I am learning my 3rd foreign language and I don't feel myself becoming more intelligent, but I am not good at the languages anyway. Do you feel you have become more intelligent by learning more languages?
Not magically so. But I am aware that when I read a text or hear someone speak, my brain now automatically cross-matches with how it might be read in the different languages that I know. This has a huge significance to me, because different peoples have a completely different way of thinking about the same things, which helps me cross the cultural divides that exist between people of different lands, and helps me understand how they lead to unnecessary conflicts.
I became aware of this, because of situations like the following:
I was eating lunch with my cousin's family, who are Israelis, born and bred. In my best Hebrew, I asked for the salt in the same way that I would do in English: "Can you pass me the salt, please?" They all laughed, and told me that I should say "Pass me the salt." I was quite shocked. My parents used to take us to eat lunch with their friends in England. Sometimes, the husband would ask for the salt, and the wife would refuse, reminding him that he had high blood pressure, and the doctor had told him to lay off the salt. Sometimes, the husband would get quite irate, and demand the salt. The wife would refuse, and a huge argument would ensue, often upsetting the entire meal. This sort of arguments is quite common in all sorts of situations in the UK. So it made perfect sense to me that one should always only ever ask for the salt, and only in the most polite way, to avoid such conflicts. But my Israeli cousins were quite placid about the whole thing. It seemed to me that they weren't bothered if someone demanded something, and equally weren't bothered too much if they demanded something and were refused. I knew that Israelis had a reputation amongst the English for being extremely rude. I considered that maybe Israelis were just more upfront, but less prone to consider an argument as a real conflict. Later on, I came to see Israelis argue in all sorts of situations, but that no-one took it seriously, not even the people who were arguing.
This led me to understand that for Israelis, a disagreement, or even a conflict, didn't mean someone was your enemy, and didn't have to lead to violence. But in England, arguing with someone quite strongly, often did lead to violence. Obviously, there was a huge cultural gap between how English-speakers and Hebrew-speakers interpreted the same situations.
Then I reflected on what I knew of British history, which had historically been extremely violent, and where disobeying or showing insolence to a person in authority could often mean imprisonment or death, for the person, and for his family, and his whole village. But from what I knew of Jewish people, things almost never escalated to such extremes.
When I reflected on the Old Testament's exhortations, I began to realise that it would read entirely differently to the people of the time, who spoke Hebrew natively, and to native English speakers who read the OT and English translations of the OT. To the Hebrew speakers to whom Moses spoke, saying that homosexuality required death, or that one had to kill every last one of a certain people, was just like demanding the salt. It was just the Hebrew style, designed to show that there was something important being said, but not that you'd necessarily act on it, and so probably only meant to kill those people where it made sense to do so.
But to the English speakers, making a demand of execution was itself an inviolable order that had to be carried out, and was not to be questioned in any way, or oneself would suffer the same fate, and so carried no exceptions whatsoever. So to the English speakers, those people who were said to require execution, had to be executed, even if it made no sense whatsoever.
Consequently, to English speakers, the Bible was to be followed unquestioningly, without reason, or if one put reason first, then the Bible read like a very evil and irrational set of instructions and fanciful stories.
But to Hebrew-speakers, the Bible read like a set of instructions and stories that only illustrated general principles of reason that one would only act on, when it made complete sense to do so, and thus the Bible was a good source of reason and sense.
Thus, it made great sense to me, why the people of the Old Testament followed the Bible, while most Europeans only did what they were told, or discarded it completely.
It also prepared me for when I read a Star Wars story about what happens after the Return of the Jedi. In the story, a Sith general would collect art of the people he was attempting to conquer, in order to understand their mindset, so that he could devise strategies that were bound to work to conquer them, which he would be highly successful in. I thought that was also in line with what I'd noticed earlier, and resolved that what I knew of a people's art, could tell me much about the people's mindset.
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