Should ASIANS Learn their Mother Language? It Might Save Your Life...

Hey, hey, hey, you know, you have to learn Chinese or else you will have dementia and you will not remember anything. Bilingualism truly does prevent dementia. Then why aren't Asian-Americans rushing to the Asian language school right now? Yeah, Andrew, I'm sure you much regret your time spent goofing off in Saturday morning Chinese school. But don't worry, you're going to forget the whole thing anyway. Ha ha. All right, everybody. There's this new study that came out of Germany that linked people who can speak, who are bilingual, have a lower chance of developing dementia later in life. Yeah. Is it because they're just using what parts of their brain that other people are not using? Basically, the brain is like a muscle. Andrew, you keep your body tight, you keep your brain tight. Make sure you like, subscribe and turn on your notifications. Andrew, this study is a German study. Right. But it also went viral in some second generation immigrant worlds. Right. Because how good or bad we are at our mother tongue is kind of like a constant conversation in among second gen immigrant kids. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think a lot of Chinese schools got to pick up on this and a bunch of parents are probably going to use this to shame their kid like, hey, hey, hey, you know, you have to learn Chinese or else you will have dementia and you will not remember anything later in life. Yeah. So we're going to get into the comments section, our own takeaways again. Make sure you like, subscribe to your notifications. Andrew, somebody said this only works if you pick up the language later in life. It's almost like being 50 and picking up fitness. It's just like shocking your body. You're starting to do triathlons. You're starting to do weightlifting versus just being born into it. Well, I think what it is, it's like I think being born into it is probably usually better if you can. But you see that gigantic shift and that jump is even greater when you start it later in life. It's like working out versus like being born. Very athletic. It's like you still have to work very hard if you're that athletic person to be athletic. But if you're like coming from non-athletic to athletic, then you visually see that jump. Right. But it is easier to speak multiple languages when you are born into them. For sure. I mean, of course, if you're naturally gifted at something, it's always going to be easier. Somebody says your brain fires off more neural connections, the more deep multiple languages you use in everyday life. And a lot of people were bringing up a lot of questions. What constitutes as a language? What constitutes as a level of fluency is like restaurant Chinese enough, because that's what most ABC speak. Right. I wouldn't say they're like super fluent in like legal terms or collegiate terms. Yeah. Tiered academic terms. It's like restaurant stuff. I mean, what if you learn JavaScript for coding? Like, does that count as a different language? Or if you just know a bunch of slang, like, does that count as a language? Like, how well do you need to know that language? What if you can see music like Kanye? You can see music theory. Is that another language? I would imagine, honestly, that it does. I don't know. What if you're a mathematician? Does that count as a language? I guess what I'm saying is I'm sure all these things, memorizing, learning, constantly growing more wrinkles in your brain only can help you later in life. Somebody said for me, learning languages is way too hard for a lot of people are just going to be dumb in two different languages because it doesn't teach you any new knowledge. It just teaches you new vocab in another language. I'd rather just be smarter in one language like English. David, you know what my one of my excuses was for not learning like Chinese when I was younger? What? It was just that. Yeah. But like, look at all these people who speak Chinese. Like, I don't know. I just felt like I was just trying to like, I guess, adapt. And like, you know, you just try to be cool or you try to be like fluid in both cultures. But you kind of don't want to do the hard work of learning the language. Obviously, I kind of regret it. But I do think that's a lot of people's excuses. They're like, well, look, I'm good at English. I can talk to people. I'm social. So like, but look at this. My cousin who can speak both English and Chinese, he's bland in both languages. He feels robotic when he speaks English and when he feels speaks Chinese. I only speak pretty much English, even though I'm like a one out of ten in Chinese. But I'm charismatic. But look at me. No, I mean, I think that that's a valid point, because even though the brain has a limited capacity, Andrew, it's about time and effort and your own 24 hours. How do you spend them and how what's your absorption rate during that 24 hours? Moving on to topic number two, Andrew, the reason why this dementia article circulated in second generation immigrant communities is what? Do a lot of kids feel bad that they can't speak their mother tongue or do they want to? Do they feel some sense of morality that they need to communicate to grandma and grandpa more fluently? Or is it more like I guess if you're Chinese, for example, more for business reasons? Yeah, I mean, obviously I think it's case by case. Each family is different. Each kid sees a different amount of pride in knowing the culture or incentives outside incentives. But there's tons of reasons why obviously even Asian-Americans, even given the chance of a language school, don't learn the language that well. It takes a lot of time. It's hard to learn. Their parents don't want to put in the time to teach them. Maybe there's not a school nearby. Also, a lot of Asian parents, they kind of prioritize a child's success in America. So let's say the parents like, OK, you're going to be a lawyer. It's like, are you going to learn Mandarin well enough to do law in Chinese or are you just going to optimize your life and just be really good at English because you're going to be doing law in English most likely? Also, I guess like Eastern languages are quite different than English. They're like almost not connected at all whatsoever versus like another Latin or Germanic language like Spanish or German. Well, obviously, there's a lot of opportunity for Spanish speaking kids, whether like a second gen Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican kids in America to be able to speak Spanish. Right. Because America is actually connected to Latin America. I'm not I don't think there's a controversial comment. I think that learning Spanish or learning English when you're a Spanish speaker or learning Spanish when you're an English speaker is probably easier than learning Chinese when you're an English speaker. For sure. I still think I grew up hearing Mandarin and Cantonese probably every day and it would probably still be easier for me to learn Spanish just because I'm way more fluent in English and English and Spanish. Thirty percent of the words are cognates. Yeah, it's really it's really fun to pick up Spanish around America, whether you're east or west coast. Yeah. And it's I think also, let's be honest, Andrew, learning Spanish, it's like more of a fun, lively culture, sometimes Eastern languages, particularly East Asian. It feels almost like so Confucian and withheld. Like, why would you want to lean into that if you already feel like your house is already more Confucian than everybody around you, too? I'm just thinking, obviously, as you get older, you start to see the value in it. But as a young kid, I totally could see why you're just like, no. But now there's a lot more fun ways to learn Chinese that that it doesn't feel so much like an old parent or auntie teaching, you know, there's all these like Instagrams that can kind of keep you updated. But there there's one comment that said, knowing two languages isn't languages isn't as simple as it sounds if you've got the frame of reference, but you learn a lot about the culture and history while learning that language, because a lot of the expressions require you to understand the meaning of like the language to even really understand the meaning of the expression. Right, right, right. For example, in Chinese, there's a lot of like Chinese and like idioms and stuff. You almost got to like know the story behind it or like, you know, even the character for like country, it's like them drawing out a country within the character. Also, what I could tell, David, do you agree that from people who learn a completely different language later in life, they tend to be a little bit more outgoing and thick skin because you have to struggle through that as an older person, like you have to struggle. Like if you want to go to a restaurant and try to practice that language, it's going to be wonky, but you have to have thick skin for that. But when you're a kid and you grow up with it in your house, you can sometimes take it for granted. Yeah, I actually think a lot of actors speak another language, whether they use it or not in their movie roles. From what I could tell, a lot of actors are good at learning languages because if they are really good at memorizing lines, they're probably also good at memorizing like phrases of different languages. But I could see it being confusing. You know, there's multiple dialects of big languages, especially in India and China. Andrew, which dialect are you going to learn? Both your parents only speak Hindi as a second language. Are they going to teach you Hindi so you can understand Bollywood movies? Are you going to teach your kid Mandarin, even though one of your parents is Fujianese and one of your parents is Cantonese? It could get super complicated. Like you said, it has to do with the cultural relevancy of a world, though, right? Like I know a lot of young Chinese-American kids, Andrew, that are really Americanized. They probably know more Korean than they do Chinese in 2023. Some of them because they've developed that interest in K-pop and K-drama or Japanese, the Japanese language due to animes and things like that. Yeah. Also, yeah, it just depends on what you want to learn the most. And like I do think Korean is probably as far as like speaking it on a conversational level is easier than learning Mandarin if you don't know. Right, because it's not tonal, it's alphabetic. So I guess like, you know, whatever language is more appealing. I know obviously for decades and maybe centuries, there's been kids overseas who were learning English, you know, just because they were like, oh, that's the language of the globe or that's the language of the upper class. You know, that's the language of these nice, beautiful, rich white men that came to my country, you know, so I'm going to learn their language. So it makes sense. So so it all depends on what you want to do. For example, Andrew, Canada officially its second official language is French, but less than 20 percent of the Canadian population is fluent enough in French on any sort of like usable level, even though they take French in school because the influence of France globally has been lessening every year. It's no longer the same world superpower that it used to be. So it all comes back to usability. Like we said, Andrew, however, I will say this. There was a study that is saying in 30 years, 99 percent of the world will speak either English, Mandarin, Hindi or Spanish. So if you are connected to one of these major groups, you might want to learn it just for usefulness reasons. And you get the add on of the dementia fighting package. Oh, all right, everybody. Let us know in the comments down below what you think. This is all very interesting. Obviously, if you use your brain more later in life, it's probably just more healthier for you in general. Also depends on what type of stuff you consume. Your brain is a muscle. Yeah. Also, let us know what was your journey as a second generation immigrant kid or whether you are or not with learning another language. Did you did you choose another Asian language or did you just choose Spanish or did you choose to learn, you know, your grandparents language? Let us know in the comments section below. Until next time we hop out, boys, we out. Peace.