Posted by Anon84 6 days ago
To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English. I think it's because even though I moved to Spain over seven years ago, I never fully immersed myself in the culture. I'm pretty sure I haven't read a single book in Spanish.
I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent.
Anyway, I can attest that grappling with a language you haven't quite mastered is a daily mini-puzzle that definitely keeps the brain working a bit harder than it otherwise would.
On a side note, I love that LLMs can handle so many languages now. After 17 years of living abroad, I still feel most at ease speaking my native language, Russian, even though my vocabulary is a bit lacking these days for more complex topics. It makes me completely understand why people prefer to receive medical care in their native tongue.
Isn't that a thing everyone does? I don't have as many languages as you, but when I finally got to the point where I could reliably do what you're describing in Japanese, I felt like I had actually achieved a baseline level of fluency for the first time. The flywheel became self-perpetuating vs. my French, where every sentence is a struggle.
Not asking to be argumentative, btw -- just wondering what's on the other side.
P.S. I've typed this out in English after having achieved such unlock.
So, if you know the entire language, then you can complete your thought. But if you only know the common parts of the language then you may need to start over with a different sentence structure in order to express your thought.
Maybe that maps to C1 vs C2? At C1 you can express your thoughts with occasional backtracking, but at C2 you almost never need to backtrack?
The C1/C2 divide does seem to mix up that concept and the idea of "looking for the right word". I sort of understand what it's getting at, but it's unclear.
I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly. Now you have two problems:
1. You need to retroactively rephrase your whole sentence to present the same information in a different style, because that's the way this language does it. This works best if you can change the past.
2. You probably don't know the correct thing to say, or you wouldn't have made that mistake to begin with.
Yeah, I get that. Then later, you get to a point where you're largely not translating from your native language at all (i.e. "thinking in X"), and you just can't remember the word in the adopted language, so you need to re-route. Worst case, that ends up kicking you back up to your native language, and you're back to translation, which is like shifting into 1st gear on the highway.
I think my point is (to the extent that I have one) that being able to route around the issue in the second language is itself a fundamental form of fluency. That, plus being able to reliably receive definitions of words spoken in the new language are like the lambda calculus of speech. You can forget words all day long (and, believe me, many older people do!) but still be "fluent" if you never have to fall back to your old language as a crutch.
Anyway, I'm not trying to disagree with the broad notion -- there's clearly a point at which you're grasping around less like a foreign-language person, and more like a native person.
Meanwhile in Chinese earlier I forgot how to say "shallow" so settled for "not deep"
For example, in the linked clip[^1], the speaker says:
"uh the European Union uh that's not a US creation that's a you guys creation so don't ex..[abandoned word] the strength of the west [abandoned sentence] and the west is a really I don't know what"
[^1]: https://youtu.be/_hBd8w-Hlm4?si=7-kvpUoeYo5ODPiI&t=787
Tho levels are often described and measured by what you are capable of, and not by what you do, or what you like to do. This includes: being able to understand others, and being able to create correct and appropriate text.
> With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
There are several concepts/situations here weaved together, but the two main are:
- artistic intent, playfulness
- inability to speak correctly
(edit: BTW these two are closely related, since both are mostly just using patterns in places where they are not commonly used, and breaking them would be preferred)
A1 level is "can barely speak the language, can maybe order a baguette"
C2 is ~native level
Most native speakers would be hard pressed to be certified as C2 in their own language. I think a lot would fail C1 because they don’t know/use some of their language quirks which would be evaluated. I know for a fact that I can’t properly use some modes and tenses in my native language without a rule book.
An unlocking would be less idiomatic IMO.
"achieving unlock" is grammatically incorrect (im a native English speaker), if its idiomatic then of course that's different, but I wouldn't put that down as being "fluent," id put it down to be exposed to those specific idioms. It's not just about using the verb as a noun; where is the indefinite article?
If the gp was making a "I can has cheeseburgers?" style joke, then it went over my head, but it clearly is not grammatically correct English just because its used online.
English takes this to pro level, of course.
It's much more common when you're multilingual, because you think in combination of all the languages you know and you only realize you're missing the specific word when you get to them trying to express the thoughts on the fly.
Sometimes it's not because you're not fluent - it's simply because the concept isn't expressible in the target language with that particular sentence structure you started with.
Typical example is English "I like him" vs Russian "on mne nravitsya" (+- he for me is desirable). If you start saying "I" you're already wrong.
It even happens within one language in highly inflected languages - because you wanted to say one thing, then changed the word to a better - but the sentence structure doesn't work with that new word, so you have to go back mid-sentence or make a grammatical mistake).
Fluency is a very high level to reach. Most people are merely conversational in the foreign languages they speak and that’s more than enough for most interactions.
This happens to me even when I speak my native language(s). Once you become multilingual, this is a fact of life.
That happens to me more with my bative language (german) than secondary (english) nowadays.
I feel the same, albeit on a much lower level. Somehow Spanish just feels strange to me. For instance, a subject in Spanish often gets placed after the verb in a sentence, so I constantly have to figure out where the subject is: is it before the verb? after the verb? Or there's no subject and the conjugation of the verb implies the subject? I guess it's just a matter of time to get familiar with the verbs and it takes time. Also, listening comprehension is a huge problem for me. Even discerning words from conversations is very challenging. When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. However, I can read simple novels like El Alquimista now, yet I could only understand what was said in Extra at best with a super focus. In contrast, listening to Japanese is much easier for some reason, even though my level of Japanese is way below N5 (equivalent to Spanish's A1).
Friends does some interesting linguistic things. One of my favorite examples:
You told me to go out and be a caterer, so I went! I be'd!
Monica isn't making a mistake there. But I would be very surprised if someone who was just learning the language understood that joke.
however, my kids are soaking up languages like a sponge. we speak Hungarian at home, English and Hungarian with our friends, and they speak both Swiss German and German at school, so they are already trilingual.
I know several families where the parents brings their own language, they speak English as a common language at home and the kids learn German/Swiss German at school, so that makes them... quadlingial?
My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am.
German, I have no such problem despite being far weaker at the language imo.
I noticed a similar thing listening to many English people trying to speak Spanish. I could hear that the native English speaker pronounced the vowel sounds of a Spanish word incorrectly - but that the English speaker could not tell. Very common if Spanish word learnt from reading and trying to pronounce it as English might. I also hear a similar reading mistake from other countries trying to speak English.
English can have extreme vowel variation - e.g. jokes based on bending vowel sounds to change word meaning. Spanish has a few vowel sounds and they seem very similar in different countries. English accents often change vowel sounds dramatically - so English speakers are not as aware of the importance of speaking vowels correctly. As a New Zealander, our vowel sounds trip up other English speakers.
I'm not sure how we learn to fix it when our hearing or sound formation is incorrect. Someone to incessantly correct one's mistakes does help but that level of patience is hard to find.
I know that I still can't hear or say nasal sounds correctly in other languages.
There's a massive variety of vowel sounds in English: Sydney, Irish, Boston, Indian, etcetera.
English speakers can often hear the differences, and many people can produce the different vowels when mimicking the accents (country, city, person, foreigner).
Most classes and individual teachers won't do that. They'll either think "Eh, good enough for a foreigner" and shrug, or they'll say "That's wrong" and repeat the correct sound at you, which won't fix the problem.
Sometimes changes happen in one language. There is a huge difference between the Received Pronunciation (RP) version of British English that was the standard up to around the early 90s, and the Estuary English that became mainstream after that.
I've always been curious about how the non-English world feels about hearing their language spoken with a strong "English" accent. Dont they just get on with it? As a native English speaker I'm totally unfazed by strongly accented English: Indian accents, Chinese accents, Italian etc. For example Italians rarely pronounce the H in house (presumably because H is silent in Italian). Even twists like unusual word stress patterns or prnounciations are easily figured out on the fly.
I know that Parisians are supposed to be one exception: infamously snooty about visitors speaking French absolutely perfectly. But fpr everyone else, it's 2025 and we live in a world of mass tourism and mass migration. Are the non-English still fazed by English accents and insistent on audible correctness?
Growing up in the US I was similarly comfortable with accents. Having lived ~10 years in China/Taiwan I struggle now. For instance I often can't understand Australians at all. It's completely incomprehensible. British English is a bit of a strain sometimes
Similarly Chinese in China have little exposure to non-native speakers so I often find people can't understand me. While in Taiwan you can use the wrong tones and grammar and people don't have any issues figuring it out
But for instance a lot of local people really struggle with Indian English bc it's seldom used in the media landscape, while for me it sounds natural bc a lot of my colleagues speak it
I have a friend who struggled to understand thick Latin American accents. I understand a lot of accents by now well enough, but I somewhat recently spoke to a Nigerian person for the first time in my life and it was a struggle.
I'm not even getting into languages that have a high degree of tonality or homophony going on. That's an entire extra layer of difficulty when your counterparty in the conversation is not fluent.
I just finished A2 in community college. Many of my classmates were native English speakers or Russians.
Most of them are elderly and Spanish is their first foreign language. My Spanish is not good enough yet to judge pronunciation, but my impression is, that the russian accent is much more pronounced when beginners speak German or English than in Spanish.
The older Brits and Irish that learned no other foreign language before have a very hard time even realising their English accent.
And when I first started working with Indians that were still in India, I had to adjust my speech and slow down a lot because they struggled with my southern accent.
Despite having worked 10x harder at it than I did Portuguese or Spanish. When speaking those two languages, it’s close enough to a correct accent that people often will ask if my family is Latino or Portuguese once they hear that im American or hear my English. This hasn’t happened 5 times but so many, I just assume it will happen now.
However my experience has been different in French, even if it’s obvious I’ve worked very hard at French (C1 now), my French friends are not begging to speak to me in French unless they have limited English skills… just because my pronunciation/cadence/intonation isn’t quite right or even remotely ok, despite having much more immersion in French than those other two languages. French also feels like I’m singing at a concert rather that just conversing.
Just sometimes your culture/brain/ linguistic mix result in happy or unhappy accidents.
Edit I’m sure someone will bring up cultural differences but I have several multilingual friends .. they all say my Spanish is beautiful and nearly to a person criticize my French (in a helpful friendly manner), this is true if they’re Latin American or French. Just seriously it’s a thing, brains are weird.
There's an explanation for this
The opposite is to remain closed. This is a dangerous state of mind and culture.
From TFA:
all these studies take for granted the uncontroversial mental superpower that you get from language study: being able to talk to people you could not have otherwise.
Talking to more people in more contexts is a practical affordance: having more tools in the shop means being able to handle new and different types of problems effectively. People solve problems working together with people.
Having the cognitive adaptability to use new and different tools is certainly a valuable quality. We can nurture it as a learning objective, but it may may not be as universalisable as we have hoped. That said, the cost of not trying to educate people is to fail even worse.
Reading and thinking and studying can be done alone just fine.
Now as far as effectiveness in the real world, yes, social interactions and fluency is needed, but I believe this to be different from being "sharp". It probably helps keep you looking sharp though.
Even excepting COVID, in the elderly the difference with social isolation can be night and day. I have witnessed firsthand one's cognitive deterioration reversed when the person moved into an assisted living community and gained a social life, and then when COVID hit and everyone was locked down the decay set in again
Sure, but I think this is more about the fact that what you don't use, you lose. Learning languages is hard, so even learning old Greek keeps you brain sharp as long as you enjoy it to some extent.
Gym for the brain is good, what you do with it can be better, but gym is still good.
1. Maybe that’s not their fault, as they are ostensibly interested only in the biology. But it still seems like a major hole when discussing the benefits of being bilingual.
It's probably why I was able to get proficient in Japanese but more Anglosphere-adjacent languages felt boring.
People from Paraguay speak both Spanish and Guarani. A lot of people from Mexico speak both Spanish and Mayan.
Does that have the same effect as the son of a family that speaks English and German?
She once told me that she likes to read conversational books like “Greg’s Tagebuch” in German while “Harry Potter” type books in English.
(I then added English)
Languages are (metaphorically) the key to a culture which can configure your thinking. Some words that are obscure or technical in one language are used more commonly in others. A little example is that in Spain it's common to use the jugular vein for a number of idioms. I know for a fact most French speakers have never heard of it and I think it's also not that common for English speakers.
For the most part, I don't feel like it has made me any sharper. Had I taken the ~2000 hours I'm in the hole for so far and spent them on going to the gym and sleeping more I'm nearly certain that would have had a much larger effect on my day to day mental acuity. Had I spent it on my career I'd probably be substantially richer. I probably have another ~2000 to go before I reach a level where I'm happy plateauing.
In general I think it's very hard to justify learning a foreign language when subjected to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis. I persist mostly because I just really, really, really want to reach true proficiency, not the fake proficiency that gets you an A in Spanish or Latin class, as I outlined in [1]. If you don't have a similar drive your time and energy is probably better spent elsewhere.
[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/thoughts-on-language-learning-at-the...
In general I think it's very hard to justify learning a foreign language when subjected to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis.
Part of this, of course, is that we're now talking very different goals with different levels of commitment required. You can pick up enough of any language to be fun at a bar in a single digit precentage of the time it takes to become professionally fluent with it. The opportunity cost really is at least one, and maybe two, orders of magnitude lower here, depending on how much "My practice needs to be fun" matters to you.
Empirically, from both personal experience and personal observation: Most people who move countries, if they're not already moving as working class professionals with a preexisting command of the native language, just find it much easier to settle into enclaves of similar immigrants and try to interact with the broader society with help from that community. This was as true in the US as it is in Finland, and I've known a lot of immigrants from a lot of different backgrounds throughout my life. Like seeks like everywhere alike.
My attempt at being the opposite of this person puts me at odds with most other immigrants I have known. I'm actually the only person I've met here so far who has actually read a complete, non-selkosuomi book in Finnish without being a native or heritage speaker, for example. "Can read an ordinary book written for adults" is not exactly a high bar to pass in absolute terms for any language, but it's higher than what the vast majority of people will ever do in one they didn't grow up with.
A "normal" existence in a populous, monolingual country may not involve other languages... But human language is remarkably various in the world. Even on HN, knowing a set of non-natural semantics (e.g. coding) is a common profession.
Most employers don't pay handsomely for multilingualism, but they do pay software workers well.
I don't see why the situation would be any different if your airdropped, say, a 25 year old person who grew up in eg quadrilingual Luxembourg into eg extremely monolingual Yakutsk, and act like their childhood means they can suddenly master the native tongue there without hundreds to thousands of hours of unpaid effort.
They would probably do a lot better spending that time, well, getting out of Yakutsk. Assuming no one is holding them there at gunpoint.
To focus on the linguistic challenge of living in Yakutsk, we can agree that a) learning a new language takes time, and b) the Luxembourgish languages might be some help (but not much) for learning Turkic and Russian.
> act like their childhood means they can suddenly master the native tongue
But there are many cases where those languages would be an advantage. Say, in learning Spanish and English.
People can and do learn languages. Some people are better at it than others. But people emigrate (or escape, as you say) and adapt.
Programming languages are a (simplified) subset of human languages. Programmers learn a marketable skill. (I use about five programming languages at work.) Employers will pay people well for programming -- better than I have seen people paid for speaking several human languages.
The way that people complain about programming languages (simplified as they are!) is somewhat related to broader struggles with learning human languages.
Person B: "And yet some people learn X! And X is superficially similar to Y, which tons of people do with much less time investment for much more money! Checkmate!"
I have no idea what your actual argument here is. This follow up isn't doing any favors.
---
My experience is that you reach "fluency" in your first programming language in about an order of magnitude less time than you can any human language. Python took me about a summer of teenage study at about 2 hours a day to feel comfortable with. Most further programming languages took an order of magnitude time less than that.
Human languages by contrast demand no less from the vast majority of people than 1000 hours of practice in the easiest cases for one to feel comfortable with them. There is a reason you can major in Swedish at Harvard but not Python. It is the same reason you can graduate having majored in Swedish at Harvard without actually being fluent in Swedish. It's the same reason. 1000 hours is a long time, and that is as easy as it gets.
You are drawing a strange and false equivalence between these two things, and I'm just not really sure what your point is. If your point is "these are secretly the same activity", my strongest response is "quantity has a quality all its own".
> Age plays a role too. Studies suggest that the effects of languages on the brain are stronger for young children and the old than they are for young adults. Bilingual tots seem to outperform in cognitive development in the early years, but their monolingual classmates may catch up with them later. One meta-analysis on the topic found that 25 studies of 45 found a bilingual advantage in children younger than six, while only 17 found them in children aged 6-12.
That's gonna be a let down to most people who read the title and make assumptions.
I acknowledge that "bilingual tots seem to outperform in cognitive development in the early years" seems both intuitive and logical.
This is a string of words that we'd expect to find together. We'd almost be offended if they weren't. Because both bilingualism and learning more things are better.
My concern over the reference to this research is that early cognitive development milestones are largely language acquisition milestones, and it has long been known that language acquisition is somewhat behind in bilingual tots. Rather than accelerated.
Generally, it is assumed that bilingual child development metrics will later catch up to those of their peer group.
Which is the inverse of "their monolingual classmates may catch up with them later".
Bilingual children aren't actually cognitively delayed, if only marginally on the face of their assessments, but rather they tend toward having a temporary delay in language acquisition due to to their bilingual environment. With any cognitive development disadvantage that this could theoretically cause essentially being non-risk.
However, I've never seen anything that indicates performant development due to bilingualism. Just the opposite, to a statistically relevant degree. Even if only marginally behind.
This is textbook information and part of the body of knowledge of language acquisition. It's not a vanguard research topic.
Of course, speaking a language is only part of the bigger puzzle: staying curious and immersing yourself in the cultures and thoughts of people from diverse backgrounds is IMO even more important and beneficial. While translation is excellent and very convenient today due to the globalization, I’d say it's very hard to understand the people of a particular culture if you don’t understand what they natively and rawly say on various social media platforms. Mainstream media and news paper don’t necessarily reflect these sentiments and predispositions. In fact, they may even hide these “small voices” very well. So, there are clear benefits to using many languages.
Everyone in my neighborhood who was not economically okay spoke different language than English.
I think it hurts more than helps when you are polylingual if you decide to spend majority of time in country like United States.
I have collected a lot of data around this. Time and time again, I can prove with data, that native english langauge speakers outperform anyone else. Whether it is college admissions, admissions to incubators like Y Combinator, job opportunities, sports opportunities, housing opportunities and more. If language is the sole factor to be considered, then polylinguals do not win.
When you speak a foreign language than English, you accent is bound to be messed up. Look at Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans or other people who speak dual langauge. There is always something off about their accent. This leads to acceptance and at time getting asked "are you american" or "were you born here?"
I am not saying dont learn foreign language. But, language is one aspect of being polylingual. You just dont speak words. Words have meaning and they are deeply ingrained in cultures.
If you know long term where you want to be, learn and speak and immerse yourself in the culture. Otherwise you are just creating more noise for social media points and making it harder for yourself to be a master of one language.
That's not true, in this case it is simply the accent they learn because everyone around them has this accent.
But learning different languages when young doesn't mean one develops a foreign accent. I know Flemish people of Vietnamese origins who speak correct Vietnamese as well as Flemish with a perfectly good farmer accent from West Flanders. And their kids speak native French with a neutral (French) accent in addition to native Flemish, because the French speakers in their family are French and not Belgian.
When learning languages young, accents don't creep from one language to the other, that happens when one learns a language later on.
It probably only matter as an item in the list of falsehood about speech recognition, definitely not something that deserve to be described as "messed up", but it's also not not true.
Vocab is easy to learn, losing one’s native accent is exponentially harder the older you learn a language, and as you probably know only through hard work with an accent coach you can eliminate that uncanny valley between fluent second-language speaker and native.
Also, not everyone wants to invest in a coach unless they really have to. You can learn a language on your own, not everybody has time, money and need to hire an accent coach.
in the case of Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans, I've seen that it's not about the accent, but about the vocalization: there are some sounds that are exclusive to English that simply don't exist in Indian languages. As an example: the "f" or "v" sound - made by lightly touching your bottom lip to your upper teeth and then blowing air through (unvocalized for "f" and vocalized for "v").
Similarly for "th" - you stick your tongue out between your teeth and the sound of the air flowing through that restriction is what defines the "th" (vocalized or unvocalized). I guarantee that if you start making these sounds in these ways, you will be seen as closer to a native speaker of English.
If an accent is too strong, yes it can be a hinderance but English is a very flexible language and native speakers are very quick to adapt to variations because we grow up with large regional variations. We expect it.
In most cases having some varience in accent is charming.
I've been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world in my personal experience I may occationally ask you to repeat something but I'll lock in soon enough.
We used to have a TV show in the UK called "Rab C. Nesbitt"[1] about a guy from Glasgow with a seemingly impenitrable accent. Here's the thing though, you'd watch the first 5 minutes and not understand a word ...and then sunddenly you get it. If it works for him it will work for you.
This is when I realised it was getting serious. But he’s a Norwegian born in the 40s, so talking about his mental health and opening up to him is near impossible.
I did call him out on these massive lapses in memory, but jokingly though.
However, without formally addressing anything, he started out of no where and never, ever before doing it my entire life: sudoku.
1-2 hours a day, then more, all the time.
He’s now in his mid 80s and as sharp as ever.
I know he went and saw a GP, and they prescribed sodoku.
But the effectiveness of it, taken seriously, is absolutely incredible.
You know when you are learning something and you get to that point where it is kind of a strain. That feeling that is kind of tense, exhausting but intriguing, all because you are about to get that thing. It is the transition from something being purely cognitive and moving into behavior intuition, like playing an instrument.
That is the thing that, in part, is keeping you sharp.
I say in part because don't forget your physical health, diet and social health. They all contribute.
David Sedaris did a long interview on learning French (he also became proficient late in life) where he said something like: when you first start learning a language, everything is new and interesting. Eventually you become fluent, you get into a pattern, and 'living in a foreign country' is just 'living'. (heavily paraphrased -- I'll try to find the original).
Anyway, my point is that I think "learning a language" is probably as good as anything else when it comes to "brain stimulation", but in my opinion, the real value comes from being completely immersed in a new culture and kicked forcefully out of any sense of routine.
Edit: interview is here - https://www.thisamericanlife.org/165/transcript
Relevant bit:
---
Someday, David says, he'll be more comfortable in French. His accent will improve and that daily anxiety will be removed from his life.
David Sedaris: But when it is removed from me, then I probably won't be interested in living here anymore. I'll probably leave.
Ira Glass: Because it'll be just like living back home.
David Sedaris: Plus the more you learn, the more disappointed you wind up being. It's easy to like somebody when you don't know what they're saying.
It is funny that at the start literally everyone is interesting, even the most boring conversations. I was more of a blank slate and more likeable too. That's gone away, but the things I enjoy are more enjoyable in a deeper way, and the scope of things I can do is larger. Goes both ways imo.
Yes! I've found the same thing.
> That's gone away
Also noticing this -- I knew that it would happen, but was surprised that it didn't take very much fluency before the natural human tendency to judge people re-appeared.
> ...but the things I enjoy are more enjoyable in a deeper way, and the scope of things I can do is larger. Goes both ways imo.
That's good to hear. I'm about to come back for another extended round, so I worry about the other stuff fading over time.
Your mind, body, and any skill will deteriorate over time if not regularly trained, so it must become a part of your life.
And because of this, the answer is easy - do what is permanently and realistically sustainable for yourself. It doesn't matter what's best when you're only going to really keep with things that are personally satisfying for yourself.
The only physical skill I have that might be comparable is typing, but (as a programmer) even after typing for over 40 years, while I can type without "thinking" about where the keys are, I can usually type only three or four words without needing to make a correction.
Worth mentioning I started when I was a kid. Learning something when you're young is so much easier due to the available time and the ability to obsess (this was also pre-internet mostly). When I try learning new instruments these days it takes much longer because I have responsibilities.
So may it really is about the journey, and any learning is good learning.
Beyond that, I'd say learning an instrument is probably a better investment than learning a language unless you need to learn the second language to live somewhere. This is because:
- language learning takes a LOT of time investment to show utility compared to using a translate app, while a lot of instruments are fun to play stuff on even when you suck
- Music is also a language, but it's a language of tonal relationships and how they map to emotion, and the emotional phrases they can form, which is more distinct than another spoken language.
- Learning an instrument also forces heavy bidirectional communication between brain hemispheres. Normally humans are very "one half brain then the other" so this encourages more plasticity.
Puzzles have been shown to be poor for cognitive development unless they closely model the cognitive task being measured, so don't bother unless you just really like puzzles.
I lived in Sweden for two years, in Finland for three, and for the last sixteen years I've been living in Germany. I learned a bit of Swedish via a beginners course. No Finnish whatsoever (it's a hard language, there was no need, and Swedish is an official language). When I moved to Germany, I refreshed what little German I knew in high school. So, I can mumble my way through a phone conversation, order food, and sit in meetings understanding maybe 80% of what is being discussed. The language is similar enough to Dutch that I can usually pick it apart if people don't mumble too much. I butcher the grammar and have the vocabulary of a five year old. And this does not bother me too much.
Undeniably, improving my German would be useful to me. But the thing is, people don't appreciate how much of a time commitment it is to learn a language properly. And the simple fact is that this is not an enjoyable activity to me. And we're talking many thousands of hours! I usually have more fun, useful, interesting, etc. things to do and am not exactly bored. And I need my downtime as well. Also, learning in your downtime doesn't work in any case. I know two languages well. Adding a third is not a priority to me. Certainly not getting that third language anywhere close to the level of the first two. So, not happening and I'm OK with that.
These days with LLMs and machine translations you don't need to speak any language other than your own. We're not that far away from being able to have direct conversations with anyone on this planet. Real time translations are not quite there yet but are starting to get usable. Native speakers of whatever will lose their home advantage. They'll no longer be needed as intermediaries. I find this very interesting. I think it will affect the status of English as the world's favorite second language.