Learn as Few Languages as Possible (vs. "Polyglot" -ism)

there is no shortcut when it comes to
learning languages none and you can google it right now and you will find books that are called learn German in 30 days and learn German in 7 days and learn in 48 hours and there are so many YouTube channels selling you the dream that there was this secret shortcut there was this path you didn't know about there was this technique started with this with my girlfriend today and so this is on has changed a lot so we're not yet at three years this relationship right but we're past were past two years at the beginning of this relationship we talked about language learning and language teaching and it was largely hypothetical for my girlfriend whereas I had a lot of real-world experience and then just in the space of two years now she's got more and more experience there is no shortcut and up with a little bit I'm gonna talk a little bit about the biological reality of language acquisition as opposed to the cultural reality and you know what else it's not rewarding in the way that people think it is or the way the people say it is I don't read as much as I used to because I'm busy learning languages so I got books here right now alright I got a great book here on political corruption and democracy and in China I don't know when I'm gonna find time to read this but I love to do a book review on this channel but if I'm okay so this is these are both word China so I can't read this book about politics and history of China because I'm gonna be busy memorizing incredibly simple sentences out of this book doing language language learning language rote memorization language practice so on and so forth so there's there's a really simple direct sense in which language learning makes your life worse makes your life less meaningful makes your life less rewarding and you know I mean on the other hand I'm spoiled I've studied so many languages for so many years I am accustomed to getting off an airplane and being able to speak enough French i'ma get off the airplane in Germany this even happened we should switch planes in Germany and speak enough German within Asia speaking Chinese speaking Thai probably if I had to I could go back to speaking enough Japanese not not easily you know the places I've been flying in and out of I am really accustomed saying pardon me thank you how much does this cost knowing the numbers even if it's just that level of interaction what buying groceries don't do it and Here I am now in Athens Greece and you know I feel ashamed I feel ashamed that I don't speak enough for this language already instantly to be able to ask people how much does this cost part of me sorry excuse me whatever those kinds of interactions from the day I got off the plane and you know what you know what I own the books right I have the temptation to think over now how much time do I want to put into reading these books but again language study it competes with studying the philosophy the history the politics things that are really more meaningful were more rewarding if I spend the time doing rote memorization on Greek vocabulary Greece and the structure Greek grammar that's time what I'm not even reading the Greek newspaper let alone the philosophy of Aristotle or you know whatever there's a lot sorry Greek political history is really deep it could be studying the Ottoman Empire period I could be studying the current unfolding you know political situation special agreement between Greece in the United States Greece vs Turkey Greece Greece and China there's there's a lot of interesting stuff I could be reading and learning but are doing instead of learning languages so sorry this may sound like a digression but for many of you this may be the main point of the video this may be something really important for you to think about and consider it take seriously is that learning languages is not meaningful in the way that people say it is but at the same time I've got to admit I don't even feel like it's my own ego I feel like it's the opposite of ego when I was at the airport in Germany you know I had to switch into German and I could speak German well enough if you guys don't know I'm vegan so it's like you know you have to ask does this contain cheese you have to save him of course how much does this cost some really simple stuff like this in German I switch in a speaking German just for that little time in the airport and in front of me in line in the same shop there were like three French women together traveling's group and they just spoke French with making absolutely no effort like no effort to slow down or simplify their French no effort to be clear but no effort to speak German whatsoever even the German nor did they attempt to to speak English and the staff this resin they were kind of struggling with it and of course the amuse thing is once someone one of them figured it out it's like they'd be saying the French word for sausage oh they mean sausage to the Chairman where the words are fundamentally similar often they have a shared entomology or shared you know components linguistically these language barriers are not as daunting as Chinese versus English as Cree and a jib way versus English these are huge impassable insuperable you know language bears but look what I'm saying is I don't think it's ego in a positive sense that I want to be able to speak German in Germany even if it's just for that little bit of interact I think it's the kind of humility like look I'm in your country I'm making the effort to speak your language I feel that way in Canada with the curry energy away and the mohawk and everything else I really refuse to accept the genocide I want to speak their language of them if I'm in their country most white people don't seem to feel that way for some mysterious reason of nationalist ideology and on the contrary I think it takes a really kind of pernicious egotism let's leave up notes a egoism but egotism it's a really strange thing to just go to another country just speak English speak your own language whether it's English or French like these women they were behind cross song in they were they were buying a whole bunch of stuff it was complex order they're ordering all of our stuff but you know to just show up in Germany and speak French or just show up in Germany and speak English and it has always been remarked that you know what the Spanish hated about about British tourists was that the British tourists would come to Spain I think to Portugal also and they would just presume that they could speak English everywhere again not even making an effort to simplify and speak slowly and communicate not even making an effort to pick up a little so there are different factors that push and pull at me all right let's keep it real I'm 41 years old right now I make weightlifting a certain kind of priority in my life okay I was bench pressing 240 pounds and I thought about it do I want to put in the hours to raise my total to be bench pressing 270 pounds didn't do it well stay tuned to this channel we'll see if I get motivated to go from 240 to 270 if there was a biped fit I I could it's attainable I could be bench-pressing 200 pounds and I know exactly the process and the pacing and the opportunity costs like what you can do and what you can't do you know what what goes into that if you want to make that transition all right I think for most people if you're not really experienced with language learning language teaching an acquisition like me by contrast it's impossible for you to visualize it's impossible for you to estimate what kind of sacrifice you'd be Masek making in getting level 1 in a language or however you think of it going up to levels 2 & 3 what the sacrifice is going to be what you're gonna have to invest in it to get to get something out of it to get a certain level of ability out of it and there's a lot of self-deception that goes in okay now of the two you know what is what is more attainable you know increases in physical strength or in qui increases in language ability what I want to say to you sincerely here at age 41 to do I have 20 years of experience with language but I don't know but if it is have a lot of years the lot of languages from a lot of different language Amelie and again I've really seen how for my girlfriend in just two years she started learning Chinese with me she's also worked on French briefly she worked on Hebrew which is interest in modern Hebrew now briefly working on modern Greek but there's been a number of language she looked at where I said to her look kind of figure out what you're missing with this and she's been with me when I was speaking Thai and Thailand she's seen me speaking a bunch of languages in front of her you know it's reflecting my weird past with all these other languages right once I spoke loshon I couldn't switch you to fat when we were in France there's oh that was so hard because I would speak my mind was in French and it was so hard for me to pull my mind back into using vocabulary from lotion anyway another another agent Lane we just studied what I want to emphasize is I think people underestimate the extent to which learning a language is biologically limited alright let's just indulge in an appeal to nature fallacy or come along with you for a sec I admit this is fallacious reasoning but it's illustrative and you'll you'll see why all right the natural process of language acquisition is of a baby breastfeeding hearing its mother speak right of gradually picking up the distinction between different word forms and morphemes when have you listening to the parents and yeah sorry to be so heteronormative it naturally appeal to nature fallacy here naturally you're gonna have one set of parents speaking one language you're not going to be raised by four sets of parents speaking four languages and giving you diglossia and so on right and then you're gonna make a transition into adulthood where you gradually pick up on subtle distinctions of you know register and cadence and sophistication and what-have-you and this is gonna progress again naturally without written language without any conscious awareness of etymology very often people develop an ignition of language and get anthropologists study this you know without knowing the difference between a noun and a verb and this kind of thing so when anthropologists are in the field and they're really working with people who are have no history of literacy one of the things that makes it so difficult to learn their language is that they don't have a meta language they don't have a way of explaining to you how their language works they are only accustomed to transmitting their languages from mother to child in this way without relying on like a concept like grammar or grammatical analysis or drawing charts or parts of speech or breaking a word into pieces they're just you just rote memorization of its purest form it's how language goes from father to son from from mother to child so on and so forth there was a fascinating example this is a true anthropological anecdote where were two anthropologists I think they were husband and wife so these these were European people I think maybe they're American but they were outsiders living with a tribal group that had never had writing and they were really working hard analytically to write the people's language and like every time that asked them something that's okay so what's the word for stone and they'd write it down and they'd practice that they make sure they were pronouncing it correctly okay so that stone stones don't stones don't they practice it and then when they were out walking in the jungle with these people you know they'd say Old Stone and they were the native people they'd all laugh at them their friends hilarious they were wrong and they the native people would say something different they'd have a different word and so this went on I mean I could save for years but I think it was just months but for months they were out living with these people and they couldn't understand and naturally these are university educated people who using all the sophisticated methods of kind of linguistic analysis you know to record this language is doing and what it came down to was that this was a language in which the names for things were different based on their position relative to the speaker so a stone in front of you wasn't the same as a stone by this kind of thing right so out of context you have to grasp this and of course so many languages we don't think of the middle of way how would someone figure out you know masculine and feminine and neutral gender and all these things you know so all right long story short um many of the people here on the internet are selling you this notion that you're doing something positive and regenerative and rejuvenating in learning a second language and there is absolutely no evidence for that okay there is absolutely no evidence that regressing to that childlike part of your brain and forcing memorization of new vocabulary and the creation of parallel structures of meaning and reasoning is positive for you rather than negative nun all right and when you look at that I'm making an appeal to nature fallacy here but I'm also making a kind of appeal to abstract reasoning argument here let's say you have a talented 25 year old in university who's all his life has been doing advanced mathematics under every heading so geometry trigonometry calculus what-have-you and then you say to him at age 25 you know what you should really do you should go back to basics and learn how to do these same calculations and learn how to write these same equations using a completely different system of notation a completely different system of symbols and instead of using base ten use base twelve so the actual underlying counting of the numbers is different and this will somehow be good for you will make you a better mathematician so you're gonna have to learn to think about and and think in terms of doing multiplication you're gonna have to learn the times tables again you're gonna put thinking with most people when you learn a foreign language the most frustrating and boring part nobody really wants to learn to do long division in Chinese you know to speak in large numbers at millions and tens of thousands and do math in a foreign language I think not even the most you know philosophically motivated language liver really wants to do this memorizing the names of the months is also not very months and days of the week nobody likes that stuff either may be interested in something more philosophical or political or more meaningful that's right but again okay know there may be an argument here that mathematics itself there's no rule for nature like we can't make this appeal to nature fallacy I'm saying it's a well naturally you'd grow up with your mother breastfeeding and learn how to do math in the home okay so geometry and trigonometry and calculus I'm completely willing to concede in this case we're talking whistling outside the scope of nature in a way that just verbal communication is not but that's more like written communication okay there is nothing in nature that resembles the Japanese hiragana writing system there is nothing in nature that resembles the Chinese system of the counci radicals and these symbols in Lagos there's nothing in nature that resembles the Latin alphabet either so it's completely unnatural in the same that geometry okay so we accept this but nevertheless choosing as an adult to regress and start again at basic start again at the rudiments of reasoning why would that be a good thing would that be positive for you and it's mentioned one of the most hotly contested ideas in linguistics is actually the argument every linguistics professor has the kind of thesis on this is that language fundamentally is not a method of communication language is a method of thought formation we all know this we dream in language right we are our ideas of things are shaped again any any professor teaching linguistics can now launch into a lengthy set of examples including the sapir-whorf hypothesis if you're Whorf hypothesis and all these kind of well polished anecdotes that the way we perceive things the way we think about things that we understand things of course is shaped by language and most of us within our own lives if you think about your childhood you can probably remember how you thought of the world differently before you really understood what gravity was oh yeah and then I had my way of visualizing well before you understood what the model of the atom was atoms and molecules and what the difference was between a chemical reaction of physical reaction this is very crude really but this kind of scientific understanding it changes the way you perceive the world language changes the way you perceive the world much more profoundly so again in some languages they don't differentiate green and blue in some languages they don't differentiate orange and red and then in some languages they have much more precise categories for different colors a million anecdotes like this all right but yes sorry I need an example that came from a Chinese professor a Chinese professor complained to me I wonder if she had other specific complaints of this she said the problem with talking to Chinese students about politics was that they cannot differentiate rule of law from simply ruling by law like just the fact that there is that there is rule of law at all right and of course the hilarious thing about this example in English they're very confusing okay so you know rule of law meaning the quality of law and order as opposed to just the rule of a particular law the fact that there are laws and rules at all right so this is an observation she had after struggling with getting students to understand Western concepts but of course in our own language they circuit these are quite unclear all those ideas of right and human rights and everything built into political and social reasoning and as I mentioned to my mother recently it's it's remarkable almost 100 percent of the words we have for politics in English are from Greek or from ancient Greek so we still rely on vocabulary from Aristotle for democracy aristocracy oligarchy the word politics itself you know sons over so there was a time in England you could look at I've never fully minutes what was the vocabulary in Old English before all this Greek vocabulary washed up on shore and did that happen so these might be interesting question to answer unlike wise by the way in Southeast Asia Thailand Laos Cambodia but even Indonesia and Malaysia you will find almost all of the political vocabulary is from Pali and Sanskrit Sanskrit is the language associated with Hinduism Pali is the language associated with Buddhism they are very very similar languages both from ancient India so you have this whole vocabulary that comes into that which includes you know words they still use today for equality and democracy and human rights and stuff of that they take a lot of that from from palliative so okay the idea here is that language is not merely about communicating with other people it's about forming your own thoughts that the formation of its how we think to ourselves is language alright and yes it may be somewhat thrilling to reach a level in a language where you start dreaming in that language where you start thinking in it when there's no one else from when you were alone that happy with lotion I reached the point where I was actually thinking in lotion to something why is this good is this positive I'm sorry in this case there's no comparison to lifting weights I can't compare this the physical develop it's not like returning to being weak or something it's not like starting to look weight siddaway I guess you could compare it to you've completely mastered baseball and then you're gonna completely stop playing baseball and start playing ice hockey or something a different set of skills or you could try to come up with us but still you don't dream in ice hockey you don't think in I sock you don't reason it's not fundamental to flaws in development okay so we're at this interesting point where we're looking at the juncture of biology and frankly the biological limits of learning right the fact that our capacity to learn itself is a product of human evolution right and we're looking at this really weird kind of odor outer limits of philosophy what's at the at the most basic and crude level of how we philosophize how we think about life how we perceive the world and it's all being eroded it's all being monkeyed with your your impairment at all by learning a new language and guys I totally get it if you're monolingual if you've only spoken English your whole life I know it can be really inspirational those people like you know they convert to Hinduism and they start learning Sanskrit and they go WOW here's this whole new vocabulary for thinking about philosophy and religion and politics in the meaning of life that comes out of sense comes out of it and that may be throwing you I get it um probably for a lot of Christians it historically was when they first studied Latin right their first encounter with Wow here are all these new ideas and book a new way of thinking a new way of seeing the world maybe it was ancient Greek maybe it was Hebrew you know for people who approach the Bible through Hebrew or something okay let me tell you something when you've done it with like six different languages maybe maybe I'm in the unique position to really cynically warn you that nope going back to basics just just let's just stick with the numbers learning the numbers again in Korean there was absolutely nothing positive or healthy or rejuvenating or a woman nothing it just breaks you down it's just forcing you back to that primitive child minded you know view of the world and and to to start with learning the numbers 1 to 10 in Korean and then to force yourself to be able make change like sorry so you buy something or sell something to subtract and add quickly and say okay it's 20 dollars and 50 cents so I'm gonna give you 15 dollars to do that in Korean to build that up again okay and then maybe you do long division and multiplication let's just stop it they look I'm not even getting into advanced geometry or trigonometry you know not such a mystery using advanced economics or something yeah that's that's really tough doing economics and business quote-unquote businesses with financial calculations in foreign language okay now let's say one year from now you say okay so I've done that with Korean now I'm gonna start again with Turkish how is that good for you how does that make you a better person how does that make you smarter okay what I see here on the internet is a kind of baseless fetishization of language learning as if this is the key to being intellectual so get out of these two books you know which one will really develop me as an intellectual so if I read this book which is some kind of sophisticated analysis of Chinese history and politics what's wrong with out how Chinese democracy works and doesn't work in corruption okay I haven't read yet but I assume it's good book is that gonna make me a more sophisticated more intelligent person or this or memorizing a bunch of sentences some of which are as simple as the cat saw the mouse the cat jumped off the wall to eat the mouse you know the point is to learn grammar of cover but at that child level that child part of your mind that part of your brain that you may not have exercised since you were a baby each other's arms and that is as rudimentary as learning the numerals again and again and again so this video is inspired by Lindy boats I have no idea to pronounce her name we know what language you're name is him to be honest with you uh this girl who is on YouTube boasting that in the next year in the year 2020 year 2020 she is going to devote herself to studying 12 languages simultaneously and what I really want you to question in this video why would that be a good thing I have to question myself to what extent is it a good thing to devote my time to bench pressing 200 pounds or 240 pounds 227 I have to question that you know there's a certain kind of meaninglessness that but you know what I am actually completely confident that whether i benchpress tuner pounds or tune of 40 pounds of tunas in advance that I'm not doing myself any harm if it's 500 pounds maybe I'm doing myself so far by the way there's a limit to this comparison all right okay and I will point out to you that not only is there no basis whatsoever for the optimism that you're making yourself a better person you're becoming profound about lives have been by learning the numbers again in Korean and Japanese and Turkish and all these differently no there's no basis that actually if you think about this skeptically whether you're willing to indulge in the appeal to nature fallacy or not or whether you're going to think of it purely in a philosophical way like abstract reasoning like math and geometry on chalkboard there's actually reason to be skeptical here that you may be doing yourself irreparable harm