alt Hacker NewsI am trilingual. All of my languages belong to different language groups; I regularly read and write in both directions. I use all of the three languages every day. I can also bulldoze my way through a text in a fourth language given a dictionary and a reference for its grammar. I can read the alphabet of a fifth language (mostly w/o understanding the sounds that I make, but I am told that I get it right).
I got there 15 years ago. I seem to be unable to learn anything new since.
Replies
crossroadsguy • yesterday at 4:31 PM
These researchers probably forgot to factor in the brain's disk size bottleneck. Maybe they will get there.
Good point about the different language groups. I wonder if there has been any research on measuring the scale of the effect by including some sort of distance metric between the languages. Let's imagine your primary language is Spanish: What's the gain if you learn Italian (Romance language) vs German (non-Romance Indo-European) vs Hungarian (non-Indo European same alphabet) vs Japanese (non-Indo European different alphabet)?