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So my friends and I were discussing some stuff today, and we somehow ended up on the topic of Asians. One of them proposed a theory, after discussing how Asian's get the highest marks and stuff (stereotyping half the planet ftw!), that if one person knows a complex language, the said person is more intelligent. How far do you guys agree?
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I for one, do not agree. At all. Serbian isn't an easy language, but at least 70% of Serbs I know are just plain old stupid. And I've went to an international school in my teen years, and I can say that most the kids that were speaking more complex languages like Mandarin, were in the average, oftentimes below average.
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Lots of Singaporeans hate Chinese, and throw it all away after 16 when it's not compulsory anymore, but we do tend to score better in tests.
It's a bit subjective isn't it? Any language will be easy if you learn it since you can first speak. To the Chinese, English is a hard language, because they have no where needed to use tenses in the past, or such a range of phonetics, or such sentence structures.
I think it's just both a combination of genetics, which has been proven before, and sheer hard work.
Of course, if you learn a new language, you ''think'' differently. I'm sure you think differently in Serbian, compared to English, just as I think differently if I switch to English from Chinese. Maybe that affects it, but I'm no linguist.
Well my joke for why Asians are so smart would probably not be the best thing to put here.
Anyway, no. Knowing a complex language doesn't make you more intelligent. It is more of the standards they have. Over there you have to be better then everyone else and have the highest grades. They push grades more then they do in Europe and the US.
i dont agree that its the level of difficulty. i do think language has a lot to do with it though. i can read 2 different types of japanese writings and each of them has like 46 letters. now it was proven that the more you teach children and play with them and complicated things and train their memory the "smarter" (i guess thats subjective?) they get. now think about it, the avarage child in america (and mostly europe) needs to memorize 26 letters. a japanese child learns 2 alphabets (which means eighty something letters) before he enters 1st grade. i think that is what developes the childs mind and that is why most asians are considered (i really dont know the facts) smart.
those children memorize double (and sometimes they actually learn the english alphabet too before entering 1st grade since they use that one too) the amount we have to.
i dont agree that its the level of difficulty. i do think language has a lot to do with it though. i can read 2 different types of japanese writings and each of them has like 46 letters. now it was proven that the more you teach children and play with them and complicated things and train their memory the "smarter" (i guess thats subjective?) they get. now think about it, the avarage child in america (and mostly europe) needs to memorize 26 letters. a japanese child learns 2 alphabets (which means eighty something letters) before he enters 1st grade. i think that is what developes the childs mind and that is why most asians are considered (i really dont know the facts) smart.
Yeah, but hiragana and katakana are the same phonetically, whereas English has many different sounds (since we combine our letters to form different sounds, whereas hiragana and katakana "letters" are more or less their own syllables, with the possible exception of su and n). Also, we have many different spellings for the same sound (two too to), and often one spelling might have different pronunciations (bass and bass). In contrast, hiragana ka is always pronouced "ka". In many ways, English is a very complicated language, if only because it is home to so many exceptions.
To put it another way, we can write all of hiragana and katakana in romanji, but the Japanese have no character for sounds like "the" or "Brick".
Basically, simplicity is actually pretty complicated.
but thats not the point. they have to remember more symbols and that is what evolves a childs mind. think about kanji. the point isnt the fact what the letter sounds like. the point is that there are so many different symbols to remember and such an excercise (spelled wrong?) really developes memory.
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