[HN Gopher] Thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making
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Thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making
Author : ranit
Score : 116 points
Date : 2023-09-17 11:48 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| toss1 wrote:
| Basically, it seems that thinking in a second language involves
| or engages more thinking and less "reflexive" responses.
|
| So, if one were to choose to learn/renew a language that
| encourages better thinking, which ones are best? Anyone have any
| examples with multiple languages and feeling that one or another
| helped them think better?
|
| (I'm currently choosing a language to learn/relearn among the EU
| languages, so interested in suggestions - thx)
| e12e wrote:
| > among the EU languages
|
| I suspect learning a language that is actually substantially
| different has a more profound effect - so assuming your native
| language is English - maybe Finnish, Basque or Gaelic?
| bibanez wrote:
| German for sure, as a romanic language speaker. I don't know
| for sure what I would recommend if your mother tongue is
| English. Maybe German as well!
| mandmandam wrote:
| > if one were to choose to learn/renew a language that
| encourages better thinking, which ones are best?
|
| Honestly it probably doesn't matter all that much. European
| languages are all pretty connected, in the scheme of things,
| and have much more in common with each other than you'd expect
| at first or second glance.
|
| That said, Spanish seems a safe bet, as per tfa. Coupled with
| the fact that so many people speak it, you could certainly do
| worse.
|
| I'm currently learning it, with the help of some lion's mane,
| and it does feel like a worthy pursuit.
|
| If I had to guess at a real answer to your interesting question
| though, I'd have to guess Russian. They've had a ridiculous
| amount of high-quality thought and literature, relative to
| their resources and population size.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| try
|
| a) something very different
|
| b) something close (but not too much)
|
| note, words/notions themselves, is different beast from
| constructs, both may give or take abilities
| agumonkey wrote:
| Funny, as trying different programming languages rewire your
| brain deeply, so does trying different human languages. Different
| vocabulary and grammars will shed lights on different patterns in
| interesting ways.
| gsuuon wrote:
| I wonder how much of this has to do with learning the second
| language when you're older and more mature? You end up without
| the childhood emotional baggage or subtle misunderstandings that
| come with learning at a young age.
| abeppu wrote:
| I'm reminded of anecdotes from Murakami, who tactically wrote
| pieces of his work in English, and then translated back to
| Japanese, and preferred the style of the result. He also
| mentioned later learning of Hungarian writer Agota Kristof, who
| learned and wrote in French, and had a direct style with short
| sentences. This is only to point out that in addition to the
| objective, empirical conclusions described in this guardian
| article, there are also sometimes aesthetic and subjective
| benefits.
|
| https://lithub.com/haruki-murakami-the-moment-i-became-a-nov...
| valyagolev wrote:
| Agota Kristof wrote one of the most intense, alienating,
| haunting works I've ever read (the notebook trilogy). but all
| the time i was reading a thought was nagging that her name is a
| play around agatha kristie
| kashyapc wrote:
| Meanwhile, as I started to learn my 5th language (French), I just
| came across this article[1], where it claims studying a new
| language can "interfere" with other languages you know. To
| selectively quote:
|
| "[...] we can conclude that learning words from a new language
| does come at the cost of at least retrieval _ease_ for words in
| previously learnt foreign languages.' In one of the experiments,
| learning the Spanish versions of words also seemed to make
| participants slightly less accurate when recalling those words in
| English. [...] "
|
| Although I can confirm the small effect from my own experience,
| it doesn't faze me. For me, the upsides far outweigh a slight
| delay in retrieval ease.
|
| [1] https://psyche.co/ideas/will-studying-a-new-language-
| interfe...
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Definitely a thing for me. When translating between two non-
| primary languages, I'll often either start talking the wrong
| one to the wrong party, or just completely blank out on basic
| words. I assume it's what an 8051 feels like when switching
| register banks!
|
| I also recall teachers doing our spoken assessments reminding
| us the moment before the tape started recording that "remember,
| French, not German" because both tests took place in the same
| week and pupils would often launch into the wrong language.
| robomartin wrote:
| Can't say I've had that problem (5 languages). My problem has
| been that what I call "language confidence" erodes quickly when
| you don't use them for a long time. For example, I use English
| and Spanish on a daily basis. No issues there. However, I
| haven't used French for probably 30 years and German for 20. I
| can listen to both and understand most of it, yet launching
| into speaking anything other than short phrases feels really
| uncomfortable.
|
| Tangent: I learned some Japanese years ago. The language made
| sense to my brain. No writing, just conversation. The same
| thing did not happen when I attempted to learn Chinese. The way
| I put it is that my brain simply could not synchronize with the
| speech pattern and sentence structures. To be fair, I don't
| think I made a solid effort.
| jongjong wrote:
| My native language is French but I learned English at a young
| age so my English is better. I haven't spoken French regularly
| for the past 10 years and so, nowadays, it takes me some effort
| to recall certain French words.
|
| 10 years ago, my level of French and English were almost on par
| to the extent that I didn't even realize what language I was
| speaking with my parents or siblings (who could also speak
| both) and would often mix words from different languages based
| on which one came to mind first.
|
| I took a French class in school (as an easy way to boost my
| grades) and sometimes the teacher would ask me a question in
| English and I would accidentally respond back in English
| instead of French (not realizing it); this amused some of my
| peers as the questions were usually very basic and therefore
| awkward to answer in English as anyone could have done so.
|
| I would just respond in whatever language the other person
| spoke and it took effort for me to consciously answer in a
| different language than what the other person used.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I definitely have this problem sometimes. I know what I want to
| say but the only word that pops into my head is in the wrong
| language.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| In traveller communities it is quite common to just say them
| in a different language - then you have a beautiful language
| mix where people stilm mostly understand each other. It just
| gets akward, when you interact with ordinary people again ..
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I think this aspect of it is common, but overall the
| "negative" effects are very minor and shouldn't stop anyone
| from trying to learn a language.
| stephen_g wrote:
| I have experienced this too, and I hope it's just temporary.
| Part of it may be that I only have a rudimentary grasp of both
| languages, but I had learnt a bit of Spanish, and now learning
| French I find I'm mixing up especially words like tres and muy
| and things like that when I go back and try to speak Spanish,
| as well as nouns, numbers etc.. Verbs probably not so much
| since the conjugation is so different.
|
| It's tricky because some words are exactly the same (just
| different pronunciation), some are similar (like from the same
| root). So I hope this is just teething difficulty.
| gsuuon wrote:
| I experienced this too but the other way, French -> Spanish,
| and I think it may be particular to these languages as
| there's so much confusing overlap (for non-natives). I've
| since dropped French entirely and haven't had any issues with
| mixed recall with Spanish recently. I imagine learning both
| can be done if you were to get to a solid foundation with one
| before attempting the other.
| htss2013 wrote:
| I wish people who write and study this would differentiate
| between close languages (eg Italian and Spanish) vs totally
| different ones (Spanish vs Russian). I am guessing these are
| cognitively two very different undertakings, in kind, not just
| difficulty.
| walmart wrote:
| Yeah, you probably want to go the farthest distance from
| where you are currently. A speaker of an analytic language
| (say, Mandarin) would probably have their mind stretched
| maximally if they went for something agglutinative(say,
| Turkish) and vice versa. Geographic and cultural distance
| makes this even more of a mind expander.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I dont believe it neither (on my 4th/5th, french too). There is
| often new mental model required, ie with French you need to
| catch first parts of words since ends are not pronounced, and
| other quirks. German has these uber long words. Grammar is
| always a bit different. Ordering in sentences. And so on.
|
| Overall it increases neuroplasticity, best starting as kids
| when brain is more adaptive. Big gains, regardless if there are
| some miniscule disadvantages overall.
| MightyBuzzard wrote:
| Thinking in words of any language is entirely too slow for
| anything except plotting out a sentence. I'll stick to thinking
| in abstract concepts.
| fidotron wrote:
| Exactly. The hysteria about LLMs has betrayed how many people
| never make the leap and are constrained to thinking in the
| words and structures already familiar to them.
|
| It is also incredible the extent to which abstract
| visualization is looked down on by our current academic
| fashions.
| incrudible wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| MightyBuzzard wrote:
| [dead]
| dazc wrote:
| My Spanish teacher used to tell me not to try and translate
| everything in my head but to just think in Spanish. This seemed
| ridiculous to me at first but, over time, I understood what she
| meant. Put simply, you can't have a conversation in Spanish if
| you are mentally translating every word as you go. No Spanish
| speaker is going to hang around that long.
|
| I never did get to that stage but can appreciate the concept.
| mandmandam wrote:
| People thinking in other languages also work stuff out
| abstractly sometimes.
|
| I'd say it's likely that learning new languages can improve
| your ability to work in abstract concepts. Something about the
| different forms of grammar, and deep paradigm shift in outlook
| implicit in the language (aka Sapir-Whorf). For example, the
| Mayan languages were fantastic for closely describing nature,
| compared to English, and (probably as a result) their astronomy
| was incredible.
| sitkack wrote:
| Being forced to translate from a language you are proficient
| in, one you possibly think sublingually in, forces one to
| move from system 2, to system one.
|
| Esp if the destination language has a much higher precision
| for the arguments you are making.
| [deleted]
| nik282000 wrote:
| I maintain a number of machines which came with non-english
| wiring diagrams. Trying to learn a language while diagnosing
| issues with a machine does not improve either activity.
| zen_1 wrote:
| The Arabic in the header image is about as fucked up as possible.
|
| The letter ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). The word
| ordering is wrong (ltr instead of rtl). Somehow they also managed
| to get the letters not to connect to each other.
|
| Great job Guardian! 10/10
| Adverblessly wrote:
| Some time ago I encountered an imported vending machine here in
| Israel. It had a touch screen with a prompt in Hebrew to
| interact with it that: 1. Had reverse letter
| ordering (ltr instead of rtl) 2. Had reverse word
| ordering (ltr instead of rtl) 3. Had no spaces between
| words 4. Broke words across line boundaries 5. Made
| sense semantically (sort of), but didn't make sense in context
|
| So imagine seeing the following interaction prompt on a vending
| machine: kildlouwi eviecerote
|
| Took quite a while to decipher!
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Spoiler: it's one of these
|
| Obfuscated intentionally
|
| Dog park and the more Receive your product Stolen from the
| following To receive I would like Tire on the other hand
| Dagger I am not parent Duck to the same role
| cafard wrote:
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-bbcs-hebrew-boo-boo/
| switch007 wrote:
| The Grauniad struggles with English all the time, what did you
| expect lol
| gus_massa wrote:
| There is a site to explain the differences " _Help! Is This
| Arabic?_ " https://isthisarabic.com/ HN discussions
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949146 (635 points | 6
| months ago | 299 comments) and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544990 (80 points |
| December 2021 | 20 comments)
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| This isn't exactly the same, but someone needs to make a
| similar site for English text for products being exported
| from Asian countries. It is totally baffling to me just how
| bad the Engrish is on some of these products I get on Amazon:
| product specs, manuals, and etc vary from "slightly off" to
| "almost unreadable." It's actually something I have been
| curious about for a long time: why is it like this?
|
| The people who make these products have to spend millions and
| millions of dollars setting up factories, hiring people,
| putting things into production, etc. But somehow they don't
| have a budget for a bilingual college student intern to
| translate a bunch of copy to English better than "using this
| product will bring a great joy." Why? I would be super
| interested in some journalist figuring out why this happens.
|
| Of course, there's always the viewpoint of "why would they
| need to translate better? It's just money that they don't
| need to spend, and this works for their business." So I will
| make a super strong claim: ChatGPT can now do nearly perfect
| mass translations of this stuff for free, in theory
| simultaneously increasing translation quality and reducing
| costs. Despite this, for whatever reason, I predict that the
| average translation quality on Amazon won't improve within
| the next few years.
|
| Anyone want to take the other side of that bet?
| distract8901 wrote:
| This has been bugging me for years. The cost of a
| translator is basically insignificant, it's just one
| salary, it's a drop in the ocean of a corporate budget.
|
| Hell, when I was a game dev, in a studio of less than 50
| people we had a sudden and huge demand to port our game to
| China. It was a Czech studio making a game in English that
| was being translated to Mandarin. It cost us one single
| person, his entire job was translating text files we sent
| him and managing our China social media presence.
|
| It absolutely boggles the mind that these Chinese companies
| can't or won't hire a single English-speaking copyeditor
| ilikeitdark wrote:
| Here in Spain too. A while back in Barcelona it was "Year
| of the Book" with events all year, in many kinds of
| places, celebrating books and reading. The even created a
| free book, to cover all the things they were doing. But
| the English in the book was HORRIBLE. And it still is on
| many government websites, tourist things, trains and
| buses etc. Such a bad LOOK.
| cafard wrote:
| There is a stepladder in our garage. The documentation
| pasted to it has text in English and Spanish, right down
| to the date: May 20xx/Puede 20xx.
| chaps wrote:
| This is hilarious. Thanks for sharing.
| LordShredda wrote:
| The image was probably made in photoshop. It's 2023 and some
| programs still can't render decent RTL unicode.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| but GIMP can, score one for open source!
| aaomidi wrote:
| It's so fucking disappointing to keep seeing this happen.
|
| It shows a lack of care, empathy, and diversity from every
| organization that makes this mistake.
|
| It completely nullifies every point they were making.
|
| I remember Google made this same fuck up on a segment in IO
| when they were talking about how many languages they're
| supporting.
|
| It's disgraceful and just outright disrespectful.
| racked wrote:
| Sheesh. The person who did it could not read Arabic. When
| does it stop being disrespectful and start becoming plain
| human error; if they make a mistake writing Thai?
| Hieroglyphs?
| aaomidi wrote:
| I'm not blaming the individual who made it. I am blaming
| the entire process that led to this getting published.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Sufficiently large corporations don't make human errors,
| they make quality control process errors.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| This is the definition of throwing the baby out with the
| bathwater
| [deleted]
| Swizec wrote:
| I am native level fluent in 2 languages - Slovenian and English -
| and this feels true to my experience. There's a lot of stuff I
| can critically think about in English because the words don't
| carry much/any emotional weight. They're just abstract concepts,
| very easy to be coldly objective.
|
| Meanwhile talking about work stuff in Slovenian is near
| impossible because most of my career has been in English. It's
| like the concepts just don't exist in the Slovenian part of my
| brain.
|
| This gets really trippy when the same word in each language feels
| like it carries different connotations and baggage. The
| translation is same but the meaning is different because the
| correct where you'd use each word is different.
| morjom wrote:
| As a Finnish person who almost fluked Swedish class I wish I
| would've taken it more seriously. Knowing a language or three
| at that seems like a big up in life.
| htss2013 wrote:
| Yes this is the most disorienting thing about using a non
| native language. You're aware that you aren't able to convey
| intended connotation or comprehend it. So even if you are
| perfectly capable of all the right denotation, you're still
| missing an entire layer of communication.
|
| It's even more difficult when a language is spoken in different
| cultures. Eg, British, American and Australians probably have
| different connotations associated with the same words.
| Distinguishing between using a synonym out of custom vs
| intentionally for a different connotation is very difficult.
| It's not like there's a connotation dictionary you can refer
| to.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| The article comes of as a bit... Fluffy. But it's psychology
| after all, so maybe that would be expected.
|
| But I wonder. From the article:
|
| >The foreign language effect does not depend on the particular
| features of the language that someone speaks; instead, it is
| concerned with the general experience of moving from a first to a
| second language.
|
| It feels so weird to me. It feels so weird that according to
| this, (own example) a Swedish person that learned Norwegian would
| have similar effect as someone that learned say, Japanese. The
| latter just so happens to be me. (native in both)
|
| But Norwegian(bokmal) and Swedish(rikssvenska) is so similar that
| I can hardly believe any "learning a second language" effect
| occur. If it does, I think claiming that a deep-Texan learning
| British cockney/posh accent, or Scottish accent, also have the
| effect mentioned.
|
| Certain languages are just so similar that there's just major
| overlap. While with others, there's just expressions that is
| impossible to convey. But here somehow national border based
| categorization of languages seems to be enough to show the
| effect?
|
| I can't help but question if this is just one of the psychology
| bogus like the "decision fatigue" that had ample evidence until
| it was almost completely disproven.
| _Microft wrote:
| > It feels so weird that according to this, a Swedish person
| that learned Norwegian would have similar effect as someone
| that learned say, Japanese.
|
| Is that from the study itself or is it an own example? For what
| it's worth I'd not consider the pair of Norwegian and Swedish
| as languages foreign to another. They are basically dialects.
| The same goes for the pair of German and Austrian imo.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| An own example. The quoted part is from the article.
|
| And yes I would consider the same. But if the quoted part is
| to be believed, the implications are that the same effect
| occur between Austrian and German, as would Afrikaans to
| Mongolian
| mlindner wrote:
| This seems really wrong given the tremendous number of aircraft
| accidents and near-accidents that have been caused by speakers of
| one language not understanding the language spoken by controllers
| very well. Using a different language adds cognitive load, not
| the other way around.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Not only spoken languages but math and music could also be
| included though the specific areas of improvement or resilience
| could very. I have learned several languages early on but find my
| thinking/imagination to be less word-language but rather shapes,
| connections, motions, and other not easily mapped to word things.
| bavarianbob wrote:
| I'd also posit that thinking improves decision-making.
| dazc wrote:
| I'm not sure about that, the more I think about things the less
| likely I am to come to a firm decision.
|
| I have gotten to the stage now where I just accept the decision
| may turn out to be wrong but it won't be the end of the world
| if it is, I'm not in charge of anything that dangerous.
| pixl97 wrote:
| More than likely it's because you understand the world works
| on probability and very little certainty.
|
| Things that are potentially deadly, like flying an aircraft,
| attempt to remove as much probability as possibly. You make
| checklists of behaviors before the emergency happens so you
| think as little as possible.
|
| Or a more inflammatory statement I've been known to say to
| others "Certainty is for the religious and conmen alike".
| Swizec wrote:
| All decisions are bets, [the right kind of] thinking just
| improves the odds.
| haswell wrote:
| The trouble is in learning how to distinguish between
| unhelpful overthinking and the [right kind].
|
| I think it's necessary to balance thought with awareness of
| emotions and intuition. To listen to the gut, which is also
| an intelligent signal, but doesn't translate to verbal
| thought.
|
| Thinking more and thinking harder often creates an illusion
| of some kind of progress or of triangulating on the best
| decision. And this _can_ be the case, but can also lead to
| a kind of decision paralysis and /or overconfidence in a
| decision (I thought _really_ hard about this, so it must be
| better) when we don 't actually have enough underlying
| knowledge to justify the decision.
|
| If we could measure such a thing, I'd love to see a plot of
| decision accuracy vs. time spent reaching the decision.
| This will highly depend on one's deeply ingrained biases.
| I'm overly pessimistic, so thinking more helps me temper my
| pessimism and reframe when needed, but thinking _too much_
| eventually leads me back to where I started.
| bavarianbob wrote:
| I find that writing my thoughts is my antidote to this
| problem. Circular paths of thought are quickly squashed
| and I have something to visually audit when I ask myself
| if spending more time thinking will likely enable me to
| make a better decision.
| rongenre wrote:
| This makes me think of my experiences in Europe.
|
| In my native language (English), I can twist and weasel with the
| language to keep from committing to... anything. It has -- too
| many degrees of freedom available to me.
|
| With German, though [where I'm intermediate], I don't have that
| flexibility. My conversations are really straightforward and what
| comes out is simple enough that I can express it. I'd say that
| this does come at the cost of understanding and expressing nuance
| and condition, but maybe that's actually helpful.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| If you're willing to accept math as a language in the same sense
| as the article uses, then this effect applies to the sciences,
| where people regularly translate problems into the non-native
| language of math to gain clarity.
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