This could be done with a few people eg: “The remarkable brain of a nightclub bouncer with the worlds highest IQ.”
The article talks of him like he’s a child. Bouncing around at all the attention. Thrilled to make new friends. Bordering on mockery. Hidden behind wonder, the call goes out: look at you, who are not one of us. A carnival ride for the writer, gather ‘round everyone!
Smart enough to do anything he wants, not smart enough to be normal.
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.“
I read a lot of the same things, but picked up an aspirational undertone instead of mockery. I definitely didn't see it presenting him like a child. But ymmv.
It’s funny that in the context of an article about a genius of language that I’ll admit there would be better, more accurate words, and ways, to say what I’ve tried to say. May I also clarify that I mean no bad will towards to writer or anyone else involved, it’s only through their honesty that things like what conversation led to his name being brought up can be wondered about. I’d like to take it as a win though that I wasn’t incoherent! Thanks :)
Is it "normal" for Americans to not only not be able to speak a foreign language, but to not even know what the word "polyglot" means, and look at one like you would look at an alien (one from outer space, I mean, not one from another country)?
Is that an attempt at a thinly veiled insult in a form of a question?
Or do you really think that one of the most powerful countries in the world is “normally” somehow full of ignorants? I’ll answer - not any more than where you are from.
I just spent a week in Morocco, a 3,000 USD per year GDP per cap country. In Marrakech, the modal service worker (so, we're talking about a guy who sells one dollar meat pitas, or leather goods, or whatever in a small store) speaks fluent Arabic, passable English and French, and probably at least some Amazigh. I got catcalled in German, Spanish, and Hebrew as well, just walking around shopping areas. This is a country where it's not unusual for someone to have a grade 5-8 education. I was in a Berber village where the modal young adult leaves school around age 10 to take part in agricultural activity; the village I was in got electricity around 15 years ago and is currently working on its first paved road. Everyone had conversational English, and fluent Arabic, native Amazigh -- this is probably an area where the GDP per cap is below 1,000 USD. Additionally, Moroccan Arabic is pretty strange compared to, say, standard Egyptian and so being a fluent Arabic speaker likely entails a bit more work. A friend of mine is currently in Nairobi on research (2,000 USD GDP per capita) and universally people speak fluent Swahili and English; most also speak various local languages.
In California, my social circle is mostly PhDs. These are phenomenally smart people. You go to a JPL party and the average IQ has to be 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean. There are a lot of rooms where I'm by far the dumbest person. But most people I know are either unilingual or bilingual. Even in Southern California, a majority of people have sub-conversational levels of Spanish. I know very few people who are conversationally trilingual. Where I grew up in Canada, E/F bilingualism was somewhat common but very, very, very few people spoke a third language and most people had halting French. I'm in Ireland right now and native-born Irish speak English and a culpa focal of Irish, and that's about it.
What this says to me is that it's pretty unlikely that a country's tendency towards multilingualism is meaningfully correlated with education or economic status. And while I know the idea of measuring "intelligence" is completely fraught, I can at least say it seems unlikely that a random sample of people in one place are as intelligent as JPL people.
All this to say that in all three of the anglosphere countries I've lived in, people seem to have a mental block on the idea that a second language is essential, or that a third or fourth language are even feasible. Someone who fluently speaks four languages is considered a polyglot, a freakshow, some kind of Beautiful Mind. But then you go to Netherlands or Switzerland or Morocco and it's normal. And the reason for this isn't obvious to me: it doesn't seem to relate to income, education, it doesn't seem to obviously correlate with intelligence. It seems to just reflect some kind of cultural premium placed on language acquisition. I'd love to read more about why this is.
I think the phenomenon of few multilingual people in the Anglosphere is the result of little actual social necessity or benefit from actually conversing in another language in everyday life, making it both more useless and more difficult to acquire. And they have good company as education subjects that the market doesn't value much that then acquire a cultural premium: with fine art and philosophy.
I think this becomes more acute when one's profession is specialized and the professional circle doesn't value multilingualism, especially because of how much harder it is to become exposed to the genre/technical writing and jargon of your professional language in another language, as opposed to mundane professions.
In just guessing, but I bet its connected to the fact that you are measuring American English against the other languages. Its tightly connected to the fact that the dollar is the de-facto monetary standard to trade in the world. Other countries have to speak English to get involved but since we already do, there isnt a real reason besides intellectual curiosity to do the reverse.So we are uni-lingual while other countries have to be able to buy sugar in their native tongue and speak English when they want it shipped to their country. The truth of the matter is that virtually every modern immigrant -leaving out the Europization of America- is multi-lingual. If it were the basis of intelligence Americans would be behind the scholarship. So not an mysterious situation. Its because trade starts in many ways with the dollar, so no need to be multilingual.
Sorry if it sounds that way! But if a Washington Post journalist is not embarrassed to not know the word "polyglot", and then describes polyglots as people she has only seen on YouTube, you might jump to that conclusion. Or, from her Spanish-sounding name, you might suspect that she does in fact speak at least two languages, but is trying to hide it in order to appear "normal"?
And I'm not saying that the US has a higher percentage of ignorants than other countries, but being one of the most powerful countries in the world, they are also one of the most (if not the most) self-centered. So, not a higher percentage of ignorance in general, but maybe a higher percentage of ignorance of other languages, cultures etc.
US is probably (I am pretty sure it holds the top spot, but haven’t checked so, “probably”) the most diverse country in the world with people of all kinds of backgrounds, languages, nationalities, and races all living alongside each other. So I am not sure how might one in good faith imagine that they are unused to people speaking multiple languages.
“Index value is the probability of two people selected at random from any one country speaking the same language. 1.0 is most diverse, 0.0 is least diverse.”
I leave the reader to judge for themselves whether that is a good measure to judge diversity as being discussed here or not.
It's common for native English speakers to be monolingual. If there's no real need to learn another language, it takes more effort. Being able to speak multiple languages looks like a superpower if you only know one language.
Just teach it in schools like every other country - learning a language after a certain age is very hard, even with all the tech and apps we have today.
I'm a bilingual American (English and Russian), and I didn't know the word "polyglot" until a year ago. I learned it as part of a software localization project--it has never come up in my life otherwise.
I share the sentiment however the grain of truth here is that it does take a lot of effort to appear normal. The essence of being normal is trying to appear normal which is what most people are engaged in most of the time.
The hidden motivation behind this is fear of other people and the fear of evil which for most people has all but conquered their love of reality, truth, and so on.
If one does have other genuine interests and pursuits (for example foreign languages) then the task of appearing normal is harder. So the implication that he isn't smart enough to be normal is in this sense correct.
Which by the by suggests that motivation is the key to learning, not attention control, repetition, particular books, starting young or the other usual suspects and methods. These are downstream from motivation.
As someone who sometimes wonders if he has autistic traits, I found it refreshing that the article didn't try to be over-inclusive. Okay! The dude doesn't think "neurotypically"! Don't sugarcoat it.
I think they presented it honestly without being derisive.
Very stimulating. I am reminded of the mending wall by Frost, of meditations by Aurelius, of Cats Cradle, and Feersum Enjinn. And of the old server mantra of accept the traffic of others but watch the traffic you transmit.
Of this lyric “ And I'm no different, I live in conflict and contradiction
But it can be so beautiful
When I don't reject what lies within
It's beautiful the way agony connects us to the living
I think of the world when I hurt, and keep on existing in the
Now”
Am I on the right path by thinking it talks on the strange symmetry in the hearts of man? (fearing the darkness and scraping away at the edges with fire - Rei Ayanami) waves and troughs, prickles and goo, anxiety is thinking one of them will win (Alan watts). This dastardly act I do only for good reason! (Someone’s ladder?) A seemingly endless cycle of justification?
Give unto Caesar, which bokonon paraphrased as Caesar doesn’t know what’s really going on.
The vine produces fruit and the wild boar has bad breath.
Is it the dangers of being locked in idealised or normative interpretations and advocacy?
I don’t think it’s what it’s trying to talk about but I’ll mention on talk of those best able to murder, those best at warfare, they may preach peace because it is they that do the killing, someone else decides the victim. Your poem maybe is of them trying to keep their monopoly.
And so it is that your poem talks of the other, beware them, do not believe their lies (write it on your Polaroid for when you forget later - memento) but it is really talking of yourself, you aren’t better than them, when you are sure of yourself you have lost, when you are unsure of yourself you have lost. If your aren’t to be fooled by others you need only stop fooling yourself? (Which maybe can’t be done haha)
Not sure how it fits in but I’m also compelled to add from a beautiful mind: you watched a mugging John, that’s weird.
Let me save you said the monkey, putting the fish safely up the tree.
Also, beware them all you like, your still stuck with them.
Gosh, actually I’m lost. I grapple with this a long time, inwards spirals infinitely, outside doesn’t stay still long enough. It’s best not to get involved. Don’t mention that you know Spanish, make friends with strangers at the bus stop.
I didn't immediately understand the line "beware those who are always reading books."
Perhaps the line means that people who read a lot are judgemental and likely to hate others. If that's the case, I don't really buy it, because people who truly read a lot are probably too busy reading to hate people not in the books.
I think it’s more about living more in a literary world than in a real one. As a person with book worm tendencies, I understand quite well how it can be harmful.
I didnt get the same feeling. I saw it as another opportunity to show how much science and experts "dont understand". For instance, there is no way that any kind of C.A.T., M.R.I, E.K.G, E.E.G, LMNOP scan could show enough about it to duplicate it. Why even bother. Just try to understand how -if its important enough to you- he accomplished it. It looks like he can because he wanted to. He got fascinated by language and set himself to learn, "LEARN" as many as he could. So the attention isnt created by him. He was found out to be who he is and gained attention, possibly unwanted. So, I think that you may feel like mocking the event. I appreciate it as he doesn't seem to be a savant. Just an ordinary guy that set himself to be able to speak to whomsoever he came across. As a carpet cleaner, I bet it comes in handy.
True. Please allow me to expand my interpretation, not trying to discount yours.
One thing would be a talk by Temple Grandin, who had her brain scanned in some way (I’m not sure between mri cat ekg eeg etc but I think fmri). Iirc and very loose summary it showed a mid section of her brain to be different, and therefore an explanation of the symptoms of her autism was her brain rewireing around this difference by relying more on other parts. I think she does compare it to others who have suffered brain trauma to see how the brain can do amazing things, as well as there might be some physical thing to autism. So I’d say rather interesting and a reason to bother with those kinds of things. Otoh have you ever been so different that people want to study you? An autist can miss this and think they’ve made a new friend but the crushing realisation is that it’s a bit more like a freak show.
And so, mentioned at the bottom of the article is that he shows signs of autism. If you assume that to be true and read between the lines of his history, throw in a leap here and there, in an attempt to understand why, it can look as though he learnt the languages because he decided to and did, but why is that he wanted to connect with someone, anyone, from childhood being a constant outsider. Like Forrest Gump learning ping pong. Like Forrest Gump only ever being treated like a person from damaged people. It also explains why he didn’t want attention, associating all attention with bad, since early childhood. Iirc, to be specific, he found novelty in how different words sound in his mouth and enjoys seeing people be happy that he can speak to them. Those people being outsiders as well, from a certain perspective. I feel as though these are all quite common autistic experiences. Another one is being paraded around as a novelty by people only long enough until you annoy them and then you are tossed aside again, not knowing why, todays puppy being tomorrows embarrassment/responsibility. Which talks of another autistic trait: be useful.
So please forgive me for portraying that I am mocking the event, you are correct in that I may have been too sensitive, but I feel as though the writer writes off as him just being brown, something quite different: the lengths some autists, and generally, some outsiders, will go to to fit in or to avoid or cope with the anxiety of not fitting in. To have a normal experience in a normal way.
So to stress again, I appreciate the story and everyone involved. I’m aware there’s a lot of contention and hot button issues nearby but I’d like to avoid it. I’ll leave you with a scene from almost famous:
https://youtu.be/WzY2pWrXB_0
My kids are natively bilingual, with their mother speaking to them in Spanish¹ and me in English from infancy. They're about to be 8 and are curious about other languages (my son wants to learn French, my daughter Japanese). It's interesting to see how they have fairly different personalities depending on their linguistic context. In English, my daughter is more extroverted, my son more introverted, the reverse is the case in Spanish. I don't think it's a matter of comfort in the languages—my son has had a strong attention to gradations of meaning between words in both languages. I’m looking forward to seeing how their linguistic skills develop as they get older. If it weren’t for Covid, they would have started French classes on weekends last year, but maybe we’ll get there in the next year or so. Otherwise, they may have to pick up French from visits with their Mexican/Belgian cousins.
⸻
1. My wife is a native speaker of Spanish. Her English is accentless² and she has above-average reading/speaking/writing skills in English. She also speaks French.³
2. Mostly. Schwas still trip her up from time to time.
3. Most of her family is at least trilingual, speaking English, Spanish and one other language. I think her cousin with the most languages has five: English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. At his sister's wedding, he gave a toast in French with a flawless accent⁴ that blew me away. I often joke that I almost speak one language, but I haven't learned all the words in English yet. I'm semi-functional in Spanish, but my kids are quick to point out that my accent is “horrible” and with my hearing loss, it’s a challenge to participate in conversations. There are a few languages I can read with a dictionary, but I don’t know that I can claim any facility in them.⁵
4. I suspected that his accent was good, but I verified it with the francophones at his sister’s wedding (she married a quadrilingual Belgian).
5. One thing I’ve found is that in general, Americans tend to overestimate their linguistic abilities and non-Americans to underestimate their skills. It’s typical that someone who took a couple years of French in high school ten years ago and hasn’t used it since will claim that they speak French. A European who says that they speak “a little” Italian will be able to function just fine in a conversation with an Italian.
This is fairly useless nitpicking in this context – he's talking about a non-native English speaker, who has learned English to the point that her accent is nearly indistinguishable from some native English accent. This is a very common, and very well understood use of accentless (in the context of non-native speakers).
This, exactly. If I would have to identify an accent it would be television news anchor, the sort of speech which lacks any distinctive regional indicators.
I did student teaching at a high school a mile and a half away from the high school I attended just outside Chicago. I remember the students (mostly Mexican-American) mocking how I said “root” (and other oo-words) where I use the short o͝o sound rather than the long o͞o sound of, e.g., boot. Everyone I grew up with (except my Mom who was born in Western Pennsylvania), pronounces these words the same as I do, but the changes in the demographics of the area (from mostly Slavs, Italians and some Greeks and Serbs to mostly Latino) have also changed the micro-regional accent as well.
It is interesting to note that Barack Obama, despite his cosmopolitan upbringing, has acquired the Chicago habit of truncating a lot of vowels to schwas so he will, for example, say “tuh” for “to.” Then again, I’ve picked up a lot of L.A. regionalisms in my own speech thanks to living there for 18 years of my life (the most notable is saying freeway rather than expressway).
Interesting. I've always been confused by "accentless", and since I had only heard the term used by Americans, had always interpreted it the same uncharitable way as GP. Your interpretation makes much more sense. TIL!
Languages need a lot of upkeep in order to be fluent. For a single language you are talking about over 10000 vocabulary words and hundreds of grammatical patterns not to mention learning the normal way to say things like what verbs typically go with a noun. And then there's also deeper learning the correct way to pronounce everything let alone the mannerism and body language you should use while speaking it. You have to do all of this without losing competency with any of the other languages you know and without mixing up anything between them.
In order to reach these crazy high number of languages you will have to make compromises.
Roughly 2000 words are enough for a basic level. Because some of these languages are related, their vocabulary and grammatical patterns overlap.
You are underestimating the capability of some people to memorize certain information. Sometimes it is called "eidetic" memory. The best chess players just don't forget any chess position they ever see. Similar reports in music. Most of them are useless when memorizing any other form of "data". The carpet cleaner in question probably has that facility for words, phonemes and grammar. He just doesn't forget that stuff.
> The way Vaughn describes it, any time he reads something in a book, he can remember it almost perfectly. When he returned to school, he had even more to say, and more that he could understand.
Rather, as with programming languages, the first five paradigms are the hardest. ;)
As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) without having spent more than fifty hours with various Scandinavians, and without having attempted to learn much. (It's mostly deciphering dialects, remapping certain words.) Having unwillingly learned German as a child, I can enjoy German television and navigate German cities as a confident, talkative tourist. Having learned fluent Esperanto, I can decipher a bunch of words in French and Italian, but can't follow conversation.
As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. (https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-...)
Learning Ruby if you know Python is kind of learning another European language, if you already know one.
Learning Haskell or Prolog is kind of learning Chinese if you only know imperative languages.
Even among Germanic/Northern Germanic languages you'd need some formal learning and practice to actually have some competency. Mutual intelligibility doesn't really cut it for "having learnt a language". I'd never say I speak danish or Swedish even though I can understand it somewhat.
The languages the man from the article has learned are considerably different from each other. Not all of them, of course. Still, even going from Spanish or French to Catalan and Portoguese is no picnic. Same for slavic languages. Flexibility with Grammar and already having the mental infrastructure can help, of course!
> As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time.
That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese.
Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.
Japanese has a huge number of words derived from Chinese: "Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as kango (漢語), meaning 'Chinese words'. Kango is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (yamato kotoba) and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages (gairaigo). It is estimated that approximately 60% of the words contained in the modern written Japanese dictionary are kango, with about 18%–20% of words being used in common speech." -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary
> Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.
That's not true, reading Chinese gives a huge leg up when reading Japanese because of the kanjis (especially if you come from a place that use the traditional characters instead of the stupidly simplified ones). Additionally quite a few words come from Chinese, granted, the pronunciation is very different, it's often closer to Cantonese pronunciation rather than Mandarin pronunciation but it helps with learning new vocabulary.
You're conflating language with writing. While it is true that Japanese writing is related to Chinese writing, the languages are still from two completely different language families[1]. Anything they have in common is due to exposure, not relatedness.
The argument you're making would be the same as this:
"It's easier for an English-speaker to learn Finnish because it uses the Latin alphabet". The only reason that helps is that you don't also have to learn to decipher a new set of squiggles. It doesn't actually help you understand spoken language or speak it.
1: Mandarin is a Sino-Tibetan language, while Japanese is a Japonic language. These two language families are not related in any ancestral way known to modern linguistics.
I'm well aware that both are from different language families, however that doesn't stop the fact that because of the influence of Chinese writing a significant number of japanese words were directly imported from China. They are the words that corresponds to the on-yomi 音読み of the kanjis.
In the same way, English is a West Germanic language whereas French is a Romance language, this doesn't however stop the significant import of French vocabulary in English which likewise is a result of history and of the conquest of England by William the conqueror. This is a bit different because both English and French are the same branch of a bigger family Indo-European, so those two languages are more similar to each other in term of grammar than Chinese and Japanese but the point about vocabulary I think still illustrates the fact that besides vocabulary inherited by a common language, there can also be vocabulary imported due to historical influences between neighbours. In the case of Japanese it's significant because of their adoption of the writing system and the amount of vocabulary that was imported that way..
Another example of what I'm talking about is Korean. There's some dispute about the language family of Korean with some saying that it's also a japonic language, some saying it's a language isolate. However no one would claim that Korean is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Yet, it's well known that 70-80% of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin. This is the same mechanism.
On the other hand, due to both languages being from different language families, the grammar of Japanese and Chinese are totally different and unrelated.
So? Reading isn't even a part of knowing a language. Vocabulary is the part of learning a language that causes by far the least problems. Knowing that δένδρον means "tree" is easy, but it won't help you use it in a sentence. That problem doesn't go away if the word that means "tree" is 木 instead.
Here's the opening of a Latin poem:
Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato Pyrrha sub antro?
Here's what it looks like if you have perfect knowledge of the vocabulary involved:
What many slender you boy in rose
soak liquid press odor
pleasant Pyrrha[a name] under cave?
Does that help you to read it? (Bear in mind that Latin and English are, unlike Chinese and Japanese, related to each other. You even got three words that are more or less identical in Latin and English! [In all three cases, as in the case of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, that's due to borrowing rather than a relationship between the languages. But you can also see a true cognate - Latin quis is in a real sense the same word as English what.])
You are very wrong, and I know not only because I learned some Japanese (C1 level) and some Chinese (A2), and experimented first hand how easy and helpful it's to transfer vocabulary, but also because I read a lot of the scientific literature on this exact subject. Japanese has 60-70% compound words using morphemes of Chinese origin, and about 60% percent have the same exact meaning in this two languages[1].
Learning vocabulary is also not "the easiest" part of learning a language either, it's one of the most fundamental step of learning a language, which take a massive amount of time. If time can be shelved here (and indeed is in-between Japanese-Chinese, Japanese-Korean, etc. even Vietnamese to Japanese) it can be reinvested elsewhere. Heck, I've seen a Taiwanese girl getting her JLPT N3 after one semester of Japanese study just thanks to the shared vocabulary and characters.
So, for context, I wrote the comment you replied to as a French who speaks Japanese fluently and has been learning both Cantonese and Mandarin. So I am talking from experience and I completely disagree with you.
First, I disagree that vocabulary is the part that causes by far the least problems, instead in general my approach to learning any language is to first focus on learning the vocabulary. And to counter your latin example, when I was a child, I studied Latin, after my first 6 months of latin, I went to live in Spain for 5 months, when I came back latin was significantly easier than it was before. I could understand a lot more than I could before. The only reason for this was that I know could speak Spanish and could use that to guess words.
Of course this works a lot better on writings that are not poems, in general poems like your example are more difficult to understand without knowing the cultural context around them. If you want to really illustrate your point, try with a text that's not a poem and you will see that knowing the vocabulary does indeed significantly help.
Second, reading is absolutely an essential part of knowing a language. At this point, I really don't even know how to answer to this besides asking for clarification why you would come to this conclusion? I'll just say that I would have loved having the significant advantage Chinese students have when it comes to reading Japanese.
Finally, I was going to make the same points historia_novae about how many words really do have the exact same meaning in written form between Japanese and Chinese. But he expressed that better than I could.
> Vocabulary is the part of learning a language that causes by far the least problems.
Strongly disagree. Memorizing vocabulary is a huge barrier to learning a foreign language. You need something like 5000 words just to have basic conversational competency, and far more to understand texts about a domain, or slang, or literature.
Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. I'm guessing quod is the closer cognate of what, though quid is the better translation in most (or maybe just more canonical) cases.
This is not an easy claim to make; at the level where they coincide, it's hard to distinguish the words. In the same sense that quis and who are identical with each other, who and what are also identical with each other.
Compare wiktionary's entries on the etymology of who and what:
> [who: ] From Middle English who, hwo, huo, wha, hwoa, hwa, from Old English hwā [], from Proto-West Germanic *hwaʀ, from Proto-Germanic *hwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷos, *kʷis.
> [what: ] From Middle English what, from Old English hwæt (“what”), from Proto-Germanic *hwat (“what”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷód (“what”), neuter form of *kʷós (“who”)
Wiktionary does elaborate, on the page for kʷís, that Indo-European proper had two unrelated stems *kʷi- [giving us interrogative pronouns] and *kʷo- [giving us relative pronouns], but that these tended to be combined in later languages. If you want to distinguish them, you can say that quis is not cognate with what. But you couldn't then go on to say that it is cognate with who; both who and what would be cognate with quod.
They are not genetically related, but they have been in contact with each other for a long time. Japanese has borrowed lots of vocabulary that have been borrowed under regular sound patterns (depends when they borrowed it). Same goes for Korean and Vietnamese.
Even if you are an illiterate Chinese speaker, you can make up Japanese vocabulary by converting Chinese words under these patterns, it may be hit or miss, but shared vocabulary makes it easier to learn. Add some basic grammar and you can start communicating pretty quickly. I know plenty of Chinese speakers that learned Japanese very quickly, but failed to learn English well.
Other factors that make language learning quicker: access to materials (lots of Chinese speakers consume Japanese content, many classes available, there are a lot more books to learn Japanese for Chinese speakers), access to native speakers (close to Japanese, many exchanges students), friends and relatives that learned the language (if they can do it I can do it too), economic incentives, etc.
Korean speakers also have an easy time with Japanese vs other languages even though they are not related. Shared Chinese vocabulary, simple phonology and similar grammar patterns.
Similarly, although Northern Saami and Norwegian are not genetically related, there is so much borrowing of terms (also same alphabet) due to shared geography/history that it's easier for a speaker of Norwegian to learn Northern Saami than it is to learn Kildin Saami (more borrowings from Russian, also different alphabet, while very related to Northern Saami) or Korean/Nahuatl/… (just as genetically unrelated, completely different Sprachbund)
It sounds in several places in the article like he has a severe case of impostor syndrome.
Fortunately (spoiler) at the end of the article, after his time at the MIT research lab, he sees that some traditionally super smart people value him and see him as intellectually special.
Yes, I think he has a bit executive dysfunction -- a bit unable to set and follow up on long term goals.
That'd make it hard for him to join a uni or find ways to make use of his abilities.
I wonder if he'd be more happy, working as a language teacher assistant (why assistant? see the 1st sentence above), for all languages they teach at some university nearby :-)
No, he wouldn’t. Programming languages have virtually no vocabulary, compared to natural languages. The differences between two programming languages aren’t the same kind of thing as the differences between two natural languages. Developers already pick up new programming languages easily, and talent there comes from being able to absorb its documentation rapidly.
If we know he has a good memory and doesn’t forget stuff, that is generally an advantage, but the connection that it is a “language” is not the reason.
You think? There's syntax, grammar, and idioms. Of course there are significant differences, but there's significant overlap too. As someone not linguistically inclined, I also notice myself looking for the name of the built-in method of a programming language I've used for 5 years. One might imagine a person with a better memory for vocabulary would be more capable of remembering the word/method name without needing to look it up.
"Does having an aptitude for spoken languages mean you'll have an aptitude for programming languages" is a different question from "are programming languages languages" even if the answer to both questions is the same.
But linguists have approached this question from time to time! The main stumbling block is highly literate people are inclined to think of writing as language but it's not, quite. You can have multiple writing systems for the same spoken language, or be fluent but illiterate. But you can't comprehend a writing system for a language you can't speak, barring disability.
So programming languages do have grammar, but not the other components of a language. Idioms in programming are a metaphor referencing linguistic idioms but structurally they aren't the same. Programming languages are more similar to writing systems, and a lot of linguistics findings do apply to them when taken in that context.
You can play around with this idea if you want. Try to convey meaning to someone using only a programming language and nothing else. This is tricky because they embed our other writing systems, so you need to be careful not to accidentally convey meaning with eg variable names. Might be best to use something like brainfuck or piet that prevents that entirely. If it's a language in the "human languages" sense, you'll be able to convey any arbitrary meaning to another person who knows that programming language, even if you don't share a spoken one.
What ends up happening is you can only do this if you reference a shared spoken language. So you can warp a PL into a writing system, but you can't use it alone to communicate.
But meaning (and even understanding of the world) is shaped by the language. Think of how one language has 40 words for different kinds of happiness, another doesn't have the word blue.
My question was "would natural hyperpolyglot be better capable of learning/using programming languages", and I don't think any of what you said tells us one way or the other. Yes, the things being expressed with programming languages are different from the things being expressed with natural languages, but they are both designed for expression and communicating meaning. I'd love to see studies on whether there's any relationship between being able to easily pick up and retain human languages, and the same for programming languages.
edit: note, that I'm not even asking if someone with an aptitude for human languages would be good at using programming languages. Obviously the logical components, required for doing a lot of things with them, are a completely separate skill.
I'm only wondering if he'd have an aptitude for learning a language, in terms of syntax, grammar, standard library and associated methods, idioms.
They're all shorthand abstract systems that define static relationships between a fairly small number of symbols arranged in a fairly small number of ways to define a fairly small set of meanings.
Example: a circuit diagram. You have a transistor and some other components, and if you know the language you can recognise it as an emitter follower. It's a very concrete and clear mapping.
There aren't many things you can do with a transistor. When you've learned them all, that's basically it.
Human languages are much bigger. If you ignore the alphabet level and start with words, there are thousands of symbols (tens of thousands for advanced users). And most of language is about implication and context.
If a partner says "What time will you be back tonight?" that can mean anything from "Because my car is still in the garage, can I borrow your car?" to "Are you still having an affair?" to "Will you make it in time for curfew?"
In most conversations and a lot of writing, the words are hints, not explicit mappings to defined meanings. You can parse an immediate meaning without knowing the context, but not the full meaning.
So it's a much harder problem. You have to learn basic grammar and vocab for tens of thousands of symbols, then learn standard basic exchanges in social situations, then special forms, idioms and social register, then implication and subtext.
Good point. Physicists even call mathematics a “language,” which obviously has no implications whatsoever as to how easy (or hard) it is for a talented polyglot to learn it.
I am not aware of strong evidence for linguistic relatively. Only some light stuff like some two words rhyme in a language so they are more likely paired in music and poetry than in other languages where they don't rhyme.
It is much more plausible that human understanding of the world has shaped language. We can expand our vocabulary for our needs. Skiers of any language likely know more words for snow than speakers of their same language who only want to hang out on the beach.
The skills that make you good at picking up your third+ natural language should be similar to the skills that make you good at picking up your third+ programming language. (With extra programming languages being much easier to pick up than extra natural languages, in my experience)
The guy might struggle with picking up programming to begin with though, it is indeed a completely different thing from human language.
> The skills that make you good at picking up your third+ natural language should be similar to the skills that make you good at picking up your third+ programming language.
The skills involved in picking up a natural language are going out and schmoozing with people who speak that language.
This is not actually a skill set that people who are good at picking up programming languages are known for.
I also am like this. I have a co-disabilities that makes it near impossible for me to pick up a second language, yet I’m fairly talented at programming and have been paid to write in at least 8 programming languages.
That's exactly why I'd be interested to see if he could pick them up too. They're much more procedural, less meaning and more grammar. It might make it easier to see what's improved in his brain.
The "if I had a penny" family of expressions dates back to a time when the monetary value of pennies was greater than the burden of carrying them around.
My natural aptitude for reading programming languages has never helped me out speaking languages. After 20 years, I still only speak 3 words of French. Inability to pronounce or hear certain phonemes is a real phenomenon.
According to the input hypothesis of language acquisition, the ability to speak is a function of how much we've already heard/read/taken in, and understood. If you're someone who enjoys reading, and you find that parsing weird syntax comes easy to you, then you're all set for learning a language with something like the refold method[1]. You just gotta put in the possibly staggering amount of hours that it takes.
I thought I'm quite good with my about 7 foreign languages with basic competency. I only ever became really fluent in English though. My latest addition was Arabic, and the Duolingo course wasn't exactly deep.
Interesting. The end implies he doesn't want to clean carpets any more. I hope he can find a job translating in a capacity that makes him happy to use his language skills he clearly finds so much joy from.
He probably doesn't have the skills for a traditional translating job, just as the average bilingual person hasn't. There are jobs for "unskilled" translators, not sure how much and in what contexts. Not sure if there is a job description out there for "hyper-polyglot genius". Niche-skill at best, unfortunately.
My experience with these guys(usually kids) is they speak English well and can say a couple of phrases out of the other languages. The trick is they confidently copy the intonation of the language they're "speaking" in to fool those who dont speak it.
