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Learning Another Language May Be One of the Best Ways to Keep Your Brain Healthy

23 pointsby 54m agotheconversation.com
8 comments
37m agoHN ↗

does this include programming languages which after all are a system of meaning?

13m agoHN ↗

probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)

I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin

similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain

10m agoHN ↗

Also wondering about instruments and learning to read sheet music.

18m agoHN ↗

I had a massive stroke. I should be in a wheelchair. I'm mostly fine now.

It's postulated that my multilingual abilities helped, among other things.

15m agoHN ↗

Before Covid I got my German B1 certificate. I was diligently going to German-speaking meetup twice a week.

One of the meetups had a bunch of googlers in it regularly. One of them was a loud gregarious Italian from the north. He was telling me a story about cleaning fish and chopping their heads off with a machete and how he cut the end of his finger off and had it reattached. He seemed nice but a little inept and lacking caution.

Covid was starting. In the newspapers it was reported that Zurich had its first case of Covid. They were cautious to not say who it was - no clues at all in the paper. But a friend at Google forwarded me an internal email that said no one at Google had it yet other than someone in the Zurich office who had just been in northern Italy.

I stopped going to the meetups. I really should start again but not sure what's going to happen next.

10m agoHN ↗

Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it's probably safe to go to a language meetup.

12m agoHN ↗

The biggest obstacle to learning a foreign language is that it's so much slower and more frustrating than using your native language, right? Compared to your native-language typing speed, even English typing speed is only half...

So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?

3m agoHN ↗

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

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

[1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it.