Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "intelligence"
Do Stupid People learn Languages faster?
When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, I started reading everything I could get my hands on written by William Burroughs. My father had come of age in the sixties, and had been a hippy himself, but when he saw me reading a copy of Queer during dinner one night, he shook his head and muttered, “My son is reading gay erotica.” Every time contains some palimpsest, some trace of the previous time, and Boomers were as much products of the 50s as the 60s.
Anyway, the part of Queer that always stuck with me had nothing to do with sex, and more to do with the tragic relationship between Burroughs’ alter-ego (I think his name was Lee) and a young, waifish lad who is sleeping with Lee because he wants the money the older gentleman doles out. One man wants love and the other wants money, and they compromise on sex.
I’ve never forgotten parts of the short book, though one statement that always stood out to me, above and beyond everything else, was when Lee noted his twinkish partner’s ability to pick up other languages rapidly. Since these two men (or one man and boy) are expats in Mexico, bilingualism is no negligible skill.
What always stuck with me specifically, though, is Lee’s observation that “Stupid people can learn a language quick and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.”
Is this true? As someone who majored in language (I have an MA in Germanistik) and works to maintain his German reading and speaking ability daily (to say nothing of my mostly-doomed efforts to learn Spanish), it’s an interesting question, one I could dwell on much longer probably than Burroughs, who seemed to toss the statement out in an offhanded way before resuming his tale of tequila, anal sex, and ayahuasca.
I don’t want to beat you up with linguistic theory, so suffice it to say that most models of language acquisition don’t view the brain so much as an ice tray, with limited space, or as a bathtub filled with water, whereby new languages cause some kind of displacement by their introduction, forcing other skills or languages out of the tub (so to speak) in order to make way for the new language.
That said, I have known people whose skills with their own mother tongues sometimes languished or got rusty as they developed their English skills. My buddy Sergey was from Moscow and we spent almost every day hanging around each other after school at the boarding school where I spent one year and half a semester before being expelled for reasons that aren’t relevant to tonight’s blog entry. Sergey did ESL (English as a Second Language) and worked on the Rosetta Stone program daily, and he even had a pocket translator into which he could type something in Cyrillic, hit a key, and then a machine translation would be spit out. It wasn’t perfect, but I usually got the gist of what he wrote on his little calculator-sized black device.
Sergey confessed that he sometimes forgot the occasional Russian word. His syntax and overall grasp and command of the language was never diminished, but he would sometimes struggle for a bit of vocab here and there. My Germanistik professor in the graduate program, a PhD who was a professional translator, would sometimes struggle with an English idiom, squint, and look to one of the German students (that is, students from Germany now in America) and ask them to tell him the English equivalent of some phrase he knew in German. The irony of an American asking a German to tell him an English phrase was not lost on me, and makes me think that, as primitive as the models are, the “bathtub” or the “ice tray” concepts may have some truth to them, beyond their utility as abstractions.
But neuroscientific efforts to find literal places in the wrinkled convolutions of our brains that correspond to models usually only get so far, reaching far more dead ends than doorways. To the best of my knowledge, no one has literally located an “id” in the brain (though parallels can be drawn between mediating stratum of the brain and impulse control; i.e., you hear people talking about the reptilian brain as the id).
A lot of what we know about which areas of our brain control what comes from a horrific workplace accident in the 19th century, in which a railroad worker had a spike driven through his skull and somehow not only lived, but managed to function (although with considerable detriment to some of his social skills and probably with quite a few headaches thrown in for good measure).
Returning to the central question, which, again, I hesitate to regard as rhetorical: Do stupid people learn languages easier?
I would say that practical-minded people learn the mechanics of a language faster, that is, basics regarding prices, bargaining, locations, asking where the bathroom is, etc. I think creative, abstraction-inclined, and more probing types prefer to first master the syntactical rules and idioms of the new language, and approach the actual speaking of the language cautiously, as if it were a prized relic, albeit one heavily boobytrapped. Learning a language, and thinking one can speak it can sometimes backfire in humiliating ways the first time you try to communicate something and fail. It’s even worse if you get laughed at and the trauma can have a chilling effect on further attempts to speak to the locals in their own tongue.
I had a Dominican friend in the Army who, knowing that the Spanish word for “pregnant” was embarazado, asked a pregnant American woman if she was embarrassed, as he pointed to the bulge at her midsection. An anecdote involving an inverse form of embarrassment deals with my friend who went to a Mexican restaurant, forgot to pay for his carryout, and said (in earshot of all the Mexican staff). “Yo soy embarazado.”
He thought he was expressing embarrassment, and turned out to be confessing that he was pregnant. If he’d been embarrassed and blushing before, he was definitely humiliated and flushing crimson now.
My closing caveat to tonight’s question of language acquisition rates of the dumb versus the smart is to point out that a certain laziness or torpor (not necessarily stupidity) probably clouds the speakers in the dominant culture’s ability to acquire the language of those in the less powerful nations and cultures. You’ve no doubt heard someone commenting on the ubiquity of the English language, and how this is related to the fact that the Atlanticist bloc (America and England) conquered the world, by every method of conveyance from the ship to the hydrogen bomb. This is usually phrased as “English is a language with an army.”
Put another way, if the man who pays you to do work speaks English, and he need only pantomime to tell you what work to do, then you will probably learn his language faster than he learns yours. Conquerors are sometimes curious about those they conquered. Whites strangely began the fetishizing of Native Americans shortly after they pretty much annihilated them, though this doesn’t always extend to language acquisition.
In general, Vae victis (“Woe to the Vanquished”) may include horrors like enslavement, mass rape, and things like forcible conversion to the enemy’s religion. One of the few upsides of being defeated is learning a new language (assuming you aren’t killed outright) while still speaking your own, and thus knowing your enemy better than he knows you. It’s this kind of asymmetry between the powerful and the powerless that allows the weaker party to succeed, sometimes in literal combat (see the U.S. involvement in Vietnam).
Anyway, the part of Queer that always stuck with me had nothing to do with sex, and more to do with the tragic relationship between Burroughs’ alter-ego (I think his name was Lee) and a young, waifish lad who is sleeping with Lee because he wants the money the older gentleman doles out. One man wants love and the other wants money, and they compromise on sex.
I’ve never forgotten parts of the short book, though one statement that always stood out to me, above and beyond everything else, was when Lee noted his twinkish partner’s ability to pick up other languages rapidly. Since these two men (or one man and boy) are expats in Mexico, bilingualism is no negligible skill.
What always stuck with me specifically, though, is Lee’s observation that “Stupid people can learn a language quick and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.”
Is this true? As someone who majored in language (I have an MA in Germanistik) and works to maintain his German reading and speaking ability daily (to say nothing of my mostly-doomed efforts to learn Spanish), it’s an interesting question, one I could dwell on much longer probably than Burroughs, who seemed to toss the statement out in an offhanded way before resuming his tale of tequila, anal sex, and ayahuasca.
I don’t want to beat you up with linguistic theory, so suffice it to say that most models of language acquisition don’t view the brain so much as an ice tray, with limited space, or as a bathtub filled with water, whereby new languages cause some kind of displacement by their introduction, forcing other skills or languages out of the tub (so to speak) in order to make way for the new language.
That said, I have known people whose skills with their own mother tongues sometimes languished or got rusty as they developed their English skills. My buddy Sergey was from Moscow and we spent almost every day hanging around each other after school at the boarding school where I spent one year and half a semester before being expelled for reasons that aren’t relevant to tonight’s blog entry. Sergey did ESL (English as a Second Language) and worked on the Rosetta Stone program daily, and he even had a pocket translator into which he could type something in Cyrillic, hit a key, and then a machine translation would be spit out. It wasn’t perfect, but I usually got the gist of what he wrote on his little calculator-sized black device.
Sergey confessed that he sometimes forgot the occasional Russian word. His syntax and overall grasp and command of the language was never diminished, but he would sometimes struggle for a bit of vocab here and there. My Germanistik professor in the graduate program, a PhD who was a professional translator, would sometimes struggle with an English idiom, squint, and look to one of the German students (that is, students from Germany now in America) and ask them to tell him the English equivalent of some phrase he knew in German. The irony of an American asking a German to tell him an English phrase was not lost on me, and makes me think that, as primitive as the models are, the “bathtub” or the “ice tray” concepts may have some truth to them, beyond their utility as abstractions.
But neuroscientific efforts to find literal places in the wrinkled convolutions of our brains that correspond to models usually only get so far, reaching far more dead ends than doorways. To the best of my knowledge, no one has literally located an “id” in the brain (though parallels can be drawn between mediating stratum of the brain and impulse control; i.e., you hear people talking about the reptilian brain as the id).
A lot of what we know about which areas of our brain control what comes from a horrific workplace accident in the 19th century, in which a railroad worker had a spike driven through his skull and somehow not only lived, but managed to function (although with considerable detriment to some of his social skills and probably with quite a few headaches thrown in for good measure).
Returning to the central question, which, again, I hesitate to regard as rhetorical: Do stupid people learn languages easier?
I would say that practical-minded people learn the mechanics of a language faster, that is, basics regarding prices, bargaining, locations, asking where the bathroom is, etc. I think creative, abstraction-inclined, and more probing types prefer to first master the syntactical rules and idioms of the new language, and approach the actual speaking of the language cautiously, as if it were a prized relic, albeit one heavily boobytrapped. Learning a language, and thinking one can speak it can sometimes backfire in humiliating ways the first time you try to communicate something and fail. It’s even worse if you get laughed at and the trauma can have a chilling effect on further attempts to speak to the locals in their own tongue.
I had a Dominican friend in the Army who, knowing that the Spanish word for “pregnant” was embarazado, asked a pregnant American woman if she was embarrassed, as he pointed to the bulge at her midsection. An anecdote involving an inverse form of embarrassment deals with my friend who went to a Mexican restaurant, forgot to pay for his carryout, and said (in earshot of all the Mexican staff). “Yo soy embarazado.”
He thought he was expressing embarrassment, and turned out to be confessing that he was pregnant. If he’d been embarrassed and blushing before, he was definitely humiliated and flushing crimson now.
My closing caveat to tonight’s question of language acquisition rates of the dumb versus the smart is to point out that a certain laziness or torpor (not necessarily stupidity) probably clouds the speakers in the dominant culture’s ability to acquire the language of those in the less powerful nations and cultures. You’ve no doubt heard someone commenting on the ubiquity of the English language, and how this is related to the fact that the Atlanticist bloc (America and England) conquered the world, by every method of conveyance from the ship to the hydrogen bomb. This is usually phrased as “English is a language with an army.”
Put another way, if the man who pays you to do work speaks English, and he need only pantomime to tell you what work to do, then you will probably learn his language faster than he learns yours. Conquerors are sometimes curious about those they conquered. Whites strangely began the fetishizing of Native Americans shortly after they pretty much annihilated them, though this doesn’t always extend to language acquisition.
In general, Vae victis (“Woe to the Vanquished”) may include horrors like enslavement, mass rape, and things like forcible conversion to the enemy’s religion. One of the few upsides of being defeated is learning a new language (assuming you aren’t killed outright) while still speaking your own, and thus knowing your enemy better than he knows you. It’s this kind of asymmetry between the powerful and the powerless that allows the weaker party to succeed, sometimes in literal combat (see the U.S. involvement in Vietnam).
