6 loves to find opposites and he asked what the opposite of "sweet" was.
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6 loves to find opposites and he asked what the opposite of "sweet" was. Instinctively I said "sour", but then thought about it a bit more... because he asked me in English, I responded "sour". But then I said if he had asked me in Chinese, I would have said "苦" (bitter).
Random thing I never thought about before... how our languages shape so much of how we think and see the world.
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@chu you should check Arrival (movie) and the short story behind it.
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Reading the IMDB spoiler on this. Sounds interesting. Will have to check this out.
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@chu it allowed me to understand the importance of language in early stages of educational development / world interpretation and the kind of connections it establishes in the human brain to apprehend, appropriate and decipher reality.
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There's a study somewhere out there (Please don't ask me to find it, i am not sure where to even look right now) where a researcher set up three trucks in front a child. (Small, Med, Large)
An adult on the other side of some kind of screen then asked the child to hand him/her the "small" truck. However, it was very obvious to the child that the adult could only see the Large and Med sized trucks. (I have no idea exactly how it was set up but this was the description).
Most unilingual kids (English) handed the adult the small truck that was out of view of the adult. Multilingual kids mostly handed the adult the Med truck. The researchers concluded that multilingual kids use context more than words at interpreting what people want and came to the conclusion that this had to do with empathy.
It was a very interesting study and a PhD well earned as far as I was concerned. I thought it was amazing to even think of such a set up. I honestly am not sure I even know how to search to find this study though.