/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.11554315]

What cognitive benefits are there of learning a language?

[Anonymous No.11554323]

>>11554315
New reciprocal feedback pathways.

[Anonymous No.11554337]

>>11554323
Which helps with?

[Anonymous No.11554341]

There aren't. Learning a new language damages the brain.

[Anonymous No.11554343]

>>11554337
You may learn for example that in another language you could get what you want with less difficulty because as you learn the language you see the new success patterns that language would have had to take in order to be spoken in such a sequence or that certain events are easier access through how that culture formed that language.

[Anonymous No.11554398]

>>11554341
>American education

[Anonymous No.11554431]

>>11554343
>>11554323
>>11554315
I speak 6 languages. Some concepts exist solely in 1 language, or are absent from others.
The word "cheap" does not exist in french.
Some other concepts are more developed in certain languages. For instance there are two words, one feminine, one masculine, for all "supreme" concepts like God or the State in Albanian.
Albanian also has different words for all parents, lineage or "race" related positions depending if it's from the maternal or paternal side.
For instance, "fis" is your patrilineal lineage and "farë" (meaning seed) is your matrilineal lineage. Dajë is your mother"s brother while Xhaxha is your father's brother.
Some languages use extensive qualifications for their interactions. You can say "you" in 6 different ways, of 7 if you're from south America ("vos"), in spanish as opposed to only 1 in English.
I'd say the prime benefits are on social ability and verbal IQ. It's also better to read important litterature and philosophy / science in their original language, you grasp the concepts A LOT better.
If you plan on learning languages, you need 1 germanic, 1 latin, 1 slavic, 1 proto-euro (greek, albanian or armenian) and 1 indo-aryan, maybe 1 celtic if the latin one isnt french/spanish, to fully grasp on the broadly European language, including your own. Once you start drawing parallels between russian and french for instance, you're ready to read Tolstoï or Camus and fully comprehend their train of thought.

[Anonymous No.11554436]

>>11554431
>The word "cheap" does not exist in french.

sounds like a shit language then mate

[Anonymous No.11554440]

>>11554431
This information felt like the nuclear option.

Generally people don't require this much information to achieve recognizable results from a gradual change in their routine.

[Anonymous No.11554464]

>>11554431
Oh look, there are many ways to say cheap in French!
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=fr&text=cheap

[Anonymous No.11554478]

>>11554436
It stems from the fact money is really taboo in french culture. You can see it is because they have 10+ ways of saying money (blé, thune, flouze, monnaie, argent,...).
It was deemed vulgar to ask for "cheap" items so the word for it became obsolete.
I'd say french doesn't have that word because of being too "refined" rather than lacking.
Other concepts that exist in latin languages do not exist in English as well.
For instance "empêchement" in french of "impedimento" in spanish is the word meaning a reason "X", independant of your volunty, "impeached" you, or will "impeach" (it's a noun so you can use it as you please) you from attending a meeting, meeting someone, doing "Y" thing or being to "Z" place.
You can't express this concept by any noun or verb in English, which is why in contractual law you have trouble understanding "Force majeure" (also in a latin language btw), or why anglo-saxons take it much more personally if you're late.

[Anonymous No.11554484]

>>11554464
No word exists for the concept "cheap" in french. "Pas cher" = not expensive, "bon marché" = good trade, etc,..

[Anonymous No.11554517]

>>11554478
cual es el mejor idioma o el más útil según tu?

[Anonymous No.11554532]

>>11554315
none, unless they're dead languages and you're translating ancient texts

[Anonymous No.11554547]

>>11554517
El más completo de los idiomas que hablo sería el albanés, por su estructura, su riqueza (36 letras y 39 fonemas) y por su capacidad excepcional a funcionar en rimas cómo los idiomas antiguos cuando la información se transmitía oralmente. Por ejemplo, en albanés, puedes traducir perfectamente en rimas y respectando el contenido y la forma original de textos de idiomas muy variados, del épico de Gilgamesh y la Odisea a los poemas populares en escocés de Robert Burns ("'los dos perros", un poema de cientos de versos, es particularmente bien traducido en albanés por ejemplo).
El más útil sería el español porque es muy repartido y muy bien estructurado. Un madrileño podrá comunicar con un paisa de Medellín o con un negro de Guinea Ecuatorial perfectamente, mientras que un francés tendrá problemas para comunicar con un belgo o con un québécois. Creo que español será lingua franca en un futuro medio no lo sé.
El más elegante y rafinado sería el francés y el más rítmico e agradable a la oreja sería el italiano.
El más preciso sería el alemán o una lengua eslava.
El "mejor" no sé, depende de cómo lo defines, pero el mas exitoso en nuestros tiempos es el inglés así que de una forma es el mejor, no lo sé.

[Anonymous No.11554571]

>>11554547
>>11554478
>>11554431
Very interesting anon, gracias.

As a Spanish native speaker that also speaks English and French I have noticed many of the interesting differences you mention. Learning other languages certainly expands lateral thinking, there are so many unique words and concepts that exist in some languages but are harder to express in others... or even in between national or local dialects of the same language. For instance few non-Spanish speakers are aware of the vast differences in accents, slangs and the variety of different Spanish-speaking countries. Even when we understand each other sometimes it is difficult translating certain regionalisms or slang terms. Obviously this chasm becomes even greater when dealing between different languages or, particularly, languages from different language families.

[Anonymous No.11554605]

>>11554571
De nada chaval. Gracias por tu respuesta también.

Adding to that, not only it expands lateral thinking but if you learn 3-4 languages you start thinking more in concepts and less in words, which are very limiting.
I grew up with 3 languages so I never realised it, but apparently many people have an internal voice, as if as they think, they formulate words in their heads. Once you speak 3 or 4 languages, you no longer do that, and my take on this is that it should allow one to think faster, as the pace is no longer limited by words and syntax. It's also helpful for abstract thinking, as you no longer attach concepts to single words but rather to 3-4 or 5 different words somehow representing the concept in a cluster.

[Anonymous No.11554639]

>>11554315
You can have multiple inner voices engaging in racist discussions.

[Anonymous No.11554676]

> A question that I have thought about for a long time now is how different languages influence the psyche and thought patterns of their users. How much does the structure of the language effect general mood, ideologies, philosophical and logical thinking.

>>11552231

[Anonymous No.11554682]

>>11554676
Anglo-germanic languages make you more likely to be a pussy homo lmao.
>No gender words

[Anonymous No.11554685]

>>11554676
In west African languages they have the same word for woman, home, house and cooking.
Make of that what you want.

[Anonymous No.11555367]

>>11554315
A lot of the cognitive benefits seem to have been overstated. Working memory capacity is higher when learning a second language, but returns to baseline as competency is achieved. Basically, having to work hard to understand is good for the brain, which should apply for any strenuous cognitive task, but mastery leads to efficiency, which allows the brain to become lazy again.

[Anonymous No.11555414]

>>11554431
>Dajë is your mother's brother while Xhaxha is your father's brother
is it due to the turkish influence? at least the distinction between the paternal and maternal relative names? bc we have "dayı" and "amca" respectively and they both have turkic roots. "teyze" -> mother's sister, "hala" -> father's sister etc.

[Anonymous No.11555652]

>>11555414
I think it's from persian to begin with. The ottoman empire then spread them all over.
t.Lebanese

[Anonymous No.11556348]

>>11554431
Would you recommend learning Japanese or Mandarin?

[Anonymous No.11556442]

Interesting stuff posted in this thread, I like it.

What I'm getting from this: languages are each their own perspective on some sort of universal, psychological 'cache', so to speak. The more perspectives, the easier it is to access this 'cache' i.e. you have a better understanding of it.

[Anonymous No.11556461]

>>11554431
>The word "cheap" does not exist in french

i bet the chinese have like thirty different words for "cheap"

[Anonymous No.11556495]

>>11554547
>El más completo de los idiomas que hablo sería el albanés
LMAO OH NO NO NO NO shut it balkan fag

[Anonymous No.11556500]

>>11554517
The greatest language of all time is Greek.
>>11554547
Silence, retard.

[Anonymous No.11556501]

>>11554315
Denser connection to root of vocabulary among humans, therefore less autism in your discourse.

[Anonymous No.11556523]

>>11554431
Estas totalmente equivocado, en el español latinoamericano solo hay 3 tu (you)

tu
vos
usted

en colombia y argentina/uruguay se usan los 3, en el resto de hispanoamerica solo usted y tu.

[Anonymous No.11556566]

>>11556523
Nunca escuche a nadie usar tu en argentina solo extranjeros, pero si usted cordialmente en forma de respeto aunque poco y el vos para cualquiera, creo que eso deberia ser al revés.

[Anonymous No.11556573]

>>11554431
>Once you start drawing parallels between russian and french for instance, you're ready to read Tolstoï or Camus and fully comprehend their train of thought.
peak pseud

[Anonymous No.11556630]

>>11554341
Did English lessons damaged your brain ?

[Anonymous No.11556671]

>>11554315
I have block on learning spanish because I was forced to wear pajamas against my will. It also accounts for me being mostly asocial nowadays.

[Anonymous No.11556837]

>>11554685
That isn't true.

[Anonymous No.11556846]

>>11554478
>why anglo-saxons take it much more personally if you're late.

They hate it because being late is a pain in the ass to the people who have to wait on you.

[Anonymous No.11556854]

>>11554484
Pas cher fits that because it's easy to say ti quickly. It's 2 words but can be said as one.

Bon marché also fits. One can say it's "
taboo" but a lot of language speculations are just guesses.

[Anonymous No.11556857]

>>11554685
>west African languages
Which ones cuz there's hundreds.

[Anonymous No.11557015]

>>11556500
You didn't understand my post because you most likely don't speak spanish.
I said the most complete language I KNOW. I don't speak greek, and I still recommended learning one of the three ancient proto-euro languages, which are greek, albanian and armenian. Those three are isolates in the indo-european languages and retain a lot of archaic traits.
>>11556495
What languages do you speak and how familiar are you with what is and what isn't a slavic language ?

[Anonymous No.11557028]

Y'all should learn Arabic, Farsi, Pashto or Urdu. The challenge is immense and very few people can do it.

[Anonymous No.11557033]

>>11557028
Aren't Farsi, pashto and urdu indo-aryan? Making the difficulty lesser for european language speakers?

[Anonymous No.11557043]

How much distance would one need to have in order to identify a language and their participation or usage patterns of it?

[Anonymous No.11557055]

>>11554431
Those are some cool fun facts, but how exactly does not being able to express the concept of cheapness, having a word for uncle on your fathers side instead of just saying "uncle on my fathers side", and being able to address another person with six different variations of "you" when one is obviously sufficient? Your post says nothing about how knowing other languages has cognitive benefits, it just lists some interesting quirks of other languages.
There's no such thing as a concept that can only be expressed in one language, just languages that take more words to express that concept.
>>11556348
Japanese is a shit-tier language that ignores a their perfectly good 46 character syllabary for a fucking logographic mess and has a grammatical structure devised by coked-up children. Avoid it. Do Mandarin instead, at least China is a world power and will probably still be relevant 10 years from now.

[Anonymous No.11557058]

>>11557055
I'm retarded, should say "sufficient, have any benefits?" at the end of the first sentence

[Anonymous No.11557068]

>>11555367
you are correct

>Basically, having to work hard to understand is good for the brain, which should apply for any strenuous cognitive task

this is why many recomend learning a new languge as a good excercise when you get old.

just reading books doesn't work, you need to put "strain" in those brain cells... learning math or physics or even mechanics (because you'll need to make an active efford to visualice mechanism)

[Anonymous No.11557117]

>>11554315
languages actually let you talk to others that you couldn't usually talk to.

[Anonymous No.11557120]

>>11557117
There must be some sort of hard-coded human brain loop that focuses on a given moment and generates abstractions or possibilities.

[Anonymous No.11557121]

[Anonymous No.11557123]

>>11554315
No. In fact, it's a big handicap. The more your brain has to index/sort through, the slower it becomes.

[Anonymous No.11557159]

>>11557055
Two reasons.
1- Verbal IQ obviously
2- Your thought process uses words for concepts, the more words = the more concepts you can grasp.
A more obvious example would be colors.
In italian and french they have a word "azur" or "azzuro" which is related to blue. But in french azur = deep blue while light blue is called sky blue (bleu ciel). In italian blu = blue and azzuro = sky blue.
So french people can identify 3 different shades of blue by a distinct word while italians can only do so for 2.
It's a lot more in fact because the french also have turquoise etc.
It seems silly un terms of only blue but some languages lack a term for "magenta" or "violet" while others have several terms for green etc.
It all boils down to the fact our reality is subjetive and a semblance of objectivity is achieved by social consensus, provided for by a language. The richer a language is, the wider is your perceived reality. Since different languages extended in different areas, primarly due to their environment (latin countries have more words for blue because of the sea, albanian or south slavic languages have more words for green because of their lushy forêts), learning more languages gives you access to grasping on more concepts.
You could of course bypass that by inventing your own language and words instead but you need to be super autistic to do that.

[Anonymous No.11557178]

>>11557123
That would be true if you mixed all the languages or provide a translation everytime you speak, which is not thé way it works.
Sounds like cope to me.
https://www.dana.org/article/the-cognitive-benefits-of-being-bilingual/

[Anonymous No.11557202]

>>11557123
Zomg modular sort search, you just climbing modular tree with paralelization that each neuron is like individual computing unit and matter is composed of sequences they fire...

Litreally it's like getting sparse file from ssd.

It works pretty damn fast until you have more sectors flawed...

Also they are redundant, but obviously redundant parts can have own problems too...

If you do that manually I don't really want your situation,

I cannot learn languages but I remember few phrases I could actually use sometimes....

Your brain won't learn stuff until it has subjects of information in some usecase in it's imagination...

If you cannot imagine how to form a memory you cannot really create it, but once you can you shouldn't have problem with some sorting...

It fires at once and most excited layer or least is information you get.

[Anonymous No.11557274]

>>11557202
Modulo cascade process event in progress.

Network propagation validated.

Welcome to Single Language User.

[Anonymous No.11557291]

>>11557159
>the more words = the more concepts you can grasp
This isn't true though, just because a concept isn't expressed in one word doesn't mean it can't be grasped. The French word "poubelle" refers to what would, in English, be called a "trash can". It's not one word in English, but the concept can still be expressed just as easily. It's not like English speakers couldn't comprehend the existence of a trash can just because it takes two words to do it, and there's literally no benefits to using"poubelle" over "trash can" unless you're in a situation where you need to speak French anyways. Same thing with the shades of blue example, any shade of blue that can be described in French can be described in English, even if it takes two words instead of one. The distinction between the individual words is meaningless anyways, because the phrase it's contained in is what's actually relevant to convey an idea.
Like I said before, there's no such thing as a concept that can only be expressed in some languages, just languages that take more words to express that concept.

[Anonymous No.11557295]

>>11557274
get color value do (color value)^2 in frame and call it colour enchancing AI...

Donate profit on some alternative computing platforms research.

...

[Anonymous No.11557299]

>>11557295
All profits redirected to production and requirement satisfaction of services and goods that can be extended and applied to each individual human.

[Anonymous No.11557329]

>>11557291
There is no downside if you actively try to grasp the idea, but there is if you passively do so. A frenchman and an italian casually calling X and Y colors bleu and azur or blu and blu implies a loss of information.
Again, it's an over-simplifying exemple, but it happens at much greater scales very very often with syntax, formulations, tenses, and so on.
The trash can is a bad example, because it represents the concept fairly, meanwhile "duende" (spanish) or "commuovere" (italian) can't be traduced in english except by approximation.
A much better exemple would be the two tenses the spanish uses for "be", "ser" or "estar".
"Ser" means something you "are" that is constant while "estar" means something you "are" but transitory. For instance you "eres" american, a male, blond etc but you "estas" in the USA, studying, etc.. But where does age description fit in spanish? It's not either one, you "are" not X age in spanish, you "have" (tener) X age.
There are countless other, more difficult to explain, exemples, but knowing spanish already gives you an implicit knowledge / awareness on different aspects of "being" and a different conception of the aging process by viewing it as an accumulation of past intervals proper to yourself rather than a descriptive form of "being" of X millesime.

[Anonymous No.11557357]

>>11554315
Still better than when somebody just says that we multiply epsilon by sigma, because it's easy to say but not a lot of words to grasp.

More synapses being activated in a text, easier it is to remember.

[Anonymous No.11557395]

>>11557028

> y-you a DLI fag, by any chance? Asking for a friend

[Anonymous No.11557411]

>>11557329

I get what you're trying to say, but I really don't think it's true. Words are helpful tools, but we definitely don't think in words. Consciously we sometimes do, but so much of the back-processing, or if you're in a meditative state, or if you're severely autistic, or if you're making split decisions, or if you're "in the zone," is wordless. We just feel it. I suppose different languages can crystallize a concept, such as shaudenfraude (sp too tired to look up fuck german), but any language can just either adopt another language's word (like english) or just make up their own. I fail to see how playing word games in another language truly provides cognitive benefits that are so nontrivial that they outweigh the bullshit amount of time needed to learn another language. That's another problem too. Maybe it helps, but a lot of other things help too. Why learn a language when you could join a debate team or compete in chess tournaments?

[Anonymous No.11557505]

>>11557411
Most people DO think in words in their mind, look it up, I found it weird when I learned that but we are an exception.
>Why?
Because it offers the same advantages in the cognitive area as those activities you listed, takes roughly the same amount of time if you do it right and it gives you many many more advantages in the social and humanities area such as :
-greater aura in society, people look up to and respect more people that are fluent in more than one language
-you can discover and truly enjoy more countries rather than being a stupid clueless tourist
-you hace access to more litterature, cinema, philosophy, poetry,..
-you can more easily bond with people if you talk their language, and gain their trust, for all purposes from sex, friendship, trade,..
-its cool as fuck speaking other languages, being able to read Dante in italian, understand the original puns of Molière in french or of Cervantès in spanish, etc..
-its a powerful gatekeeping method to speak X language with an interlocutor in a region where people speak Y without looking suspicious or drawing attention. I'd sometimes switch to speaking italian with my Italian friend in Vienna even though we both speak german and we share no common mother tongue. It was useful to share confidential information like "is your X friend single" or "is X professor right or left leaning". This allows you to not waste time on a married girl or sound too right/left wing to an old fart who has your grades and future in his hands.

[Anonymous No.11557887]

>>11557178
>which is not thé way it works.

Dumb frog detected. Opinion discarded.

[Anonymous No.11557898]

>>11557178
All that article says is that bilingual people use more of their brain for simple tasks. Sounds like a handicap to me.

[Anonymous No.11557919]

>>11557887
>>11557898
Howdy ho fat amigos ! :-D