People regularly ask me what it’s like to speak many languages, how it has affected me concretely, how my mind is different for it. This is my attempt at an answer.
First off, since it’s also a common question: it is not easier to be creative. I have never been creative and never will be. Here are the 13 ways learning many languages has actually changed the way I think:
- It is easier to find A right word to describe something in *some* language, but not necessarily in the language your audience understands. Sometimes it’s just ordinary words that enter my brain in the wrong order, especially if I’ve been mixing languages too much. Sometimes it’s words like “convenient”, which are so convenient when you’ve learned them that it’s hard to get by without them / find other equivalents in foreign languages. Try going a day without using that word.
- In fact, I believe that learning more languages has led to me pausing / looking for words more often, because I start a sentence and later realize that it doesn’t quite work in this language because I’d need a word that doesn’t exist in this language or that would sound strange in this language. A simplified example is that it’s like starting to say “I’m hungry” and getting past “I’m” only to realize that the language doesn’t have a commonly-used word for “hungry” in this expression and having to backtrack and say “I have hunger” instead. Obviously it doesn’t happen with set expressions like this but with more complex sentences, or when I want to use a saying and find that there’s no equivalent.
- On the other hand, learning languages has certainly increased my vocabulary in each. I understand more than half the words on a SAT test without having seen them before because I understand the Latin or French or Greek root. “auriferous”, anyone?
- For the same reason, it’s also easier to learn more vocabulary. Even if I don’t recognize the word root straight out, the word probably sounds similar to some word in some other language I know (without being related in meaning), so that I can create a mnemonic.
- It is easier to use poetic / flowery expressions, because they are the natural way of expressing things in some language.
- It is easier to classify words (find hyponyms, hypernyms, antonyms, holonyms) because Esperanto words often make such relations obvious, so I’m used to mentally traversing word nets like that. I aced part of an IQ test because of this. This is mainly an advantage of learning Esperanto (language), other European languages won’t help, but learning Kiswahili (Swahili) or an agglutinating language to fluency may have the same effect.
- It is easier to understand your own language. Having access to an outside view means that you’ll find it easier to identify grammar or even to realize when you’re using a figurative expression, or to realize when you’re using difficult words. All English as a Foreign Language teachers should speak at least one foreign language fluently, in order to be able to help their students. Even if they learn a language that their students don’t speak.
- It is easier to remain rational. Read this article in Wired for details.
- It is easier to remain emotionally detached. Negative words don’t have their full impact when we hear them in a foreign language (which is why so many people love to learn foreign swearwords). Ulrich Matthias wrote a semi-autobiographic novel about his youth in Esperanto rather than his native German and he said it was because it was easier to detach himself from the memories this way. When the book became popular, he had someone else do the German translation rather than doing it himself. A more known example: “Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Hungary”, the autobiographical novel by George Soros’ father, was also originally written in Esperanto, and probably for the same reasons.
- It is easier to come up with safe passwords, because you have more languages to choose from, including special characters or numbers (numbers are commonly used to demark tones).
- It is harder to watch blockbuster movies because of all the ways movies misrepresent foreign languages or foreign language learning, making you want to shout at the screen.
- It is easier to acquire a taste for foreign movies and music. You start by watching/listening to stuff just because it’s in your target language. Maybe it’s a hidden gem that you immediately like, but even if it’s not, you’re tempted to keep at it “for language practise” and eventually you’ll grow to like it.
- It is easier to eavesdrop / harder to avoid it, because tourists speaking foreign languages on the subway often cannot conceive of the idea that someone might have studied their language, so they talk quite loudly.
Have you noticed any other changes? Comment below.