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 Friday July 17 2015, @08:06PM
Yes, all in all, I'd say having grey matter is more than a little inconvenient.
But, then again, in most cases I think it beats the alternative :P
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:40PM
"Bilinguals of Two Spoken Languages"
Brought to you by the Redundant Department of Redundancies
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Zinho on Friday July 17 2015, @08:21PM
While I've met and befriended many bilingual people, I've developed a stereotype over the years that anyone with 4+ languages is insane. Something about the doublethink needed to assimilate that many cultures' worldviews at the same time, I don't know. Oddly, the Swiss seem to be resistant to this effect; learning German, French, Italian, English, and Flemish as infants doesn't seem to break them. Then again, the only crazy Swiss guy I met knew seven languages, so perhaps there's a threshold there as well.
For what it's worth, I'm not judging the crazy ones; as a speaker of English/French/Portuguese/Italian I'm one of them. Crazy people are fund to have around, and tend to put up with my eccentricities nicely. ;)
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 5, Informative) by CRCulver on Friday July 17 2015, @08:35PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @09:00PM
Swiss has lost many local versions of languages over the years. My father, born outside the town Glarus in canton Glarus, family spoke "Swiss-Swiss" or as my father called it "Low German". Never did get a straight answer of what he meant by that. When he went to Switzerland for one summer, he picked right up were he left off, after more than 7 decades from not being living there.
Looking at the Romansh areas, his canton boards the Romansh area, maybe why he also to talk to many older Italian couples when I was a kid.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 17 2015, @09:43PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=High_German_languages&redirect=no [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Zinho on Friday July 17 2015, @09:33PM
Perhaps you meant "Romansh", but Swiss don't usually learn that either.
Yep, I got the language name wrong, thanks for the correction! You are also correct about the Romansh being rare, I don't think I've ever heard it spoken or met anyone who claims to be a native speaker.
The time I spent in Switzerland was in the Italian region, so most of the Swiss I met there were happy to speak to me in either English or Italian; many also had French, German, or both as extras. It was a bit surreal visiting the post office and listening to the clerk change between Parisian French, Milanese Italian, British English, and German (I can't place German accents, not enough experience with the language) depending on the customer. To my ear her accent was flawless in all four languages, it was amazing. And, in my experience, not unusual at all for the area.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 17 2015, @08:39PM
Tell that to janrinok [soylentnews.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dyingtolive on Friday July 17 2015, @09:05PM
I've had about 8 years of learning Spanish. I still can't speak it very fast or well, but I can read and write it more than well enough to get by, long as anyone I have to interact with is patient enough to wait for me to write out whatever.
That's probably due to not interacting with enough people that speak it though. Back when I did helldesk stuff, we didn't have any fluent Spanish speaking people in our region. This netted me the dubious position of email answerer for anything coming from Latin/South America. People would send me the funniest things and tell me to respond to it for them. I remember getting Portuguese and even French emails more than a couple of times and responding, "This is x language. I cannot help you with it. Better contact the Account Manager and hope they pick up." I'm surprised with how people can't tell the difference sometimes. I mean, I can't tell what every language is just by looking at it, but for the three most common foreign languages we saw, there's enough tells in them to at least have a good indication of what you're looking at, even if you can't read it.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday July 17 2015, @10:12PM
Awel zunne, ik denk dagge der 'n bietje neffens zit, met dien Zwitsers en hun Vloms. Probeert het nog 'ns, maar nu een aantal steenworpen noordelijker, s'il vous de plâit.
Switzerland was the only place where I've ever asked politely if they spoke English, because I was tired, in the train station:
"do you speak English?"
"NON!"
"eh bien. ehm... je.. tu.. il.. passé composé..."
I dunno about insane. Um.. I'll reserve my judgement..
what if you speak most languages badly, and therefore can only absorb the surface of the various and sundry worldviews?
I think everybody that's been to a few countries has learnt a few lessons about "live and let live". Is Portuguese difficult? The vowels sound very complicated. And is Brazilian just similar, or mostly the same?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @10:37PM
Holy cow, was that Swiss German blended with Flemish and wrapped up with French? I had a Belgian girlfriend once who would do that and throw in Mandarin every now and then to keep you on your toes. Crazy as a loon, that one.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday July 18 2015, @01:00PM
I was trying to aim for Flemish ("Vloms" [wikipedia.org]), so from your response I conclude I succeeded ;-)
But honestly; the Belgians speak (much) better Dutch than the Dutch.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @11:12PM
How deep you go is a factor. Knowing a few thousand words to get around and effect basic communication is do-able across more than 4 languages. You can probably also manage to read "The Alchemist" with a dictionary to spot you. But if you want to appreciate the humor or real literature it's a whole different level of commitment. I've read about people being able to speak dozens of languages fluently, but you have to consider them savants that you really can't compare yourself to; they have some special structures in their brains that even neuroscientists are at a loss to explain. And that's partly because those people are so rare and there are limits to the experiments you can do on them to figure out what makes them tick.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:53AM
How true! Other than English which I learned as a child, two of my other languages were learned by virtue of having to live in countries where those languages were the norm. Yes, I managed and could happily have regular conversations regarding current news items or daily life, but getting a feel for the written word in novels was a different matter. I could understand what was written but there was no way I could emulate the style. Humour is another area where jokes would sometimes have everyone else but me laughing their heads off as I missed the subtlety or a nuance of the joke. As soon as I left that environment and was not using the language on a regular basis, my knowledge and fluency began to deteriorate.
One language I had to learn to level 4 - level 5 (the highest level) is usually only attained by a native speaker - and I had to be able to interpret and give formal presentations in that language. That language has stayed with me for far longer but, after 10 years or more away from that role the language is slowly slipping away through lack of use. But, as I now have to get to grips with French, when the going gets difficult my brain suddenly pulls words from other languages as it struggles to find the appropriate vocabulary. The passive skills (listening and reading) are much easier to maintain.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:57AM
I should perhaps say that there are people who do reach this level but I have not met many and, unless fully immersed in the language on a daily basis, I suspect it would be quite difficult to maintain it.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:52PM
How different can the worldviews of, say, Spanish and Portuguese speakers be? Or Italians and Portuguese? The languages are very closely related. German and French are a little more different, but they're all European. If you want really different worldviews, you need to go to different parts of the world, like the middle east or east Asia. Someone who learns Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, English, and Spanish would probably be much closer to "insane" according to your idea.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Sunday July 19 2015, @04:11PM
How different can the worldviews of, say, Spanish and Portuguese speakers be? Or Italians and Portuguese? The languages are very closely related. German and French are a little more different, but they're all European.
How different can American, Scottish, Welsh, and Australian worldviews be? After all, they all speak English. Pretty different, considering that we're famously "divided by a common language". Same for Brazil and Portugal.
If you want really different worldviews, you need to go to different parts of the world, like the middle east or east Asia. Someone who learns Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, English, and Spanish would probably be much closer to "insane" according to your idea.
Agreed.
BTW, don't take this prejudice of mine too seriously. It's a joke, and a self-deprecating one at that. I was aiming for "funny", not "interesting" as a mod :P
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday July 20 2015, @12:59AM
American and Australian worldviews are not *that* different, in fact they're not very different at all compared to any other two random pairings. They're probably closer than most other pairings in fact, except maybe US and Canada (though there's a big exception for French Canadians), or Australia and NZ.
Welsh is probably quite a bit more different since there's actually a whole different language there, called "Welsh". Yes, Welsh people probably all speak English too, but they also have their own native language that's quite a bit different. Scottish too, but to a lesser extent. Same for Irish. It probably doesn't help that all three of those countries were conquered by the English.
BTW, don't take this prejudice of mine too seriously.
There might be something to it, I'm just pointing out that some languages are much more different (from one's native language) than others, so being multilingual in languages that are all very closely related isn't the same as being fluent in languages that are nothing alike (e.g. Mandarin and Swahili), so maybe the effect is much more pronounced for those people.
(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.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday July 17 2015, @09:05PM
Does becoming bilingual cause a big brain or does a big brain cause becoming bilingual?
I didn't notice any drawbacks from being pretty bilingual yet, even with the idiomatic stuff. On occasion it happens that there's a word in the other language that fits spot on, or a well suiting metaphor, so I might even introduce that ("As the English say...") to be more precise.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Tork on Friday July 17 2015, @09:11PM
Does becoming bilingual cause a big brain or does a big brain cause becoming bilingual?
Do muscles get bigger through exercise or do strong people exercise more?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @10:48PM
Maybe it's different if you grow up bilingual. Me I start transposing prepositions and losing deft turn of phrase when I'm in another language too long.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rich on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:25AM
Maybe it's different if you grow up bilingual.
Not from (own) anecdotal evidence. I only started learning English from 5th grade. But it could well be that it's different going from native English to another language, because then it's the first time that English speakers get exposed to nasty declensions (i.e. "ein rotes Auto", "eines roten Autos"...) and the like. While those learning English as second language get very little grammar to do and the "harder" stuff then is only straightforward memorizing of the list of strong verbs and the pronounciation of rare words (e.g. (supermarket) aisle).
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Friday July 17 2015, @09:09PM
As opposed to bilinguals of 1 or more than 2 languages. *rimshot*
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @09:26PM
As opposed to people that can read or write in two languages but can only speak one.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 17 2015, @09:45PM
"Spoken" was not the part I was calling out.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @04:15AM
So it was just a bad joke that did not make sense due to not even noticing 20% of the words.
(Score: 2) by SrLnclt on Friday July 17 2015, @09:56PM
So where do C, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. fit in?
Or is speaking programming languages now required for earning your nerd card?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @10:51PM
I would say they're pretty similar in their affect on the brain, except it's probably more analogous to speaking Spanish to a Portuguese speaker. If you go slow you can make yourself understood, but if you go fast you miss the bigger picture and finer points, in much the same way that if you know Java you'll be able to tell where a loop is in Perl, but the regex's might still make you scratch your head.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:02AM
That's actually an important aspect of the study. They also looked at the effects of knowing a signed language in addition to one's native language, and that did not correlate with more gray matter. So it is: Bilingual of one spoken and one signed language - no effect on amount of gray matter; bilingual of two spoken languages - more gray matter.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @09:50PM
It sounds like you are...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @10:13PM
If Americans lived in countries the size of our states, each with a different language, more of us would be multilingual as well.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @10:26PM
...and maybe you'd get the joke then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @09:51PM
I slap my ballsack in protest.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday July 17 2015, @10:19PM
I'm tired, so this comment may make even less sense than my usual ones.
Douglas Hofstadter once wrote about the "semantic web" for laypeople. Maybe, if you have multiple languages, there are more spots in your semantic web that are close to words in at least one of those languages.
My personal three tips about learning languages:
1) Don't be afraid. You *will* make a fool of yourself. Deal with it.
2) First comes reading, then listening, then writing, then speaking, then discussing, lastly joking. It takes time.
3) Fall in love with someone who speaks a different language. It helps a lot :-)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Friday July 17 2015, @10:31PM
2) First comes reading, then listening, then writing, then speaking, then discussing, lastly joking. It takes time.
Not sure I agree.
I would start by listening not reading.
- And if you are listening interactively to someone speak, they can augment with non-verbal cues, as well as detect when you don't understand and go slower, explain themselves using different words etc
- It also gives you a chance to practice speaking; again with interactive feedback as you go.
- It also makes reading so much easier when you have an idea what those glyphs on the page are supposed to sound like.)
- Then writing comes after that.
Thus you should be speaking before writing, although I agree you probably master writing before speaking, because you have more time to think about writing. Likewise you'll master reading before listening again because you have more time to puzzle things out, writing is usually a bit more formal and grammatically correct, and isn't being shot at you at high speed with an odd accent...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @11:06PM
This is dead on. It's one of the hardest things about learning Japanese, for example, because the kanji have so many readings--you don't know which it's supposed to be unless you speak the language or somebody takes pity on you and throws in furigana as a superscript. Sort of the same with tri-consonantal roots in Arabic. If you know what the vowels are supposed to be you don't care that the author of a sentence didn't supply the diacritics.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday July 18 2015, @04:50PM
I see people suggesting that they listen before reading, but it's hardly that cut and dry. Sure, for a language like Chinese the amount of time it's going to take to read is going to make that a fairly easy decision. But, with reading it's much easier to take the snippets of language you encounter and store them for future memorization. You also have the benefit of knowing what the words are and more easily looking them up.
That being said, listening is an essential skill for anybody that isn't deaf and you're not going to be speaking the language effectively if you don't work on it. But as a means of internalizing the language it sucks. You have to have a fairly decent vocabulary before that really happens and people greatly underestimate how much time that's going to take.
FWIW, most of a persons vocabulary beyond the basics comes from reading. People often times underestimate just how limited the vocabulary needs are of daily living. You can learn most of those works in a few months, without special tools. But, the words you need to be fluent and comfortable are more likely to be had by reading. To make matters worse, it's definitely possible to read 700 wpm, but good luck listening that fast. And somebody that's practiced speed reading can go even faster without missing words. You encounter a huge number of words like that and the number of times and ways in which you encounter a word is the best indicator of how well you'll know the word when you're done.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @10:58PM
This is true, but it's a show-stopper for a lot of people. It's very close to the fear people have of public speaking--it makes most freeze, but a few thrive. If you have ever jumped out of an airplane or off the high dive you probably have the tools to harness the adrenaline to get past it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @10:36PM
are there good alternatives to this expensive software?
(Score: 1) by robmullr on Friday July 17 2015, @11:40PM
We have been using duolingo. Its made it pretty fun so far. For free.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @01:33AM
Search boilerplate:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:AlternativeTo.net+intitle:Rosetta.Stone [google.com]
Page:
http://alternativeto.net/software/rosetta-stone/#content [alternativeto.net]
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Filter by license if you want to.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @11:40PM
While on holiday, we met a guy who was fluent in 5 langauges - Russian, Finnish, German, English and Estomian. That's impressive but then after a couple days it got me wondering - he has 5 languages and his job is tour guide around a pretty mediocre "attraction". I'll stick with my English and hacky C, thanks.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @12:07AM
What do you call someone fluent in three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call someone fluent in two languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call someone only fluent in one language?
English.
What do you call someone that doesn't speak any language well?
American.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:34AM
In Toronto
"Monolingualism can be cured."
(Score: 1, Informative) by CirclesInSand on Saturday July 18 2015, @03:58AM
Most people who claim to be multilingual really aren't. Some are, most aren't.
If you only know how to speak within 1 language group, such as Italian and French, then you aren't multilingual, sorry. You simply know 2 vocabulary sets for the same language. It's like claiming to know 2 different programming languages because you changed the names of all the variables in the standard library.
Real multilingualism is learning 2 languages that are actually different. Such as learning English and Japanese. Or learning Russian and German. Or learning French and Swahili. Languages reflect the evolution of the culture that created them, to really have a mind for them you have to be able to "think" like the people in that culture.
On a side note, many people tend to look down their nose at Americans for only speaking one language. In my observation, the majority of "bilingual" people only speak English and their native language, and the same can be said of Americans. The irony is that so many of them only learned English from watching American's exported television, movies, news, etc (but would never admit it). "English and your own native language" also isn't a great sign of linguistic study, more so just a sign that you watch foreign TV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @05:27AM
Wouldn't that make you feel better? Alas, you, and the moderator who modded your comment "informative", are clinging to the no true Scotsman fallacy. The study found that larger gray matter correlates with Spanish-English bilingualism compared to just English. They disproved your hypothesis before you even wrote it down.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:06AM
If you don't know what the phrase "No true Scotsman" means, then you really shouldn't accuse other people of making that mistake. "No true Scotsman" refers to choosing definitions for the sake of establishing the question, rather than choosing them in a more sound and generally useful fashion.
When I say that learning 2 languages in the same language group isn't really being bilingual, it is just learning a new vocabulary, it isn't "No true Scotsman". I'm making the very point that it is a more natural definition. As stated, language is more than vocabulary, it is grammar, culture, different styles of logic, etc. Simply learning vocabulary isn't the same as learning language.
And as far as their articles claim goes, it isn't surprising at all. "People who are proficient at X have more grey matter" is probably true of anything that requires memorization or fast mental acuity. Such as being a concert pianist, or an electrical engineer, or a top poker player. Is it more likely that learning language made your brain grow, or that people with strong mental abilities learned some vocabulary or language in their free time?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:59PM
Spanish and English are from different language groups, just like Russian and German. English is a Germanic language, and Spanish is a Romance language. Of course, all these languages are Indo-European languages, but that's a really big group of languages that spans most of the world, except for African, far east, and Pacific Island languages, and some other aboriginal languages.
(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!"
(Score: 1) by simonInOz on Saturday July 18 2015, @06:45AM
Slashdot, sorry, SoylentNews. I have used (reasonably fluently) maybe 20 computer languages throughout my career, ranging from Java to COBOL, Fortran to php. But I'm terrible at human languages - I can order food in maybe 3, and beer in more, but actually converse - zip. Ok, one (or maybe more - English, Americanish, New Zealandish, Australianish). So do I have more or less grey matter? And does it matter?-- cats like plain crisps --
(Score: 3, Funny) by Geotti on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:56AM
But I'm terrible at human languages
You should have learned smalltalk. SCNR ;)