alt Hacker News> im not convinced multiple languages made me smarter either...
I used to work in the language learning space, and I personally think that the idea that speaking multiple languages makes you smarter is mostly a myth. It definitely does expand your mind a bit and gives you the ability to express some ideas more concisely, but I don’t feel like it’s made me smarter in the same way that learning to code, or reading books has.
Replies
I don't agree that you should necessarily feel smarter by speaking multiple languages. The health benefits are well-established. For example, bilingualism is known to delay the onset of Alzheimer's, though the strength of the effect is dependent one's use of those languages (actively speaking vs passive knowledge).
I suppose you could liken it to eating nuts more regularly. It might not make you feel healthier, but physiologically it is doing that.
Learning foreign languages can spur you to read more books, and books you might not have read before, thereby making you more informed.
Recently I learned Arabic to directly work with some sources in my branch of academia, and to be a better guest who can make some basic conversation when I travel to über-hospitable Arab countries. But going through the reading selections in my Classical Arabic textbooks revealed a whole canon of interesting literature on Middle East and world history over centuries. I have been eating that stuff up, and I probably never would have learned about it through languages I already knew; indeed a striking amount has never been translated.