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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2603 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 17, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is learning new languages actually worth it for adults?

I have met people who have lived in a country for years, are intelligent and have studied hard. Yet they are far from a native speaker. Those who haven't spoken their new language for years seem to lose it. Is picking up French/German/Spanish worth it? It seems like an enormous investment to develop worse language skills than the average native 12-year-old. Even when it comes to enjoying the culture in the native language, I am not even sure it would be the case. A person who learned latin and read Caesar's memoirs in the original latin would probably get less out of it due to their lacking latin than reading a translated copy.

I studied a language for 6 years in school. Along with everyone I know who hasn't studied their extra language extensively post school I can barely write a paragraph in it. Was it a giant waste of time to have Spanish or French an hour a week for 6 years when the results are lacking?

If learning a language meant learning it to the point of fluency or near native ability, I could see the point. However, most learners seem to spend countless hours learning without being able to have a conversation that doesn't require effort from both parties.

I'll use French as an example because I started learning it a few years ago in my 20s and currently speak pretty good French.

The time you spend learning a language doesn't have to be a pure sunk cost. You can go to language learning meetups where you'll make friends and have fun socializing in French. You can find girls on dating apps who speak French and practice with them as a way to flirt and build a rapport. You can watch/listen to stuff in French and learn about other topics as you learn French. You can meet lots of interesting people on platforms like iTalki. There are many ways to practice besides just grinding Duolingo.

I don't think it's worth it. You already know the most common global language, and quite a few people in every country speaks it. You'll gain the ability to talk to tens of millions more French people - how valuable is this, when there are a billion english speakers you could talk to now but don't? Language learning is more like a hobby than anything else.

Also, we have to be under a decade out, from a fully functional babelfish live audio translation tool, which would obviate most of the practical utility. All of the pieces are there. I think current implementations still have significant latency problems, but latency is something a few more generations of chips and product development solve.

I'd say there's a second question implicit in your first. Is learning a language worth it given the time investment and poor results, and why are languages taught so poorly that even a great time investment produces such poor results?

It really shouldn't take 6 years of high school plus 4 of college to learn a Latin/Germanic language. I've known people who did it in a year through self-study while working. The 'extensive study post school' can be done without having covered it in school in the first place, and at that point it's not so extensive.

I guess you're really asking two questions there, is it possible and, if possible, is it worth it?

The answer to the first question is absolutely yes in my view. It is possible for adults to acquire (not learn) a language to a native level. The problem is that language education is fundamentally broken. You cannot 'learn' a language by studying the linguistics of the language, you have to just expose yourself to the language and let your subconscious do the rest. I've been acquiring Spanish through comprehensible input for a few months now, and my understanding has just skyrocketed. I've found myself dreaming in Spanish, I've had random phrases pop into my head. It's pretty incredible to experience, and it is genuinely fun to feel this kind of improvement. It's like noob gains at the gym.

But you do need to put in the hours. The website I'm using estimates that it takes around 1,500 hours of comprehensible input for an English-speaker to reach native level fluency. Half that for someone who speaks a Romance language, double it for a non-European language like Japanese. It's possible to do it with one hour a day, but it'll take years. The good thing is, the further along the process you are, the easier it is to get input. Once you're at a level where you can read Harry Potter or watch How I Met Your Mother in your target language and mostly understand it, you can just replace your English media consumption with the target language.

Is it worth it though?

For me it is, I want to be truly bilingual and I want to give my kids a second language too. I want to be able to speak to the Spanish people I know in their mother tongue. I want to be able to visit Spain or Latin America and communicate effortlessly with the locals. I want to gain the cognitive benefits of bilingualism (if they do exist). Whether it's worth it for you depends on what you're looking to get out of it.

Unless you're in a country where the vast majority don't speak English, it probably isn't worth it.

And that's leaving aside that we're right on the cusp of ubiquitous, seamless real-time translation for pretty much any language, so the marginal benefit of learning another better than a decent ML model can explain it to you is going to be slim if existant at all. The technology exists, as do proof of concepts, there simply isn't a convenient packaging for it. You still get most of the way with Google translate on a phone. But something like GPT-4 can explain the nuances that a more basic, albeit adequate, translating software can miss, so you won't even lose out on the cultural nuances.

There is no plausible real-time translation solution that (in real life; deepfakes are obviously possible on Zoom) makes your mouth make the words as they are spoken. So digital translation is always going to be lower status than learning the language yourself. That said, I agree that it’s becoming less and less necessary.

I agree, I can't imagine any situation where somebody would actually socialise or do any significant work using machine translation. Google Translate (and whatever comes next) can be helpful for translating emails or websites, and for media we already have dubs and subtitles. But most people who learn a language do so to use their new language in the same way they use their mother tongue, to talk to people.

I think it's almost never worth it to learn a language as an adult just for fun or in order to consume media. That said, I have met several people who learned a foreign language as adults to a native-like proficiency (by my own judgement as a native speaker of that language). All of them use that language extensively in the course of their work; two of them are professors teaching either the language or a subject that requires reading difficult primary sources in the language at well-known universities. This is a non-indo-european language that's supposed to be hard for English speakers to learn, so I imagine it's even easier to find examples of people who have achieved this level of skill in the examples you named (French/German/Spanish).

My prior is that it's not really possible to learn a language well in the one-hour/day format in which foreign languages are taught in most secondary schools and language-specific supplementary schooling programs, no matter how many years you spend on it.

I see people reading literature and non-fiction for abstract knowledge doing the same thing

Some people (I’d wager many here) enjoy the experience of exercising curiosity, which is the main pleasure in reading non-fiction. In literature it’s hard to see what abstract knowledge is the goal, it’s mostly just enjoyment of storytelling, which again is pretty age old.

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