I'd be undertaking a huge amount of study just to read a handful of books. (Not that there wouldn't be significant beneficial side effects, of course, such as the ability to converse with living people who speak those languages
Conversational ability and reading ability don't completely map onto each other. (This is particularly true for languages like Chinese and Hebrew and Russian, which would entail learning a new symbol set to read, and in the case of Chinese a new way of reading.)
Hm, that makes me wonder - kids who know more than one language during the critical language acquisition phase end up with permanent changes in their brains that make it easier to learn more languages later. Does it affect the brain if a kid learns to read in more than one alphabet, or more than one writing system, during the same time?
Of course it does. Learning several alphabets at the same time has made me your very god, puny mortal. Bring me credit card numbers and pasta. Fly, my monkeys. I command you.:)
If, as many people (that I know at least) would claim, mathematics should be considered a language, then yes more alphabets (symbol sets with attendant structures) matter and help in both languages and general learning, at leat in my experience. Even the trivial bit of Russian I learned in high school also helped me in more ways than most things do. All I remember of it now is a ~dozen phases and words, but the underlying viewpoints of a considerably different culture have stuck better and help a lot when dealing with non-US citizens. Each additional set adds to it, but that first one after the initial set gives the most benefit. Not too surprisingly, it seems to be a declining exponential curve.
But while mathematics and, say, music are talents that are well-known to sort together, I haven't heard about mathematics and languages going together, other than as part of an old-fashioned classical education.
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Conversational ability and reading ability don't completely map onto each other. (This is particularly true for languages like Chinese and Hebrew and Russian, which would entail learning a new symbol set to read, and in the case of Chinese a new way of reading.)
Hm, that makes me wonder - kids who know more than one language during the critical language acquisition phase end up with permanent changes in their brains that make it easier to learn more languages later. Does it affect the brain if a kid learns to read in more than one alphabet, or more than one writing system, during the same time?
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)