Make school interesting.
Actually, learning how to code and learning Japanese changed my life in this regard.
I didn't know how to teach myself things until those two things happened, once I did, pretty much everything else opened up to me.
Actually, learning how to code and learning Japanese changed my life in this regard.
I didn't know how to teach myself things until those two things happened, once I did, pretty much everything else opened up to me.
A friend with an affluent upbringing was telling me about how his school would filter out anyone they wanted, and give them the option to either transfer out or be expelled. Usually this was done for kids who had hit other kids. I couldn't help but think "You were way luckier than you probably appreciate." I thought it was just a fact of life that when you go to school as a kid, you have to worry about being attacked. Not so, apparently.
I think I recall someone from the administration estimating that at least 10% of students were expelled before graduation. (At least I think it was 10% over the course of four years, not 10% every year.)
I never truly "got" the trigonometry and geometry until I started going graphics programming. High school is too much theory and not enough application of the theory and experimentation.
Demonstrate it and you'll not only be rich but revered.
When I was in college, I finally had the chance to study it well and they had a great program. What I learned there taught me how to learn in general, which I then used to learn Computer Science, which opened up a bunch more for me.
I think it was the program (Ohio State has an excellent program) that provided me with the tools for this.
It came down to imitating successful patterns of speech and behavior (they called them core conversations), the heavy focus on proper intonation (more imitation, if your intonation is off, you're never going to make Japanese speakers comfortable listening to your speech) and the practice of spaced repetition (through flashcards, for learning kanji), which I had never been exposed to growing up.
For that last one, I'm actually in debt of my buddy who got me into the kanji flashcards.
1. Monday in Dutch is maandag, which means 'moonday'
2. Friday in Dutch is vrijdag, which means 'free day' (and is pronouced 'freydag')
Obviously the French is lundi, but I never made the connection with lunar.
So for 28 years (4 year's worth of Moondays) of my life I never considered the connection between Sunday, Monday and Moonday.
Perhaps it's not scientific fact but actually learning another language fluently and seeing the differences was pretty freaking awesome to me.
There's other fascinating differences like the difference between 'Icing sugar' in English and 'Flour suger' in Dutch, one explains what you do with it vs the other explains what it resembles.
Perhaps it only challenges simple brains like mine.
It's also interesting to see how different languages give you different options. For example, Latin has infinitives that can inflect for tense and voice, so you can say "to have written" or "to be written" in single words, not just "to write". Portuguese lacks these, but has infinitives that can inflect for person and number, so you can say "for us to write" in a single word. English has neither! This is just scratching the surface of grammatical variation within closely related languages.
I think the controversy alluded to in this thread is that there is an old, fascinating theory that people think qualitatively differently when using different languages, or else that some languages are more effective at or conducive to thinking certain thoughts. (One form of this idea is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even though it's not clear that Sapir and Whorf understood it in exactly the same way.) There are many suggestive examples in support of this idea, but the strongest forms of the claim are in disrepute in the academic linguistics community.
The Sapir-Whorf sorts of issues are potentially rather different from saying that you'll understand language better by learning more languages, since they suggest even that you may understand the world as a whole differently.