Fun anecdote: while drinking susurluk ayranı somewhere forty minutes from Mardin (because everything is forty minutes from Mardin, including the sun) I had a brief conversation with our guide about the Kurdish language.
It was then I learned two Kurdish essentials:
- dew (ayran) and
- zor spas (thank you)
To this day that is all the Kurdish I know and will possibly ever need.
Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.
Thinking in a foreign language to reduce decision bias never occurred to me. How cool!
Does the Language you Speak Really Affect How You See the Future?
The way people discuss the future varies from language to language. Some have a well-defined future tense, while others distinguish much between present and future. But does this point of grammar actually affect how we see the world?
As you may have seen in some recent reports elsewhere in the blogosphere, that question forms the basis for a new paper by Yale researcher Keith Chen. Chen - who, it should be pointed out, is an economist, not a linguist - is currently working on a paper in which he examines the effect of the future tense in different cultures’ future-oriented behavior.
Psycholinguistics eff tee dub. If you like things like this, read Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought.
In all of the Spanish classrooms I sat in during high school, bored out of my mind, there were skits. Everyone had to team up with someone else and make some sort of presentation in Spanish to the entire class, every once in a while. I didn’t realize it then, but this is the best way to learn Spanish. As Benny constantly attests, speaking is the best way to learn a language.
It’s true! Some of the best learning I ever did was when I was teaching people. You wind up having to explain concepts you may not have thought about thoroughly before, and in explaining them, you reaffirm them for yourself.
Lifehacker reader Gabriel Wyner was tasked with learning four languages in the past few years for his career as an opera singer, and in the process landed on “a pretty damn good method for language learning that you can do in limited amounts of spare time.” Here’s the four-step method that you can use, too (and you don’t have to invest hundreds in a language course like Rosetta Stone).
A common misconception of language learning is that you need the good software and ‘Teach Yourself’ books to learn a new language. While resources certainly help, and getting good resource material is definitely recommended, what’s more important is that you take slow and consistent steps in your studies. The most time-consuming step is immersion, since true immersion is difficult when you’re not living in the country of whatever language you’re learning.
Reason 1. Expands your social network: The act of learning an overseas language will help you bond with fellow vacationers alongside the same path. And, once you turn out to be proficient within the language, your social community of potential contacts and acquaintances will improve by the…
I had to write a persuasive speech about this very topic last semester. Presenting it to my classmates in the context of ‘here’s how many new people you’ll be able to talk to on Facebook’ really made them sit up and pay attention.
No, but seriously, learning another language is important and something I think everyone should do. Unless you don’t want to, of course, in which case, by all means, don’t.
