You end up spreading yourself too thin. You’ll need to remember too many grammatical rules, too many words and at the end of the day there will be no time left to develop your verbal skills in your mother tongue.
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I have three birth languages, and speak as of right now seven of them pretty fluently.
I also like to engage in artistic activities, such as writing poetry. And when I do so, I tend to think I can express the feeling I want to put into words in one unique language, or at least translate what I know would describe it in other languages. But it is almost always not at all the case.
I will, for instance, write one line in Spanish, and then, to embody what I want to express in the next line, I’d need an English expression. Afterward, the only word that could exactly describe what I think is the feeling of the poem is a word that only exists in French, so I don’t know what to title this Spanish poem. The work becomes then a text that’s impossible to understand for someone who isn’t fluent in the three languages at the same time. And this kind of experiences extend from my art and my school essays to my social interactions, causing myself to go silent more often than I’d like to. Because I don’t know how to put what I’m thinking into words that the people I’m with would understand.
I feel like a partial stranger everywhere, and there is no language in which I’m totally comfortable. Sometimes I can’t even express my feelings to my loved ones in the middle of a very urgent situation because what I feel will come out in a language that they don’t understand. Sometimes I need five languages to make myself understandable.
You may argue that it seems like the problem is that I don’t have enough vocabulary, but, even with a dictionary and translator at hand, these situations do not change. Different languages express different things. And it is sometimes excruciating to feel alone in this knowledge.
So, yeah. I do think there are some disadvantages.
No
Proof?
Do you have any proof it is?
>Need to remember too many grammatical rules
Not how it works. In reality you will eventually forget most of them outside of barebone-basics. What will remain is the instinctual understanding of what is grammatically right, and what is not. It's kinda like muscle memory and martial arts.
>but but but, some oldass language/art grandpa spent 20min of a presentation autistically speaking about language and differences and such
He's paid to know this by heart, and in most cases he had to refresh his knowledge by returning back to the basics from time to time. Also old-school autism is irrelevant unless you're researching esoteric texts and the nature of etymology related to sacred languages, gods and traditions. Most people are not on this level because basic-slop modern english language doesn't require that.
>t. know 4 languages + learning latin
Nietzsche knew 4 or 5 languages before he came to that conclusion. Go ahead and corrupt your cultural identity, it's just a construct anyhow.
What did Nietzsche write about it?
I do not remember all of it but it was a criticism that learning other languages corrupts your inherent cultural identity, he also criticized the process as being one in which the participant is just learning redundancies and some social criticisms which might be more location and time specific about how certain professions at the time expected it when it was unnecessary.
From Human, All Too Human:
The French all learned Latin, and many learned Greek, and probably also regional dialects, thoughbeit.
Yeah but memory don't work like that my homie. I'm starting to think he was a pseud.
You do be spouting that Black person talk doe like the good Black person you is.
>and at some distant future there will be a new language for all - first as a commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in general - just as surely as there will one day be air travel.
Nietzsche predicted Esperanto? (Though I guess the 'commercial' part makes it sound more like English.)
>Esperanto
I swear to god if that becomes a relevant language at any point in the future I will cause a nuclear holocaust right now. Would rather learn Igbo, Basque, Navajo, or any other moronic language as long as it's real and I don't have to deal with autism the language.
I do not understand why esper*nto exists. The language isn't even """international""" since it's comprised of indo-european languages.
If we want a language for all of Europe, we have Latin.
At this point it is real- it has living native speakers and everything.
Half of the world speaks Indo-European languages, if you're looking for the word for a given concept the largest portion of humanity will recognize, it'll probably be an Indo-European one.
It's definitely English. Computers have cemented it as so.
It's a shame, really, because there are fundamental issues with any ethnic language in that role.
I don't mind it that much, but English is quite moronic with the disparity between text and spelling it.
Yeah, it has one of the worst alphabetic orthographies in the world. Traditional script Mongolian is probably up there, and maybe Danish.
Except most notable French authors knew Latin and Greek and some other languages like Spanish, Italian, and German. Voltaire was a fan of English and René Descartes constantly used Latin, so Nietzsche is either wrong or just needs to be clearer that they are headstrong to using/writing in their own language rather than others they know. Which is not that much as that can be applied way more to the Romans, who only cared about Greek as a foreign language.
Nietzsche’s not the be-all-end-all of knowledge and wisdom. Also, didn’t he know 12 languages?
Developing eloquence in any language is a matter of using it. If you use your mother tongue on a daily basis, read in it, write in it, etc. it will be stronger. The only way you'll spread yourself thin is if your not using it daily or you spend all of your life studing Latin grammar and neglect everything else and can't tie your shoelaces or order a pizza.
This post was made by a purebred EOP.
1-language-only is reserved for plebs. Stay in your lane peasant
In this girl's case, her parents focused too much on Japanese at home and she ended up delaying her English ability and having trouble in school. There's an opportunity cost and developing one language means less time and effort put into developing the other. As an adult, this isn't an issue since presumably you already have a strong foundation in your native language and adding one or two into the mix won't give you any problems. But in principle, time spent learning French or German is time spent away from deepening your English. There's always more words to learn, more refined language to acquire.
Her parents failed her, but children are language learning machines and with the most minimal input she could have been perfectly fluent in both. There are different methodologies for raising bilingual children but it's really hard to screw it up. Her parents just had autism.
What is it you think they did wrong, exactly?
>Lust provoking image
But I'll play along. Your linguistic skills aren't linear and there are many things to be gained from different languages. Language isn't also a skill you develop consciously, just like you aren't necessarily aware of grammatical rules every time you speak: you forget, you relearn them, you let different etymologies and ways of seeing the world take over your brain. You develop your own mother tongue and soar above the rest through this rich backdrop of foreign culture and keep on growing as time passes. You usually learn things about your own language from seeing how others, especially the closely tied ones, develop.
>>Lust provoking image
Autism
Eiko is so hot.
No. That's pure monolingual cope, and you know it.
Yep.
That's why so many polygots are stupid.
Take, for example, every european scientist, novelist, or philosopher in the last 1000 years.
Most scientists are monolingual, most famous novelists and philosophers know at most 2 languages.
I think it depends. If you learn French, German, Latin or Greek you'll be fine. Both because they have influenced English and because the works in these languages are often referenced in English works, or they were writing at the same time as English writers, so you're working in the same civilizational sphere and will have common references.
I think it's also fine if you become a 'natural' polyglot, i.e, you lived in a country, were raised by bilingual parents, or something like that.
But if you're some youtube polyglot moron who purposefully learns ancient Mongolian and Thai at the same time + 10 other random languages then you're definitely fricking up your brain.
I mean it's probably not detrimental per say but it's def overrated. You've got people that can barely convey their own thoughts properly speaking their native language yet gloat about having a 5th grader level proficiency in a handful of other languages. It's the nerdy equivalent of white people tanning basically
Monolingual mental gymnastics
Say that to Nietzsche.
I'm just gonna go off what
said.
>Cultural identity
Isn't really a thing anymore. Nietzsche also didn't live in a time where states were aggressive entities working against your best interests, your safety or your livelihood. A nation nowadays is a thug collective you're directly competing against in the game of global capitalism. It's not something you ascribe to unless you have vested interest in exerting a similar level of control. Globalism itself has made sure that any kind of regional identity or local culture is killed off, otherwise.
That seems to be the thing that sticks out. The world sure has changed in only a few generations.
It can be though language cucks refuse to acknowledge this
>You end up spreading yourself too thin.
Anything you spend time on will take time from something else. Why would learning a language specifically be a problem?
>You end up spreading yourself too thin.
this is the same cope as "you can either go to the gym and become fit or go to the library and become smart but you can't be both", i.e. the rationale of people who have misled themselves into believing that living is an engagement of exclusive conditions when in reality it only justifies their own inaction and leads to them being neither fit nor smart
Working out doesn’t interfere with your ability to gain knowledge, it actually enhances it since being fit is good for you brain. Learning several languages on the other hand can me detrimental.
I don't care about grammatical rules
I don't know them with English and even though I studied them at the start with French, I generally don't think about them when reading
I remember there being a big deal about which auxiliary verb goes with which verb, the formation of the passive and reflexive, but it was only after 4500 or so pages of French text that I remember that this was supposed to be a thing
ff9 was the best final fantasy
The more languages you learn the more connections you make between them. The only thing that's detrimental to learning a lot of languages is if you stop studying you'll lose all that vocabulary.
>there will be no time left to develop your verbal skills in your mother tongue
That's stupid.
> That's stupid.
Why?
I'm gonna learn japanese+russian and there's nothing you can do to stop me.
retroactively refuted by Nabokov
Source?
From Wikipedia
>The family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age.
>Much to his patriotic father's disappointment, Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian.
Not being literate in Russian myself I can't speak to the quality of his work in that language, but considering his extremely successful, nearly century-long bilingual literary career, I think it's safe to say that learning languages wasn't detrimental to his brain.
He learned only 3 though according to that article, we’re talking about learning 5+ languages in this thread.
Well then, yeah, you're going to get diminishing returns at some point.
I could say that learning five languages is great and you could say what about ten, and I could say ten is still great and you could say what about a hundred...
We have limited lifespans and learning a language is a big time investment.
But learning a few languages is really helpful. In the internet era the biggest barrier between a person and new ideas is no longer time or money, but language.
My ability to write well in English improved dramatically after I learned Japanese. There are so many techniques, styles, methodologies that are commonplace over there that are foreign to our ear, and almost all of what I learned was directly applicable to my English writing.
I think the sweet spot is two or three. That isn't an absurd time investment, and fusing the ideas of several different cultures will not only bolster the strength of your writing, but the uniqueness as well.
If human longevity is increased dramatically, I could easily see that number going way up. I predict many of the best authors of such a time period would be polyglots. It's hard to overstate the advantage of first-hand experience with the literature of multiple wholly separate cultures.
But to answer the question the thread started off with; no, it isn't detrimental to your brain. You would have to be an unusually spectacular caliber of monolingual idiot to even think that was possible. Learning new things makes you smarter, not dumber. This is preschool level stuff here.
Not necessarily, but, regardless of that, everything proactive & excellent eventually, to some degree, demeliorates something passive with which it is in unity: melancholy is reserved for those who deeply press.
tf you on about homie
much like highway expansion does not reduce traffic, but traffic almost always meets the new capacity, learning new languages does not fill your brain but simply expands it to fit the new input. the human brain has millions of neural pathways specifically for learning and speaking languages. There is also a network effect to being bilingual, where its just easier to speak and remember more the more you know.
You have to remember that Nietzsche was a shut in incel mega polyglot who was self critical to an extreme. He spent decades of his life learning everything there was in a dozen languages. This was a man who thought being compassionate was not a moral principle, yet entered into profound mental moronation over seeing a horse being beaten. So if you're going to take his words for granted, a visit to the sanatorium may be for you.
>You have to remember that Nietzsche was a shut in incel mega polyglot who was self critical to an extreme. He spent decades of his life learning everything there was in a dozen languages.
Really? What's his best biography? I'm kind of interested in his life now.
You don't forget anything when you learn something new. Simply not how it works. Your brain is no harddrive.
Either way, learning anything new, especially languages, will always develop your brain and expand your mind. In the end, you wont be remembering anyhting either, as the langauge you're learning will go from being remembered to being intuition when you have gained proficiency. There is no excuse for not studying.
Also, learning new languages can develop your mother tongue also. Douglas Hofstadter, who knows like four langauges, has often said he often thinks in different languages so as to be more elequent in his mother tongue.
>don't learn a language because you won't have time left to develop verbal skills
>spend 4 hours a day on IQfy
This place will do infinitely more damage than learning a language could ever do.
i could learn everyone else's language, or they could learn mine (english)
Or you could all learn a neutral language that's easy to learn.