I’m surprised that nobody seems to have brought up any mental benefits of speaking more than one language. I’m not sure how strong the evidence is, but there has definitely been research that claims to point in that direction.
As goes for most of the arguments for learning second languages for reasons other than actually speaking said language: what makes you think that this unspecified advantage applies more to learning languages than to the other competing possibilities of intellectually challenging activities like learning math/statistics/programming/art/etc etc.?
Of course (I think I should have pointed that out in my first post), but physics/math/etc also take a long time to learn properly, so the time required becomes much less relevant.
I do not mean that one should necessarily learn a new language instead of learning math—although I might say that if you already know a lot of math (enough to get significant benefit to your thought processes), it might be useful to spend some time learning something that trains different aspects of mental processing (like learning a language). If I had to speculate on what any specific benefits might be, I would suggest that it comes from having more than one independent lens through which you interpret the world/more than one basis for your thought processes, and the benefit to mental flexibility you can get from switching between them (I’m not sure if I am properly communicating what I mean by that though).
I’m surprised that nobody seems to have brought up any mental benefits of speaking more than one language. I’m not sure how strong the evidence is, but there has definitely been research that claims to point in that direction.
As goes for most of the arguments for learning second languages for reasons other than actually speaking said language: what makes you think that this unspecified advantage applies more to learning languages than to the other competing possibilities of intellectually challenging activities like learning math/statistics/programming/art/etc etc.?
Of course (I think I should have pointed that out in my first post), but physics/math/etc also take a long time to learn properly, so the time required becomes much less relevant.
I do not mean that one should necessarily learn a new language instead of learning math—although I might say that if you already know a lot of math (enough to get significant benefit to your thought processes), it might be useful to spend some time learning something that trains different aspects of mental processing (like learning a language). If I had to speculate on what any specific benefits might be, I would suggest that it comes from having more than one independent lens through which you interpret the world/more than one basis for your thought processes, and the benefit to mental flexibility you can get from switching between them (I’m not sure if I am properly communicating what I mean by that though).