adjectives after nouns. There are a few variations on verb tense, but 99% of the grammar is the same, as it is for other Latin/Germanic languages.
The alphabet is the same, the pronunciation of almost all letters of the alphabet is the same, 99% of the phonemes are close enough.
The same cannot be said of Russian, or Japanese, or Arabic. It is not a small difference. Whenever someone claims to be multilingual, ask them what languages they know. It's almost always "Native language and English" (aka watches foreign TV), or "Language of my country and a neighboring country". It's almost never "oh I know Arabic and English and Chinese". Pretending that knowing multiple languages from the same language group is on par with learning languages from unrelated cultures across the earth suggests a lack of understand of how hard learning a truly foreign language actually is. Linguists who actually accomplish proficiency in multiple unrelated language are amazing, and shouldn't be slighted by being grouped together with the vocabulary memorizers.
The problem with many Americans is not that they only speak one language. It's that they think there's something wrong with speaking more than one language.
You really think that there are a significant number of Americans walking around saying "That guy knows multiple languages, let's beat the crap out of him!" ? Is it more likely that your actual complaint is that you want Americans to be forced to learn multiple languages, to appease some politically correct sense of multiculturalism?
I could make the counter accusation: "The problem with many Europeans is not that they can't figure out which language to speak. It's that they think that there's some intellectual virtue in memorizing vocabulary from more than one language."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:47PM
Of course some languages are more similar to each other and are easier to learn, but in no way is Spanish just English with some inverted word order. Not even close.
The verb conjugation system is totally different, words have gender in Spanish (English has no gender) and words must match each other in gender and number.
Plus the one thing that *all* languages have that must simply be memorized: idioms. These are expressions that have meaning only as an entire unit but make no sense when broken down into their component words.
An example: That is the author's best work "by a long chalk".
Another, in Spanish: "Era un olla de grillos". In English, "It was a pot of crickets." Meaning: It was a disorganized mess with nobody being able to come to a consensus or understanding.
And then there is simply knowing the common (idiomatic) way of expressing something and using it so you don't sound like a foreigner who doesn't know the language. "Do the needful!"