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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

That may be so, but if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much? I'm not saying the answers to these questions are obvious "nos" but the assumption could stand some scrutiny.

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> if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much?

Yes

Do you have a reason to back that up? I'm far less sure.

(I mean, I think the advantage is that you are able to speak to more people easily and in their native tongue, which is a whole other advantage, but that's different than "expanding your mind" directly by learning another language.)

>Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much?

I went to high school in Ontario with anglophones who took French immersion, learned fluent conversational French, graduated high school legally credentialed a bilingual, but then proceeded to move to Toronto and never really leave the province. I don't like being judgmental about people's worldly experiences, but I don't think that those high school French classes really did much to colour their worldview, most of us just knew it as a reliable way to secure a 90+ average.

I think the missing piece is engagement with the culture that is unlocked by being bilingual.

not only that but also the increased opportunities for new knowledge and experiences as well... it can open a lot of doors that would ordinarily be shut-off.

Having achieved a foreign language college major with minors in two others I find it hard not to be cynical about this unless the doors you’re talking about are things like vacations, entertainment, and similar amusements. From a work perspective it has not done much for me. Of course that could be different if my native language weren’t English or I didn’t work in the US, but then that’s just about the relative economic importance of various languages and not some inherent property of multilingualism.

Yeah. That's why the argument about number of speakers is total bunk,for example.

It's all about the economic weight of those speakers and the desirability of living in the countries where the language is widely used.

There's a reason English is so far ahead of Mandarin or Hindi.

for me the rewards to learning (basic) German have been more personal than professional - attempting to speak with a German speaker in their native language generally makes it easier to bond with them.

Yeah that's completely reasonable, but there are a lot of people trying to sell you on career success that is a mirage. And it can be frustrating the people you want to talk with often speak English better than you speak the language you're learning, though that's more of a problem with some languages than others.

I think it may debunk the myth about ability to fix all false friends that some americans seemingly believe in.

Unsure what myth your referring to. The only thing I know about "false friends" in the context of learning languages are "false friend" words that sound similar but don't have similar meanings, like "embarrassed" in English and "embarazada" in Spanish (which means pregnant).

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