Thread

1. timr · 1789830838 · focus · HN ↗

   All of the the research I have seen on this topic have been observational retrospective studies, which are worthless and should be ignored. The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language (let alone a third or more) are so large that they cannot be overcome without a randomized control. This stuff is churnalism, right up there with "does coffee make you live longer?" [1].

   But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy.

   I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring.

   [1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.

   1. MrDrMcCoy · 1789877135 · focus · HN ↗

      Confounding to learning language, on top of one's base ability to do do in general, are the teaching methods not meshing at all with the individual. For me, rote memorization of anything is nearly impossible, doubly so if the thing to be memorized has no immediate utility. "Conversational" language learning and similar that give you a bunch of vocabulary and bring in the grammar later are why I failed Spanish 1 three times. I need the grammar first, then words with etymology. It also helps to not fight with phonetic collisions between different languages using their own bastardization of Latin script, which is why I was far more easily able to meet my college language requirement by teaching myself classical Greek and translating the things I thought were interesting.

      1. nchmy · 1789906007 · focus · HN ↗

         This is fascinating to me, because I am adamant that learning grammar (and especially verb conjugation) is completely counter productive when starting to learn a language. Especially with Spanish, where every tense and person has different terminations.

         I literally just ignored conjugation and spoke in infinitive for a while.

         Yo comer pan. Tu comer pan. Ayer/mañana el comer pan. Etc...

         Likewise not worrying about gender, articles etc. If you use the wrong el/la/lo/les/whatever, it almost never matters, whatsoever.

         Likewise if you put words in the wrong order.

         Everyone understands it all.

         So, just focus on building vocab, fluidity and confidence. The tenses come in time.

         I do agree, though, that etymology - or at least noticing similarities between languages - can be very useful. Spanish and English speakers already know thousands of words in each language just with some basic rules. -al is the same (metal). -tion becomes -cion (conversation, conversación). Etc...

         I suspect that your struggles was that you were being evaluated on the wrong things...

         I'd be curious to hear your experience and what you think of what I've said.

         1. MrDrMcCoy · 1789964919 · focus · HN ↗

            I think you're probably right where most people are concerned, but none of that held for me in my various attempts. I think I should amend a couple of the points I raised, though:

            I wrote etymology when I meant morphology. Etymology is certainly useful to me and helps vocabulary stick, but I find morphology to be a useful building block that I need on the front-end of learning vocabulary. No curriculum I've found includes it.

            Phonetic collisions were particularly difficult for me, as my early education intrinsically bound phonetics to the English alphabet in my mind, which made it very difficult for my memory to latch onto new associations that share Latin script. I think phonics are crucial, but I wish there was a good way to better steer the sound associations to morphemes instead of individual characters, so as to better make room for more than the one language you're trying to learn.

            New point: I had already done some programming by the time I tried learning another language. My thought processes had already reshaped into a sort of compiler for all my language processing. The necessary precision of code extended into how I wrote, and that overinflated the importance of grammar into something I just couldn't see past before getting to the words themselves. I wanted the words that were useful to sentence structure ahead of all others so I could do something useful with the rest.

            I expect this would all be pretty incomprehensible to most people.

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