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Speaking a Second Language May Change How You See the World
sciencehabit writes: Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question in German. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Speakers of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences, influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study (abstract). The work also finds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be more flexible.
This just in, studying different cultures changes your outlook on life. Seriously? You might as well say learning changes how you see the world.
There's an entire branch of research into the subject of language, culture, and perspective. You might want to do some reading before crowing that you discovered something "new".
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I would have to suppose.
I was just about to post that.
So, instead, I guess I will have to say "it is a good day to die".
... weiß nichts von seiner eigenen."
That's a saying in German attributed to Goethe, which means, "he who can't speak another language knows nothing about his own."
And another proverb, either Czech or Tamil in origin (or even from the mouth of Charlemagne): "Mit jeder neu erlernten Sprache erwirbst du eine neue Seele" -- "every time you learn a new language, you get another soul."
Speakers of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences
The important part here is how it is understood. A native English speaker who is also fluent in German will catch intonation and emphasis differences, and may conclude that the Germans don't express the same way an American does. But how a native German understands the same phrase will remain a complete (unknown) mistery for the native English speaker. Often the problem is the translation - even sometimes in professional translations, in books for instance. The difficulty being to find out how "sticky" must be the translation of a phrase from A to B. Basically - and very few if any people can - an interpreter has to go deep into his/her feelings to transcribe not a text, but a raw feeling.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The old saying goes: the more languages you know the more human you are. Why stop at two languages? I like a set of at least 5 personally, preferably 7. Wonder what that does to perception of the reality.
You can't handle the truth.
"To know another language is to have a second soul."
.: Semper Absurda
Does the study use p values?
The language shapes how you think about a problem.
If only because of the enhanced cultural exchanges, and expanded possibilities for travel!
It's just a pity that the world's de-facto common language (English) is so hard to learn well... still glad I managed to master it, if only as second language (out of four) for me.
My native language (born and raised) is French, I was born and live in Quebec, a (mostly) french speaking province (altough living in Montreal pretty much requires speaking english and soon arabic). My mom plugged me in front of Sesame Street as soon as I could speak, I was involved in a language exchange with an english-only speaking family at 15 in Woodstock, Ontario, Learned english at high school and went to work for an ISP in 1994 (mostly english speaking customers). Dated an english-only supervisor when Videotron went into a lockout, some of my girl friends only spoke english, Tried to learn Spanish while in CEGEP.
My younger sister was a little more fortunate as she went to an english-only immersion school where everything including geography, history and mathematics were done only in english. (and she speaks it way better than I do, she has *no accent whatsoever* )
One of my "she's a girl and my friend but not my girlfriend" is teaching me Ukrainian and Russian, but I'm pretty sure it's gonna get me nowhere unless I move to Russia or Ukraine or want to visit Tchernobyl as she's currently doing...
Even If I'm french speaking, all my OS's and devices are configured for English just because they're aren't any translation mistakes.
(If I made any syntax or any other errors, keep in mind my primary language is french)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I knew my Klingon would do me good
Table-ized A.I.
A lot of Americans have some sort of awe for people who can speak two languages. My experience? Who cares! Speaking another language means...you can speak another language. It says nothing about your character, worldliness, sophistication, or other characteristics commonly attributed by Americans to bilingual people.
I used to interview people whose sole qualification for the job was that they could speak English. Well, what else have you got? Yeah, exactly. I have also seen the reverse, Americans who show up speaking the local language and expect to be employed immediately. Uh-huh, it doesn't work like that. You should hear the butthurt, too, these people spent years learning, planning on living the rest of their lives abroad, and they neglected to learn any marketable skills.
One of the worst pieces of human trash I ever met was a Swiss who spoke seven languages. You know what? Who cares! Language ability has absolutely nothing to do with what kind of person you are. It just means you can speak another language. Yay, I guess. A skill increasingly irrelevant as Google Translate marches on. In another 5-10 years there will be immediate simultaneous translation, and there will be even less need to learn other languages. This makes me sad because I myself spent an enormous amount of time studying, and GT will likely do a better job expressing my thoughts than I ever could with my old-fashioned biological brain.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. - Edsger Dijkstra
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. - Edsger Dijkstra
Can we turn this around and say, "ability to think in multiple perspectives is important to successfully learn a new language"? There are many for whom learning a second langauge is very difficult while some others pickup a new one easily. Would this theory explain that problem?
Hasn't this been common knowledge for decades or centuries? It's the primary reason they teach some languages. Ie, no one learns Latin because it helps them communicate with native Latin speakers, and most of the students of Latin will not be perusing the classics as light reading (though the Latin version of Asterix is good), but they teach it because it affects how the students think.
Definitely I was told by more than one person growing up that learning a second language changes how you think about the world. So I can only presume that this new study is not breaking any ground and is just a bit more evidence to pile onto the mountain of evidence.
Breaking news! Slashdot editor discovers the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, adopts it as true and immediately begins passing it off as revelatory!
I have often wondered if the reason that England led the industrial revolution was the use of the English language. There were also cultural issues (a culture of meetings that enabled exchange of ideas), but perhaps there is something about the English language that allows people to think about, discuss and solve problems in a manner that is more effective than some continental languages.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I always found that funny. I learned Apple Basic because it was all that I had access to. I started writing my own functions, a global return array to track back through and some gotos...just like assembly which I hadn't learned then. I also found myself trying to make objects, by camel case iff needed. $ObjectName and ObjectNumber.
Moved to C++ and everything was fine. Functional programming, not so much, but that's from all the professors who drilled "variables are variable" into my head years later.
Would have expected this to be already extensively studied. C'mon humanities there must be already some linguistic research on this?
Being fluent in English and German I know exactly what this refers to, in fact it is so glaringly obvious that it simply must have been studied before now.
The first time I really became aware of this is when doing product management in a role that required me to sometimes position products in English and sometimes German. I was startled how much easier marketing spin works in English.
I always like to create a kind of pseudo-code that fits the problem at hand, and then work backward to turn that sub-language into the base language, be it C# or Python or whatnot.
In other words, brainstorm about which notation and/or command set (API) best fits the domain or problem area without letting the syntax of the base language get in the way. The rest is mostly implementation detail. Sometimes OOP is the best fit, sometimes optional named parameters, sometimes database tables of commands and attributes, etc. (Certain languages do, however, make certain of these choices easier than others. Often it's a trade-off.)
I prefer to shape the "language" (to fit) rather than the other way around. Of course, like anything else, one can get carried away and over-engineer a sub-language. Keep it a light layer.
Spoken languages can kind of be viewed the same way. Languages that are vowel-centric tend to be better for singing and operas, for example. Latin is a good fit for science because it's a dead language, making it a stable naming platform. German is a great language for cussing in because it has a lot of sharp consonants and guttural sounds. (Somehow, I doubt Hitler would have sounded so ominous in French.)
Table-ized A.I.
I noticed that after about 4 years of learning English in school (30 years ago) and then again when learning French. I though this was a well-known effect and that there was really no need for any research.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Most of the Euro languages are just small variations of each other. Even the Romance/Germanic divide is basically just learning a bunch of new words for the same thing.
Personally, I feel like I am the same exact person if I'm speaking Chinese or if I'm speaking English, and those two languages are actually different.
this is just obvious to anyone who is fluent in multiple languages. speech follows thought. oftentimes you find it difficult to quickly switch to a different language just because you need to think in a different way than you did two seconds before.
I'm Norwegian which meant that I had to learn the two main Norwegian languages (bokmål and nynorsk, used to be about 30% overlap, it is larger now) and English. Those are ones I'm currently fluent in. I also had four years of German and two years of French, plus a single year of Old Norse (i.e. Icelandic).
The interesting part here is that the list above was the absolute minimum I could get away with, since I knew very early that wanted to get a technical degree (MSEE from NTNU in Trondheim).
Fluency in any language requires thinking in that language, this is so obvious that only mono-lingual people could possibly doubt it!
Thinking about stuff you have no way to express in language is extremely hard. :-)
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
mathematics?
These might be viewed as even more strange than those for whom it is a 2nd/3rd/... language.
There are two ways to speak a non native language : translate every sentence in your head and run into the problem you indicate, or master it without constantly translating and your way of thinking will be sooner or later the same as a native. Once you start dreaming, thinking, in the other language, chance is that you are actually using very similar or even identical structure as the locals. Language is no hexenkunst.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Speaking language is the programming language of our brains, that is what complex logic and reasoning is built upon.
I can definitively corroborate all the effort it took to master the grammar of the second language helped me being more conscious of what I say in my native language.
I thought this was common knowledge, or maybe the study is confirming what was long suspected?
Germans have a reputation for being precise, their language is very precise, so it would seem to follow that if one is 'thinking in german' one has to think at a level of precision which far exceeds, say, chinese, which as a spoken language is very simple (tonal complications notwithstanding). Then again written chinese has immense potential for deep poetic meaning due to the recurring use of similar tones and similar partial-characters, which phonetically-written or alphabet-written languages simply cannot have.
Japanese is built with less precision in specification but a minefield when it comes to respect levels. In Japanese you have to *think* in a manner that respects your view of everyone's relationship to each other in terms of seniority, superiority, deference, familiarity etc.
amirite?
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Latin on monuments often uses so many abbreviations it's like a different dialect.
Perhaps stonemasons used to charge by the letter.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The article seems to suggest speaking more than one language is something 'special', as if compulsory education somehow never happened. For more than a century, almost everyone in reasonably developed countries has been to school. Very few people have never learnt a second language.
I speak 3 languages and I think the world is generally shit. Maybe if I unlearn one of the languages I'll have a "best" world view. I'm thinking it has something to do with odd and even numbers. Odd number = oh everything is shit. Even number = flowers and unicorns.
I didn't read the article. I just came here to make pointless satire.
I'm Spanish native and now in my thirties moved to an English country. I can't complete crosswords in any of these. Knowing words by their definition is hard.
True. As an American, I love teaming with German and Japanese engineers. Brilliantly educated, and bringing a different style of pragmatic problem-solving to the project.
I'm a Finn. The wife is Russian. Together we speak English. Our children will be trilingual from the start :)
It's true that Mandarin has no "No", but they use a "negative Yes" as a "No"
"Yes" in Mandarin is "Shi" (sorry can display the Mandarin character in /. because of the ancient construct of this site)
The "No" in Mandarin is "Bu Shi" - in which the adjective "Bu" denotes something that is 'negative', and added to "Shi", the whole thing "Bu Shi" means "No"
In Luxembourg, from the first years in school on, we learn french and german.
And additionally learn the local Luxembourgish.
Later, english is added.
So everybody is trilingual, but often from parents there are 1 or 2 other languages added.
And learning 5 languages as a kid is in fact no problem at all.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
I'm quadrilingual, so I must be the thief.
"On the Way to Language" anyone?
English is not my first tongue but is the only language I am fluent in - it is most certainly my mothers tongue. I left my father's land when I was young and him behind too. The brain is good at forgetting things that are no longer useful. I have since begun learning my original native tongue again, and while my fluency is poor, it "grows".
In conversation with my mother, I described how there were still embers of the first tongue within me, and how I was stoking those and it was becoming a weak flame. One evening I found myself suddenly thinking in the language again and able to form sentences, however imperfect, on the fly. I described to her how it was as if I had two inner "mes", that while the same person, were slightly different in perspective. I of course feel dumb in the first language - it is less mastered than the age I was when I began to only speak English. I also feel that to gain the same level of education as I have in English, I will essentially have to redo most of the subjects. Fortunately Kahn academy is translated.
I did some basic geometry in the first language on Kahn academy. It was a formula I don't even remember having encountered. It taught me a few geometric words I picked up by immersion but also successfully taught me something I never remember learning at school in English.
Interestingly, I have always been aware that in the areas of transition between green and yellow as well as yellow, orange and red I tend to come to view these differently to my peers in this country. I have good vision and do not suffer from colour blindness. I consider my perspective more accurate. I will now have to really restudy the colours in both languages to see if this could where this comes from.
Reggie Watts is comedic musician who frequently uses influences from multiple languages and I believe speaks at least four. The things he says are frequently nonsensical yet at the same time profound. He has been on multiple TED talks, is easily findable on Youtube and discusses subject matter to do with the sciences, even if it's kind of as a joke. He may be of interest to anyone wanting to see multilingual foolery.
I wish I could be that silly all the time and get paid for it.
Hopefully in the next year I can begin learning my third language. There are six languages I hope to be familiar with by the time I die.
There are indeed many mysteries to be found about human psychology. It is like an endless domain of research.
I mean, nice to see a study confirming "stuff we already know", but not only has this discussion been done to death in academic circles, it's been such a hot topic it was used as the basis for the Jack Vance story "The Languages of Pao" and a mainstay of the A.E. van Vogt stories, most notably the Null-A novels.
And that is even without going into other literature where this was a hot topic about 80 years ago...
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
This happened to me. I realize people will think this is goofy, but here it is anyway.
In US English, many people say "No thank you" in a way which sounds like "I don't thank you even though you offered nicely." In Spanish they say "Gracias, pero no." or "Thank you, but no.". That's far more polite than "No thanks".
I try to remember this and thank people who offer me things even if I don't accept.
is "this is America, speak American."
Spanish sounds lighthearted
That depends. Latin American Spanish sounds quite friendly, but Spanish Spanish sounds like a Chicago Typewriter. I would not call that "lighthearted".
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Jack Vance's "The Languages of Pao", written in 1958, is based on this idea. The planet was transformed by segregating the population, teaching each a different language, with the previous world-language relegated to secondary status, to encourage a different world view and thus enable multiple goals to be obtains. The warriors had their own language (e.g. friend meant "battle companion"). The scientists another and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Languages_of_Pao
"English is a terrible language to convey ideas in."
Really?
The vast majority of the world's most precise information (scientific, etc.) is conveyed to the world in English. English is certainly up to the job. One thing that makes English different than perhaps the other languages you are thinking of as more precise is that English is an *analytic* language as opposed to a *synthetic* language, meaning that rather than have different word endings to convey all sorts of meaning, English uses prepositions and phrases instead. You might think that English thus doesn't have as much "built-in" functionality to describe meaning, making it not as expressive, relying on tacking on phrases to get the point across. Really, this is no different than a small, core programming language with a large library versus a programming language where all functionality is part of the core syntax. I have found that what truly results in a language being capable of precision is having an educated populace who speaks it, moreso than the base features of the language itself. One can speak really crummy, loose English, or precise English. Education makes the difference.
Breathing allows a person to see the world.
Where did the thief go ? to New Orleans
How did he get away ? he walked to the bus stop and boarded a bus
Instead of "You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question in German" it should have said "Asked you in German the question might you a more accurate answer get..."
The only place where Captain Obvious is a super hero.
Enough said ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is actually one of the main benefits of Esperanto, a regular, constructed language that's much easier to learn than a "national" language.
Students who first study Esperanto and then go on to study another language learn the second language better than those who studied only the second language -- even if they had less time to learn it.
The science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto
Tom Geller
Have gnu, will travel.
$ObjectName and ObjectNumber.
When I was learning BASIC, AppleSoft BASIC only had two letters of significance in variable names... this was Apple ][e...
From there I moved on to C and Assembly from there. After I learned Assembly, everything just kind of made sense, because I could tear apart everything in assembly in my head, and know what it was doing. I stuck with C all the way until my professional career which started me in Perl, and then just recently Go.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
"The planet Pao has a stagnant culture. Scientists of the neighboring world Breakness launch a ruthless experiment, jarring Pao into new vitality by installing three class-languages; one for a warrior class, one for technicians, and one for merchants. But their formula contains weaknesses of their own degenerate culture. Beran Panasper- heir to the throne of Pao- has been spirited away to Breakness to be trained as a tool for later subjugation of Pao. But he still has a mind of his own, and his Paonian characteristics will blend with Breakness science in an unexpected way!"
Perl Programmer for hire
Just a tiny introduction to French really cues one in to the difference in thought processes. An American asks "How are you?" inquiring into the state of being of a person when they meet. The French ask "How are you going?" . The French greeting is more inclusive and in part reflects a historical sense to the greeting. Picture a time in which people walked a lot more than they do now. The greeting may be in response to knee, foot, hip or ankle issues or even to the mode of motion such as by car, by boat, by bicycle or whatever. Obviously no English speaking person can self evaluate their state of being making "How are you?" a question about how you feel about the moment. Further the expected reply is that you are fine. We do not normally expect a reply that "I am lousy. My feet hurt. My wife has cancer and my son has gone gay and my car is broken". In essence the English greeting is foolish and very narrow in meaning whereas the French greeting asks a more fluid and meaningful question. As far as German goes I find it a rather crude and rude language. German has a twisted grammar. "Make you please the window open." is simply not an elegant nor efficient way to ask someone to open the window.
Not likely to have been Charlemagne, though I can imagine people attributing it to him. Charlemagne managed to pick up some spoken Latin and a little Greek, but he wasn't fluent in anything but Frankish and could barely read or write a complete sentence in any language. Nevertheless he was a famous promoter of education who founded monastic schools and one at his court, and took an interest in the practical aspects of scholarship and teaching (and religion, which was more or less the same thing): the collecting and copying of books (in a new, standardized script that was easier to read and write), the standardization of prayers, etc. Charlemagne was responsible for a big revival in the teaching of Latin, which was already distinct from everyday forms, of, say, Italian, and definitely a "new language" if you came from a Germanic background. But that's about where it stopped. Devoted scholars could go on to learn some Greek, but "every time you learn a new language" just didn't apply in those days. (In the secular world, there was always a bit of trade and intermarriage between neighboring ethnic groups, but those involved had to do their best through immersion and maybe some tutoring (or fall back on Latin if they knew it) - there were no codices titled "teach yourself Lombard in 90 days".)
You are focusing way too much on the literal words in each expression. It is an *idiomatic expression*. This means that the meaning of the entire message is different than that of its individual components put together. The meaning assigned to that idiom is agreed upon by the culture that uses it. For example: if someone asks you in English, "What's up?", they certainly are not asking you what is above your head. They are asking what is happening, what is the "news". And even more than that, it's a friendly greeting where you are not expected to actually relate what is going on. It's an *idiom* and makes sense only as a *complete unit*.
I formally divorced TRS-80 Level II BASIC by writing something along the lines of the following code snippet:
for i = 1 to 5
gosub basic_sucks
if (i==4) return;
basic_sucks:
next;
I'm not going to wrack my brains to make this into a working example of obfuscated code, but it definitely was possible to mis-nest the loop and call stacks in this way, without the code generating any run-time notifications.
BASIC did me no damage at all, because I consciously filed formal divorced papers, rather than letting my further education accomplish the same by slow attrition.
One can do the same with English without actually learning German or Chinese. One's native state of mind has a lot to do with it.
The idea that language forms our whole vision of the world is just nonsense. If the English-only speaker was asked, :What is the goal of the walker?" would he say he had no idea, because his language didn't let him think of such things?
The fact is that every linguistic thought rests on the top of a ten-mile-high pyramid of unspoken understandings. Where these researchers are going wrong is in assuming all understanding comes from language. But when I walk down the street, every face looks different, even though I have a highly-inadequate set of words for describing faces. And I can recognize, say, Ronald Reagan's voice, even though I could not describe it well enough for someone to imagine it accurately in their mind.
Pre-linguistic infants cognize a great deal about the world, and so do animals. And a great deal of this is universal across cultures, and even species. People opposes this well-established fact partly because they are cartesian dualists, believing the mind occupies a non-material realm outside the world, and partly for political motivations, like trying to preserve non-western cultures, and overthrowing democracy and capitalism. But scientifically speaking, it is simply nonsense.
Why when somebody tells me some word does not exists, they do not check for themselves ?
https://www.google.de/search?q...
It is not as if using google was hexenkunst...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org