Brain Fills in the Blanks with Experience | Hacker News Reader

Brain Fills in the Blanks with Experience

nautil.us

25 pointsdnetesn7 comments

I really object to the claim that your first language will always be stronger. Just last week, I saw a TV program about people who migrated from the Netherlands to an English speaking country more than 40 years ago. Some of them could still speak Dutch fluently, but there were also those who could no longer and were much more comfortable speaking English.

I learned English in school, but I only became fluent later on in life. When I was around 30, I worked in an English speaking environment and also at home I spoke English. I was thinking in English and there were days that I did was surprised when I heard some Dutch being spoken, suddenly realizing I had been thinking in English all the time. I felt at some time that the two language become one in my mind, that I could effortless switch from on to the other. I also acquired the ability to simultaniously translate from English to Dutch. I even sometimes when I was doing this, would find my mind to wander off, as if it had become a purely automated task. The surprising things is that I am a dyslectic and often have to look up the spelling of words. Dutch spelling seems to give me more trouble than English.

I think that many bilingual people share the same experience, but that it is hard to believe for someone who is not bilingual her/himself to believe that a second (or third) acquired language can be as intergrated as your mother tongue.

Quick question? Is the grammar of Dutch also Subject-Verb-Object?

I suspect this sort of "merging into a single language" effect is a lot easier when the grammar overlaps a lot and thus substituting a word in one for a word in the other gets most of the way to translation. When the two languages have a totally different word order, I suspect your experience to be rare.

Yes, English and Dutch are rather similar. There is a difference in how tenses are used and it is known that Dutch speakers often make mistakes with using the wrong tense in English. In Dutch the verb, when consisting of more than one part, is split, where most parts and up at the end of the sentense, just like in German. Dutch is somewhere in the middle of English and German. I do understand German, but find it hard to speak, because I end up using English words all the time. I guess that if I would spend a few months in German, I would be able to speak it enough to communicate with native speakers. The hardest part of German to master is that all nouns have a gender and the partical depends on the gender and the case (nominative, accusative, dative or genitive).

I do know a little Chinese (Mandarin) and I do know that there are languages with completely different sentense structure and different grammar structs. I do not know if bilingual people with two languages that are far apart experience a similar intergration as I experience with English and Dutch, but I do know that they are able to switch from one to the other and instantly.

I'm bilingual and can speak both languages fluently. One important thing that i notice and I hope someone else experiences is when you are staying with family for a while and when you have to go back to using English/SL there is this murky "transition period" where your brain has to get used to using your other language.

removing the "how" from the title totally changes my thoughts from "this might be interesting" to "huh? an obvious statement? what could this article be?"

(p.s. it is slightly interesting. and very popular science-y - worth a read if thats your sort of thing)

at least for me when HN removes the How and I decide that How needs to be there and I edit and put the How back in it allows it, although I don't know if that is because of high enough reputation to do that or if everyone is allowed to do the same.

on edit: however if it is rep the original poster definitely has enough.

I wasn't going to read it until I read your comment. Thanks.

It's a wonderful article. This was one the gems for me:

> Put simply, you learn from all of your neural experiences. From your brain’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether the signals passing through it originate from something you’ve seen in the outer world, a daydream fantasy, or a deliberate attempt to imagine your potential future. Each of those corresponding electrical storms shapes the landscape of your brain’s database.

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