Commentary: Learning another language has benefits - just not the economic kind
LONDON: I'm a rootless cosmopolitan, so nosotros're moving the family unit to Spain for a year.
The kids are up for it. Growing upwards with anglophone parents in Paris, they speak French and English, and once you know one Romance linguistic communication, learning some other is a sure-fire.
"Lexical similarity" is the measure of overlap between word sets of different languages; the lexical similarity betwixt French and Spanish is virtually 0.75 - where 1 means identical.
I want the children to accept such good Spanish that they tin say everything, understand everything, have deep friendships and be fully themselves in the linguistic communication for life. That's what matters, not perfect grammar.
Just for all my emotional commitment to multilingualism, I know its usefulness has diminished. How should we recall most learning languages in this era of global English and machine translation?
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING?
I spent an intensely rewarding decade learning German. Yet I now keep encountering younger Germans who insist on speaking their practically native English to me. This is true across Europe: About 98 per cent of pupils in primary and lower secondary schools in the EU are learning English language.
Meanwhile, machine translation is catching up with the human being sort. I've been having successful email exchanges with Spaniards past putting my English text through Google Translate. It's imperfect, but still much better than my Spanish.
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The utility of language-learning volition just proceed diminishing. Already, many publications effectually the world now translate some of their articles into English.
In v years' time, Le Monde and Cathay'southward Jiefang Daily could whack 20 manufactures a day through machine translation, hire underpaid immature anglophones to polish them and, presto, they'll be global newspapers.
The corollary to all this: Learning a language desperately is becoming pointless.
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In my generation, people spent years at secondary schoolhouse breaking their heads on French or German grammar.
Most emerged able to order beers and perhaps read a basic news story. I suspect they would have had a more enriching experience spending that time studying medicine, history or statistics.
Language teachers will disagree, only then they would, wouldn't they? They have jobs to protect.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
I'chiliad every bit sceptical of translators who insist they can never be replaced by a machine.
True, machine translation is often faulty, machines can't (however) communicate through body linguistic communication or eye contact, and some algorithms are sexist.
For instance, in gender-free languages such as Turkish, today'south algorithms tend to assume an engineer is "he".
But almost man translators are faulty likewise. 1 human did such a poor job translating a German language text into English for publication in the FT that I spent an afternoon rewriting information technology.
Moreover, humans can produce sexist language without help from machines, and their algorithms are harder to adjust.
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In brusk, rather than spend years learning bad High german, simply install a translation app on your phone.
If you do larn a language, get for excellence. If you have children, immerse them in it from birth.
Wall Streeters sending their kids to Mandarin-speaking preschools may be hilarious, but they are choosing the virtually efficient route.
PRACTICALLY English
I still wrestle with the result of anglophones learning foreign languages. Hither the utilitarian statement is weakest of all. If the global linguistic communication is your female parent tongue, your brutal self-involvement lies in forcing strange interlocutors onto your dwelling turf.
And anglophones don't have the easy linguistic wins that francophones practise, because no major foreign linguistic communication is peculiarly close to English.
I took these issues to Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
He agreed, upwardly to a point, on the weakening utilitarian example for languages. Dingemanse is a gifted linguist who speaks a Germanic language and lives 10km from the German border, yet even he often finds himself speaking English to Germans.
For other languages, he sometimes uses machine translation. "I think anybody does," he says.
Still, he points out, humans can do something machines can't: Ask each other for clarification. We do that constantly in conversation: "Actually? You lot sure? What practise you mean?"
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He worries that machine translation might dilute our accountability for what we say.
MULTIPLIER OF OUR LIVES
But he warns me against focusing on the utilitarian value of languages. Multilingualism, he says, is the standard man status. Most people alive today speak multiple languages. That shapes who they are.
In the Ghanaian hamlet that Dingemanse studies, people apply different languages for unlike registers: English for some purposes, various Ghanaian ones for others. Each language has its own domain.
He asks me: "How would you feel if you suddenly became monolingual?" I shudder: I'd feel diminished as a human.
He explains why that is: A multilingual person can be multiple people, inhabiting multiple worlds.
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"The pleasure of mastering unlike languages is something humankind volition never lose," he says. "As the linguist Nick Evans wrote, we report other languages because we cannot alive enough lives. It'due south a multiplier of our lives."
The enrichment, Dingemanse emphasises, "is not just economic or utilitarian". He's correct — just it's best to know that before yous commencement.
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Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/commentary-learning-another-language-has-benefits-just-not-economic-kind-294816
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