Bilingualism Delays Onset of Dementia

Dee writes with word of a Canadian study indicating that lifelong bilingualism delays the onset of dementia by 4 years. The scientists were reportedly "dazzled" by the results. From the article: "The researchers determined that the mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the monolingual group was 71.4 years, while the bilingual group was 75.5 years. This difference remained even after considering the possible effect of cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender as influencers in the results. "

Comments

Wow

[wbean]

Wow, does that include Fortan and Cobal? (Couldn't be C# because it requires lifelong fluency.)

Re:Wow

[malsdavis]

This isn't the first report to note mental health benefits from knowing another language, there have been many studies done on the matter, I remember recently reading a report which showed bilingualism (along with ambidexterity among other things) helps prevent/delay Alzheimers.

While on the face of it, the various studies would seem to imply that programming languages help in this way, I doubt they are quite as beneficial as a natural language due (among other things) to the comparatively minuscule vocabulary and grammatical flexibility that programming languages generally use.

The general indications are though that all brain usage assists to ward off mental health degeneration however so the good news for Slashdotters is that just being a nerd helps in itself!

Re:Wow

[Andrew Kismet]

Well if size and complexity are the deciding factors, then Perl should be the best at keeping you going out of your mind :)
Fixed.

Re:Wow

[MattPat]

It's OK, according to the study, as long as he's fluent in Cobol and FORTRAN, he doesn't need English! :)

Re:Wow

[indifferent children]

A compiler is the ultimate spelling and grammar Nazi.

Re:Wow

[SatanicPuppy]

I doubt it. A lot of the studies on dementia have boiled down to: if your brain is more flexible, you develop symptoms much more slowly. People with more education tend to exhibit symptoms much more slowly, people who know extra languages exhibit symptoms much more slowly.

What it boils down to is, if your brain is wired to do things in more than one way, you're more likely to be able to cope for longer when dementia starts throwing up road blocks. So, in that sense, I'd expect programming skills to be useful, due to the amount of problem solving ability that comes with coding.

Cause or effect?

[kestasjk]

Does learning another language make you less susceptible to dementia, or does being the sort of person who learns another language mean that you already were less susceptible?

It would be interesting to compare the dementia rates in bilingual people in unilingual(?) cultures and bilingual people in bilingual cultures, but it looks like this study was limited to a couple of hundred people at a single mental health clinic.

Re:Cause or effect?

[CRCulver]

Does learning another language make you less susceptible to dementia, or does being the sort of person who learns another language mean that you already were less susceptible?

The majority of the world is bilingual or multilingual. Especially in the countries refered to as Third World, people are forced to pick up at least one second language in childhood, and often continue learning languages throughout life. John Edward's Multilingualism (New York: Penguin, 1996) is an eye-opening introduction to the field. It seems really strange now to hear well-off Americans complain that learning languages is "too hard" and requires special talent, when one can plainly see that any poor and uneducated peasant does it succesfully and without complaint.

So when you say "being the sort of person who learns another language", I hope you aren't suggesting that only language nerds with special brains do so. Multilingualism is a general human phenomenon, it's people in the West who are usual.

Re:Cause or effect?

[metlin]

Actually, born and having spent my formative years in India, I can attest to this.

While growing up, I lived in a few states, which entailed not only learning to speak the local language, but also read and write the said language. The good news is that once you've gotten the hang of it, it's not particularly hard.

Usually, folks learn the language of the state they are in, they learn Hindi (the national language) and of course English since it is the language of education and commerce, owing to the fact that we were a British colony.

End result? I am quite conversant in reading and writing several languages (speak 5 and read/write 4 - of course, I can read serious literature in only three of these languages). And do note that when I mean different languages, I mean languages - not dialects (I have noticed that a lot of folks tend to mistake all Indian languages as being dialects - they are not, and depending on which part of the country the language originated, they even have different linguistic roots).

I have also found that having learnt the skills for picking up languages as a child, it is a lot easier for me to learn a new language than it is for most people who've not had such an opportunity.

A most equitable bargain, I'd say.

Re:Cause or effect?

[Riktov]

Oh, right. The editorial review board of Neuropsychologia , the medical journal publishing this study, is still incapable of clearly distinguishing between causality and correlation, after 40 years of publishing scientific research.

I myself notice a link between Slashdot readers who read about a study claiming something that they don't want to believe, and those readers then attempting to dismiss them through trite posts about basic scientific practice. I can't say whether that link is causality or mere correlation, though.

Re:Cause or effect?

[o2sd]

People still look at me funny when I tell them I learned english at the age of 11 and speak 5 other languages. White folks are weird.

Reminds me of a Swiss guy I met in Beijing. He was already tri-lingual by the age of 16 (Swiss French, Italian, German), then learned English and Spanish after high school before going to Taiwan to study Mandarin Chinese. He was in Beijing for sight seeing before heading to Moscow to learn Russian.

And yet hardly a month goes by without another idiotic article in the paper describing how difficult it is to learn a second language. White people ... sheesh.

Re:Cause or effect?

[rynthetyn]

It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort. Problem is, since much of the rest of the world learns English in school, Americans don't feel the need to bother with other languages. We could fix that problem by starting foreign language education in early elementary school, actually, that's what we should do, but there's too much political baggage that goes along with language for that to happen any time soon.

The thing to note though, is that depending on the languages, it's not hard to be multi-lingual. It's not that big a deal for someone to speak French, Italian, and Spanish, they're all basically the same language. I speak Spanish, have never studied either Italian or French, but I can understand spoken Italian and can read it, and I can read French and I don't consider myself to be particularly talented in the language learning department. Being able to speak completely unrelated languages is another thing altogether, and that does take work, though the more languages you know, the easier it becomes to learn more. And, back to the original article, the more connections you make in your brain, even when you start losing some, you're still ahead of the poor schlubs who never built those connections in the first place.

Re:Cause or effect?

[Monkelectric]

It seems really strange now to hear well-off Americans complain that learning languages is "too hard" and requires special talent

Learn some neurology then. The brain looses its plasticity for languages after the age of about 14. It *IS* extremely difficult to acquire a language after that age -- and if you do it is actually stored in a physically different location in your brain than your primary language.

This is the same reason that people who don't learn to read after a certain age almost *NEVER* learn to read.

The human brain has windows during which it is most receptive to acquiring new abilities. After those windows expire it is very difficult and in some cases impossible to acquire those abilities.

So blame the American educational system. Most language courses are offered at the freshman level of high school -- about the age of 15.

Re:Cause or effect?

[niktemadur]

It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort.

You missed two crucial elements here, my good man: exposure and practice.

I once travelled alone through Italy and France for a couple of months, and before I knew it, I was having conversations in Italian, not fluently of course, but enough to get by and then some (I got invited to a couple of parties, etc). If I had travelled with a friend, I would have spoken my native language (Spanish, similar but not identical to Italian by any means) with that person instead of making the effort to connect with the locals, so in a way, necessity became my crash course, and I was astounded by how fast I'd picked the language up.

Similarly, I went to France right after that and it took me about a week to begin constructing my own proper sentences, even though my accent must have been grating to french ears, but the effort was appreciated and on a couple of occasions I was treated to drinks in bars, courtesy of parisians! It was a super cool exercise.

However, sadly and predictably, about a month after I returned home I'd forgotten most of what I learned during my trip.

Similarly, my now wife lived in Germany for a year, and a couple of years after she came back to her hometown, she'd forgotten most of what she spoke exclusively for nearly a year. She recently took a refresher course with immediate results, but now that the course is over, she doesn't have anybody to practice with, so she's forgetting it again! Getting rusty, so to speak.

On a humorous note: I once met a guy from Chile who'd been living in the US for a couple of months. He hadn't picked up English very well yet, but he also hadn't practiced his native Spanish, so I tried to have a conversation with the guy and quickly realized he spoke no languages! Half an hour later his Spanish had fully returned, so I got to witness the language part of the mind (so to speak) in action at point-blank range.

Most High School students in the US may take a language course, but while in Europe you drive a few hours and find yourself exposed to the stimuli of a foreign language, in the US there is a sort of language isolation, except for Spanish in the southwestern states, Florida and a few major cities, but many latinos in the US prefer to speak English anyway, and if they speak in Spanish it's like a sound in the background for most white folks, so there is neither much stimuli nor incentive for the average US citizen to be bilingual.

OK, my point is this: take an average US citizen who thinks it difficult to learn languages, place him/her in a european-like environment, and that person will become adept at languages, sooner or later, to his/her astonishment.

Re:Cause or effect?

[drsquare]

We could fix that problem by starting foreign language education in early elementary school, actually, that's what we should do, but there's too much political baggage that goes along with language for that to happen any time soon.

It wouldn't make a difference. Say for instance you taught American schoolkids German from an early age. By the time they leave school they're pretty good at it. Then they leave school, and as they live in America they never use German at all, and several years later they've forgotten every bit they ever learnt.

Learning a foreign language is only useful if you're actually going to use it day in day out. For an English speaker in an English country, this isn't an issue.

Re:Cause or effect?

[GeckoX]

So very very true.

I went through French immersion, spoke it completely fluently. Partook in exchanges to both Quebec and France, no problem whatsoever. Over 15 years ago now.

Not a lot of french is spoken in the greater Toronto area, and thus I've lost the ability.

Now, I am quite certain that if I was thrown into a french speaking environment, I would very likely pick it up again quite quickly. But it's certainly not an ability I can just pull out at my own whim anymore.

Re:Cause or effect?

[nblender]

I can support this as well. I was born in Austria and lived there til I was 3. Then moved here where I promptly had to learn english. My parents continued speaking to me in austrian but I would respond in english. Years later, I can still understand german/austrian fine when it is spoken to me but I have trouble making my mouth speak it. In the late 80's, I went there with my wife who didn't speak any german at all so I had to translate. After about 2 days of full immersion, it was like a switch was turned on in my head and I could speak german fluently...

The strange thing that happened however, was that my brain switched to thinking in german as well so in a restaurant, while translating what the waiter was saying, to my wife, she looked at me like I was an alien. I had just spoken an english sentence but used german construction so it came out all wrong and practically incomprehensible.

Having not been there in about 10 years, I'm back to being unable to speak german.

Re:Cause or effect?

[LuisAnaya]

:).

Yeap, I do not know, I was taking English classes from Kinder through College in Puerto Rico. I knew enough English to ask for an orange juice when I went to Disney World. I was seven years old, and in '74, whites were the majority in Florida.

Today hispanics consits of 20% of the US population. Whites are still complaining about people speaking spanish on the streets.

Get the hint... carry a spanish phrasebook, y evite la senilidad.

4 years?

[TodMinuit]

And how long does it take for me to become (and stay) bilingual? Is there a net gain, or would my time be better spent elsewhere?

Re:4 years?

[Max Romantschuk]

And how long does it take for me to become (and stay) bilingual? Is there a net gain, or would my time be better spent elsewhere?

Aside from the obvious benefits of simply broadening your perspective, learning a new language takes anywhere from 1 to 10 years. (I'm pretty much trilingual with Swedish, Finnish and English, know French pretty well, and some German.) Anybody can do it in one year if placed somewhere where you simply can't speak anything else. If you don't spend a lot of time, on the other hand, it'll take a lot longer. You'll also lose an extra language pertty quickly unless you use it regularly for a decent number of years.

Then there's the question of what qualifies as bilingual. If you ask me it's the ability to express your thoughts equally and effortlessly in both languages. Otherwise you're just good at another language.

It's interesting to note that if you're bilingual from age 0 and up it takes a little longer to learn to speak. It's also very important that one parent speaks one language to the kids, and vice versa. Otherwise they'll have a hard time determining what's what. (Our kids are Swedish/Finnish bilingual.)

Great

[Frogbert]

I can understand English and whatever language New Zealanders speak, do I count as bilingual?


:P

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever language New Zealanders speak

It should, because it certainly isn't english.

anklebiter: toddler, kids
home and hosed: safe, completed successfully
corker: very good
get off the grass: exclamation of disbelief; equivalent to "stop pulling my leg" and "no way"
Good on ya, mate!: congratulations
skiting: bragging
Wally: incompetent person, loser (my name's Wally, you insensitive clod!)
and many more.

Some people think bilingualism is bad

[pembo13]

Some people think bilingualism is something for 3rd world countries. Of course I've only heard this sentiment expressed in the USA.

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[The MAZZTer]

I'm seeing more and more Spanish-translated stuff popping up in the US, and not just near the southern border either...

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[Gothmolly]

While your comment is an obvious troll, I'll bite. Americans assume that you don't need to be bilingual simply because if you speak English, you DONT need to be bilingual. You can travel in the entire UK Commonwealth, the US, most of western Europe and Central America, and get by with English. It's the language of the Internet, it's the language of business. A German friend works for a Japanese country (in Germany) - what do they all speak? English. It's not the US' fault that it speaks one of the world's most popular languages.

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[CRCulver]

Those kinds of people just get frustrated that immmigrants don't magically know English upon entering the United States. I wish they'd imagine what it would be like if they went to live in another country with a different language.

I think the frustration is not that people don't immediately learn English--even the most vocal opponents of Mexican immigration I've encountered understand that English is difficult--but rather that some immigrants don't even seem to try to learn. For when large areas of major cities now have Spanish-language billboards, the locals only know the culture they see on Univision and miss out on traditional American references, and there's not even a need for one living there to learn English, then there's understandably a fear of balkanization. Personally speaking, however, I dig Latino immigrants, and when I used to live in the U.S. I spent a lot of time in such neighbourhoods.

It's full of silly rules that make no sense. Even people who learn it at a young age and speak it their whole lives have trouble with it.

Native speakers automatically speak perfectly correct English, since correct English is determined by how native speakers speak. You are thinking that people speak incorrectly just because they don't mold their speech to artificial proscriptivist norms, but this is antiquated reasoning from the era when all languages had to be just like Latin (no split infinitives, prepositions at end of clause, etc.). Linguistics has been a purely descriptivist field for nearly a century now, but it's taking a long time for this to filter down to the public, who still get riled up if you show that there's nothing wrong with, say, African American Vernacular English.

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[CRCulver]

Combined with the fact that a lot of the world learns English from proscriptivist norms, it is not surprising. And secondly, I might be wrong, but it seems to me that it is only in the US that descriptivist vernaculars take over proscriptivist vernaculars (for English, at least).

Prescriptivism is dying in England, as well. RP is pretty much dead, and what passes for RP now among the elderly has marked differences from the standard set down a century ago. It's replacement as the standard English accent, Estuary English, is learnt more through osmosis just by living in the area than by rigorous schooling and hearing that this is the "right way to speak". Nevermind that in some former British colonies, such as Nigeria and India, the masses learning English nowadays are taking it in crazy directions that the British upper classes who brought the language there could have never imagined.

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[CRCulver]

Yes, but you don't seem to understand what that means. Descriptivism is the idea that grammars and dictionaries adapt to changing usage; it doesn't mean that there is no such thing as standard usage. Again: the concept of "incorrect" remains; it's just that "incorrect" means at odds with the educated usage of today, not that of the 19th century.

Having trained as a linguist for some years, I've never heard the term "incorrect" used. In fact, I know that using it quickly bring reproachment from my elders in the field. If a speaker does not match the standard, one says that his speech is simply non-standard, not "incorrect".

The easy way to bilingualism?

[tepples]

Does Toki Pona count? It's amazing what one can do with only 120 words.

hmm

[compro01]

Must be why the Canadian government hasn't gone crazy yet.

Simple conservation of confusion

[NotQuiteReal]

Be confused with multilingual voices in your head for much of your life... or just a concentrated dose for the last four years.

statistics

[digitalderbs]

I was curious about the claim (and standard deviations) and pulled up the paper. The mean for monolinguals is 71.4 +/- 9.6 and the mean for bilinguals is 75.5 +/- 8.5. Now those std deviations are 1*sigma (68.3%) leaving a lot of overlap between the two distributions. However, they claim that these two distributions are statistically different by an F-test (if I'm not mistaken, which assumes that both distributions are normal). I'm not a clinical statician and I'm used to working with numbers closer to Avogadro's; how statistically significant are these results? Can you make binary statements like this with such a small pool and such close distributions?

Re:statistics

[dorpus]

Normally, we would test a difference in means between two populations by a t-test. If the sample size is large enough, then even a difference that is only a fraction of a standard deviation can be statistically significant. F-tests are used in ANOVA tables, and yes, they do assume normal distributions, as well as homoskedasticity (same variance). Assuming they performed a linear regression, then one can perform a Type I F-test (added-in-order test) or Type II F-test (added-last test). One can also talk about an overall F-test, testing whether any of the effects in the model are nonzero. However, as I indicated in another post, the study only had 184 patients from a single treatment center. There is selection bias, since the study only sampled patients who were already suffering from memory loss. How many other bilingual immigrants with memory loss are lurking in the general population, who aren't going to memory loss clinics due to lack of knowledge? Also, what method did they use to adjust for "cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender" with only 184 patients? The study only proves that bilingual patients who arrived at a particular treatment center were, on average, 4 years older than monolingual patients. It does NOT provide a causal link between bilingualism and cognitive reserve.

Galvanized minds?

[w33t]

I find this interesting. Since these are apparently, "life long" bilinguals, they must have learned the second language at an early age.

I would seem that having two languages one's whole life would somehow affect a brain. However, I think research shows that life-long bilinguals actually use the same region of their brain when speaking either language.
As shown by this article - google cache - the real site barely worked. just google "bilingual brocas"

Perhaps bilingualism gives the brain some kind of extra strength - or flexibility. Maybe more than just the broca's area gets an extra workout, and that effort pays off in the long marathon of dementia.

Stands to reason

[Gryle]

"At my work (city hall) bilinguals get $600 extra per month just for knowing another language."
I fail to see your point. Don't additional skills usually warrant an increase in paygrade?

Re:Stands to reason

[TerranFury]

>I fail to see your point. Don't additional skills usually warrant an increase in paygrade?

Depends.

If your second language is Spanish and you work in Miami -- definitely.
If your second language is Swahili and you work in Vermont -- well, probably not.

Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck. ;-)

Re:Stands to reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck. ;-)

But if you worked as a flight attendant, it might just come in handy!

Re:Stands to reason

[OldManAndTheC]

Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck

Just add "Expert with Python" to your resume.

Re:Stands to reason

[nacturation]

ANY language in addition to English. Ellway, ouyay oday eakspay Igpay Atinlay, on'tday ouyay?

Re:Stands to reason

[Potor]

I disagree. I once worked at IBM, and they hired me, they said, because I knew Latin. I would submit that Latin is to IBM as Swahili is to Vermont (mutatis mutandis).

Knowing another language also means an ability to think outside of the box (excuse the cliché, but I am tired), because knowing another language is simply the culmination of a bunch of other skills you have (intellectual/cultural curiosity, tenacity, an open mind, and strong analytic / synthetic skills, not to mention probably vastly improved English skills).

In fact, this last point is probably the strongest argument. I have acquired a three other languages since I turned 19, and although I am perfect in none of them, my English skills are extremely strong because of the extended process of comparative grammar I have undertaken.

But since I am not a life-long bilingual, I expect now to lose my mind at 71. I guess all you slashdotters who've been coding since the cradle are safe though.

Re:Stands to reason

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Nah. It's been proven that learning things like SQL flat out increase mental instability.

Re:Stands to reason

[Lijemo]

If your second language is Swahili and you work in Vermont -- well, probably not.

Actually, Burlington VT is a refugee resettlement center. There are small numbers of people speaking so many languages there that the second-most common language (after English) is "other." This makes life interesting for the public library with regard to forign-lagugage collection development and ESL classes-- and I suspect it makes things interesting for municipal servieces as well.

Truth is, in a municipal setting, you never know when Swahili (or any other language) will be very useful to know.

Speaking as a biostatistician

[dorpus]

The study only had 184 patients from a single treatment center. There is selection bias, since the study only sampled patients who were already suffering from memory loss. How many other bilingual immigrants with memory loss are lurking in the general population, who aren't going to memory loss clinics due to lack of knowledge? Also, what method did they use to adjust for "cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender" with only 184 patients?

The study only proves that bilingual patients who arrived at a particular treatment center were, on average, 4 years older than monolingual patients. It does NOT provide a causal link between bilingualism and cognitive reserve.

Re:Research funding needs more scrutiny

[audacity242]

And the article clearly states this is preliminary, meaning, this is essentially a pilot study. The fully controlled studies come later, but cheap studies that show correlation are the way to go, unless you want to go on wild goose chases.

Wunderschöne pink elephant?

[A beautiful mind]

Most nem fogom megmagyarázni hogy mi a francot jelent amit írtam, legyen elég annyi hogy 4 évvel tovább élek mint ti, haha.

I kind of like the idea of living 4 years longer. Does the effect stack with more than 2 languages? If that's the case then it ist Zeit für ein neu schprache gelearnen.

Sometimes the idea that my english/american is most likely better (barring accent, but could be trained) than half of the people speaking it as a native language scares me.

Re:Wunderschöne pink elephant?

[dunkelfalke]

es ist Zeit, eine neue Sprache zu lernen.

now call me grammar nazi.

Re:I'd just like to say...

[Propaganda13]

Let me be the first to say "Tengo un gato en mis pantalones."

Either that or "Tengo un sandwich de jamón en mi sombrero." After that, the conversation usually goes downhill from there.

Bullshit

[Alphager]

I am the Son of a Diplomat. This means that every 4 to 5 years, we went to a different country as a family. We _ALL_ managed to learn the foreign language in ~12 months (this means that we could function normally in school, understood the local television and had no problems reading newspapers). After 24 months, one can master the language to the point where literature-studies are not harder in any language. Of course, it helps to really live _IN_ the country among locals, not in some kind of gated community where everybody speaks your language. And we never got satelite-TV, so all TV-chanels were in the local language. End effect is that my whole family is multi-lingual. Even my parents, who where significantly older than 5 when they learned these other languages.

Re:Bullshit

[Dun Malg]

I am the Son of a Diplomat. This means that every 4 to 5 years, we went to a different country as a family. We _ALL_ managed to learn the foreign language in ~12 months (this means that we could function normally in school, understood the local television and had no problems reading newspapers). After 24 months, one can master the language to the point where literature-studies are not harder in any language.Of course, it helps to really live _IN_ the country among locals, not in some kind of gated community where everybody speaks your language. And we never got satelite-TV, so all TV-chanels were in the local language.End effect is that my whole family is multi-lingual. Even my parents, who where significantly older than 5 when they learned these other languages. Do you really think learning the language in 12-24 months is fast? I learned Russian well enough to read and discuss Crime and Punishment after 8 months at the Defense Language Institute when I was in the Army, and all we had was classroom instruction and textbooks. Achieving basic fluency after 12 months of immersion is only average for an adult, and downright pedestrian compared to how fast a child under 5 can pick it up.

Re:Bullshit

[CRCulver]

Do you really think learning the language in 12-24 months is fast? I learned Russian well enough to read and discuss Crime and Punishment after 8 months at the Defense Language Institute when I was in the Army, and all we had was classroom instruction and textbooks.

Speaking as another former DLI student (Mandarin Chinese), one cannot really compare the situation there to that of the OP. Of course one is going to learn a language fast if severe punishment follows if one slacks off, and if one is spending eight hours a day with some of the finest language instructors in North America. If one is the average civilian without access to world-class language training, learning a foreign language in 12 months is fast.

Re:Any language?

[ClamIAm]

My opinion is that programming languages and musical notation (I also read these) are basically different ways of writing mathematical-type expressions. So you're basically learning different ways to write down logic and relationships between abstract things. Natural language is in some ways similar, but there's the added human elements like emotion and nuance.

As for benefits, I certainly believe that knowing programming languages or any kind of abstract notation helps a person understand other abstract notations, as well as "systems" in general. The more generalized your understanding of logical/mathematical relationships between things, the easier it is to piece together the workings of different systems. This can be a benefit when learning natural languages; I've noticed that I can pick up the "rules" of a language pretty easily (I've studied Spanish). Who knows if it has health benefits, although it seems most studies show people who work their brains tend to not go senile.

OK, ramble over.

Not just bilingualism - mental activity in general

[Raul654]

In the book 'Everything Bad is Good For You', they mentioned several studies that have come to the same general conclusion - staying mentally active tends to reduce both the incidence and seriousness of mental disease. One nunnery they studied, whose order believes than an idle mind is the devil's playground, the incidence of mental disease was a fraction of the total population, and the overall lifespans were tremendously greater (the two librarians were 97 and 99 years old)

I do a wee bit better than that.

[patio11]

As long as we're talking about human languages on Slashdot for a change, let me give you my pitch: STUDY A LANGUAGE. I'm a native speaker of English who also speaks passable Japanese and can program. There aren't exactly tens of thousands of people with that skillset. There are more than a few positions that require it (including my current job), and every time I hear of a new one the hiring official practically begs me to introduce him to anyone I know who would fit the bill. I'm not exactly hot stuff as a programmer -- in fact, I bet you could find dozens of people who are my equal or better at any graduating class in India. None of them can do my job. This gives me job security and a variety of employment options in a quite lucrative little niche which has a nice, deep moat around it that keeps out competitors.

If you're planning on a career in IT, get yourself an answer to the question "What can you do that I can't do with two and a half Indians for the same price?" "I speak a foreign language" is an easy and sufficient answer to that question.

I'd rank languages in terms of priority by a quick mental guesstimate of our trade with the appropriate countries divided by the number of Americans who speak the language. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are going to be high on the list. Arabic is an up-and-comer, particularly if you desire to work for the federal government. Spanish is not a great choice because we have plenty of American bilinguals. I wouldn't personally recommend the European languages because the market sizes are smaller but, hey, there is money to be made in facilitating communication and commerce with Italy or Poland and SOMEBODY is making it.

Re:I do a wee bit better than that.

[silkenphoenixx]

As long as we're talking about human languages on Slashdot for a change, let me give you my pitch: STUDY A LANGUAGE.
I think you've touched on an important point there, it's the extra mental activity that increases the brain's longevity, and studying (or even learning on a conversational level) an extra language really streches the brain's proverbial muscles, speaking as a bi-lingual myself. It requitres an increase of one's mental capacities, one eventually learns to think in another language rather than deciding what you want to say in English and translating it before speaking. It's the exercise that helps.

Note the article said that being bi-lingual fends off dementia, not death, as was implied in a post somewhere above this one. Thus not working as hard because of a pay increase due to an extra language has nothing to do with it, and that's totally ignoring the fact that we generally associate working harder with increased longevity (although increased job stress would counter this out).

Re:I do a wee bit better than that.

[christophe]

in Western Europe it is de rigueur to speak at least three languages. Well, Western Europe is a big place with many different nations. You can expect people from small countries, like Swiss or Belgians, to be fluent in one or two foreign languages, and people from Sweden or Danemark to speak very good English and often German. But the average French barely speaks enough English for international business (with many exceptions), and English people don't even have to learn another language. Situation seems better in Germany, at least for English. IMHO, that has more to do with the educational system and motivation than anything else. Exposure to foreign content (most films in original version with subtitles on TV for example, as in Danemark) is another key.

(Spoken as a French which speaks three languages).

Re:I do a wee bit better than that.

[linuxci]

And actually studying different languages is quite fun.
 
Well, from what I've heard, in Western Europe it is de rigueur to speak at least three languages. It's not even admirable in countries like Switzerland and Germany, it's a standard requirement. In the UK those three languages are usually en-gb, en-us and en-au

Re:I do a wee bit better than that.

[christophe]

I think this has economic roots. Dubbing has about the same cost in every language, but the cost for the final customer is very different according to the size of population/market.

France (like Germany) is a big market (60/80 millions people) to make dubbing economically feasible. Danemark for example (5 millions people) only dubs movies for children ; subtitles are enough for the rest. It is not a wonder to have very good English-speaking Danes when most of their TV speaks English. (It goes as far as endangering the Danish book industry: succesfull English or American books are read in English before the translated Danish version is available.)

In some Eastern Europe countries exit a cheap version of dubbing, with one or two actors reading translated text without synching the lips. They're used to it... Many Swiss people are probably accustomed to switching between their 3 or 4 official languages.

I can assure you that ALL foreign movies are dubbed in France, in the cinemas or on TV. Subtitles are not mainstream (this is laziness). But it's true that a rather big "cultural" alternative market exists for many people like me who prefer the original voices (with subtitles) and see it as a way to improve their English or German. It you want original content, you can have it (French-German TV broadcast TV channel, many free foreign TV channels through ADSL, cinemas in big cities).
On the other side, our educational system needs to seriously improve the way foreign languages are teached (even if the default is that most children between 10 and 14 must begin to learn 2 languages (mainly English+Spanish, sometimes German or Italian).

As for clinging to our language with zeal, it is resistance of a once-powerful country in face of the power of English - and the American influence in many ways and areas, which goes with it. In my mind, the real problem has more to do with the lack of bi/trilinguism than with protecting French (which won't disappear). And we won't make ourselves understood by speaking so badly foreign languages.
I'm astonished that so many countries accept so easily to throw all their own identity and use English (and only English) in so many areas: Scandinavian pop music, European Union internal communication, business relationships... I understand the practical reasons, but still...

Re:I do a wee bit better than that.

[Ethelred Unraed]

Ahem. That may be the case in Switzerland, but in my experience (having lived 13 years in Germany) the Germans are also by and large pretty monoglot themselves -- not as bad perhaps as the French, English and especially Americans, but it's not like you find that many people in Germany who speak more than a bit of a second language (usually English). Certainly a far lower proportion than in Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and so on.

It is partly because there just isn't that much interest in Germany in learning other languages -- movies, TV shows, etc. are all dubbed (usually poorly to middling), English-language original editions of books don't sell remotely as well as German translations (quite often rather inferior), and so on. Before multilingual DVDs came out, it was very hard to find English-language video cassettes, unless you lived in a major city like Hamburg or Berlin. It used to be that most major cities had perhaps one or two cinemas that did show movies in English, but even that's being scaled back -- the city where I live now shows more movies in Turkish and Russian than in English (because of all the immigrants).

In Switzerland, the Netherlands and so on, by contrast, movies generally are shown in the original language (albeit often with subtitles) and the culture is more encouraging towards learning another language. In four-official-language Switzerland it's a day-to-day necessity; in official-language-pretty-much-only-spoken-here Netherlands it's a commercial necessity, just to do business with the rest of the world.

I remember visiting Amsterdam once some years ago. My (German) wife and I were accosted by a panhandler, who addressed us in Dutch. I didn't catch what he said (I only speak a bit of Dutch) and asked my wife sotto voce if she caught what he said. He apparently thought I spoke French to her, so he switched to a stream of pretty fluent-sounding French. I turned back to him, and said "What?", and he switched to (quite good) English, and said "Can I have a bit of money? I want to buy some food." I asked him how many languages he spoke. Dutch, French, German and English, he said. Why doesn't he get a job as a translator, I asked. He shrugged and said everyone in Amsterdam speaks four languages. I figured he had a point, gave him a few guilders (I don't normally give panhandlers money, but what the hell, I gave him an A for effort), and went on.

Cheers,

Ethelred

Kuplah!

[Tablizer]

Kuplah!

Re:Related languages

[bladx]

"English and Japanese have nothing in common and therefore require far more learning, understanding and whatnot."

Actually... Japanese has many loan words... from Chinese, English and some other languages as well. That makes picking it up easier. The real difference (in my opinion at least,) that makes learning Japanese (from an English as a first language person's standpoint,) is learning to think in Japanese. It's a lot different and I find myself thinking more in Japanese than in English now.

Daniel_Tammet

[fredouil]

one week to learn icelandic, the most difficult language in the work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet impressive, insnt it

Re:Any language?

[Knutsi]

This will be guesswork on my behalf (not yet a doctor), but if I was to make an uneducated guess as to what causes this, i would suggest it is the constant increased level of activity in the brain of a multilingual person. It makes sence, that you have to engage larger patterns of knowledge when navigating between languages. If you learn a thing in one language, you also learn it in a second. If you know 10.000 words in two languages, I'm quite sure this accounts for quite a bit of added activity in the learning process, and is contsantly being stimulated by life around you. It should suggest that the more languages you know, the better the effect.

People claim that memorising a few things every day, such as learning a poem, keeps your mind kicking beyond the average age. I'm not sure this is a the actual case, but it is interesting.

(What the article fails to address is wether these people where speaking the language activly, or if they just knew it. I would take it there is a bit of a difference)

The patterns of a programming language is probably not being stimulated very much in your head as you move through the world, and I think it's scope is quite narrow. I'd doubt simply knowing one will have an effect, but maybe if you programme allot, the challenge of constructing systems and flows should be an interesting challenge for the mind, hopefully keeping it young (:

Stupid, ignorant, or fraud

[Futurepower(R)]

Title of the article: "Bilingualism Has Protective Effect In Delaying Onset Of Dementia By Four Years, Canadian Study Shows"

That's either stupid, ignorant, or deliberate deception. The study did not prove causality. It showed that two phenomena seemed to be related.

Here's a quote that says what was actually shown: "Our study found that speaking two languages throughout one's life appears to be associated with [my emphasis] a delay in the onset of symptoms of dementia by four years compared to those who speak one language,"...

It's common that editors try to get attention by claiming that scientific investigation is important than it really is. I don't know what happened in this instance, but it's difficult for me to believe that the editors of a medical journal would be so ignorant about science that they would not know they were mis-reporting it.

But you may only get to keep your native language

[joeflies]

I know this is only annecdotal, but my good friend works at Asian nursing home. They hire billigual people to help the elderly, because after the onset of dementia, many of the patients only remember their native tongue. Their children who were raised in the US without being trained in their parent's language often find themselves unable to communicate with their elderly parents.

What is a valuable skill?

[Savage-Rabbit]

Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck. ;-) You seem to value skills only if they result in a pay rise, this is a major mistake. You see... while snake charming might not get you an increase in pay it will significantly increase your chances of survival when it comes to dealing with management. This is true in any industry, not just IT and has been true for many millennia, which actually makes snake charming a most valuable skill.

"White folks are weird"?

[alienmole]

Plenty of European "white folks" speak at least two languages - often their home country's language and English, but also other regional languages. If you're going to go down the path of stereotyping everyone different from you (following a lot of white folk, btw), at least get it right: you're probably really mainly thinking of Americans and/or British white folk.

exercise delays decline?

[Kopretinka]

If you exercise, it's understandable that you'll be fitter longer. Bilingualism is to the brain like living in a hilly terrain to the legs. I'm dazzled that the scientists would be dazzled by a finding like this.

Language-related behaviour

[sinktank]

I am a lifelong bilingual (English/French), and I have quite distinct personality traits depending on the language I'm using. In English, I am reserved and polite whereas in French, I am more outgoing, brash and tend to swear more.

If I go out for an evening with Francophone friends, we drink wine, live to eat (expensive "fine" food), and talk about each other. If I go out with Anglophones, we drink beer, eat to live (cheap familiar food like pizza), and talk about current affairs. There are more jokes in English, but more sex and ribaldry in French.

It's a nice balance. I suspect if I only spent time with French folk, I'll eventually die of liver failure, whereas if I only spent time with Anglophones, I'll die of heart disease. I can't be bothered to check which is statistically likely to kill me first, but surely I'm hedging my risk between the two?

Re:SEND THE ILLIGAL MEXICANS HOME

[Joebert]

Wow, wait untill I tell Stacy she can get $600 a month just for being Bi.