Quote:
Originally Posted by rgeorg
I have read that bi-lingual children, brought up with up to 3 different languages from an early age, have more highly developed cognitive processes (are smarter in general than they would be otherwise). I suppose this is because they use more of the language-reasoning part of their brains at an earlier age? Has anyone else read this?
|
There is some research on this. What I've seen that appears to be solid is that bilingual children have advantages in learning to read earlier (possibly because they are already familiar with the idea that a word can have more than one "encoding") and have advantages learning additional languages. There are also some interesting brain studies showing that those who have been bilingual from an early age process language differently than those who acquire an additional language as an adult, but I don't know if this has been verified against adult learners who have spoken a second language for a comparable period of time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
I was thinking more of the self-study courses.
Rosetta Stone was the best of the bunch I test drove; but I didn't have the motivation to stick with it .  |
Unless you're studying classical Latin, I don't think you can really learn a language this way. There may eventually be computer-based systems that can detect and offer feedback on pronunciation (which Rosetta Stone claims to do, but does not), and there may eventually be computer systems that can handle simple conversations using correct grammar. Until these two processes are developed, I think the results are likely to be even worse than the kind of "pen of my aunt" memorization that goes on in poorly-taught middle-school classes.
That being said, the US Department of Defense has been funding a lot of work in this area, and one result is a series of language-learning video games which look quite promising, e.g.
http://www3.isi.edu/about-news_story.htm?s=155