The hidden benefits of learning Chinese: Q-and-A with psycholinguist Sara Maria Hasbun

Sara Maria Hasbun owes her interest in languages to an early personal failure to learn the language of her heritage. Her father is from El Salvador but rarely spoke Spanish to her as she grew up in the Bay Area, where she was surrounded by friends who were bilingual (mostly Cantonese, she says). She took Spanish classes in high school but found the experience exasperating. “My teacher was like, Aren’t you Hispanic?” Hasbun recalls. “He couldn’t understand why I was so terrible at it.”

Everything changed during her freshman year at Columbia University when she took a class in linguistics. “I remember sitting in that class and realizing, Oh my goodness, there’s a whole field of study devoted to how language works,” Hasbun says. She realized it was systematic: where it comes from, how it manifests in the brain, how it is acquired. “Language is almost its own organism that’s really predictable. Whether you’re trying to learn Korean or Turkish, there are certain parameters that are always the same.”

Armed with that knowledge, she gave Spanish another try. It clicked. Knowing that she could overcome this lifelong nemesis, she then picked up French. Then Russian. Mandarin Chinese? Why not. Arabic, Korean, Indonesian, and different sign languages (American and Nicaraguan, to start) followed. (You might be surprised to learn that American and British sign language are completely different, and that many Hispanic sign languages do not necessarily share the same base, whether Spanish or otherwise.) She trained as a psycholinguist — someone who studies how languages work in the brain — and has picked up a scattering of other languages since.

Hasbun has been based in Beijing since 2019 and is currently working on a book about language acquisition. For foreigners in China, the question of the importance of learning Chinese has been widely (and sometimes intensely) debated, considering the difficulty of the language (which Sinologist David Moser has written extensively about). Nationalist commentator Zhōu Xiǎopíng 周小平 recently weighed in, arguing that foreign students wanting to study in China should first pass a language proficiency test.

But for Hasbun, we should be thinking about this question differently. We need to understand what it actually means to “learn” a language and recalibrate what “success” in this area entails. “It’s because I’m not good at it, because I came to it so late, that I’m passionate about the process of learning language,” she says. “I saw what worked and what didn’t, and I saw others struggling with it, too. It’s not that I have a special talent for language, so I know if I can do it, anyone can do it.”

We recently spoke with Hasbun on this subject.

Anthony Tao: Let’s begin here. How does one “do it”? Is there a trick?

Sara Maria Hasbun: My agent wants me to have my one trick that I can be known for, but it doesn’t work like that. I can perhaps distill it into three tricks though.

The first, most important thing is you need to work on the actual skill that you want to develop. What people don’t realize is that language isn’t a single .exe file that you can upload, it’s made of all these different skills that are somewhat related but aren’t necessarily transferable. If you learn to read Spanish, it doesn’t mean you can speak it. If you want to talk about AI, you have to practice talking about AI; you can’t just memorize word lists or do Duolingo and expect to get up there and talk about AI in French.

That’s one of the most important things. In that same vein, setting an actual, reachable, clear goal is really important. Your goal can’t be “to learn Chinese,” it has to be, for instance, “give a presentation about AI in Chinese.” And then you can be motivated to work toward that. You learn all the vocabulary related to AI, and then you practice giving a presentation in Chinese.

And you have to approach every part of language with different strategies. If you want to learn grammar, there are certain tools that are best for grammar. If you want to work on pronunciation, there are tools that are good for that. Right now, I wouldn’t say there’s one tool out there that helps you do everything.

Target everything with different tools. For example, for pronunciation, when I was learning Vietnamese — which is very difficult when it comes to pronunciation, there are so many different tones — there’s a tool called Glossika that I used that presents you with sentences to repeat. It’s so boring, but if you do that for an hour every day, after a couple of weeks, you notice your tongue naturally going where it needs to go.

The tongue is a muscle, and learning language is like working out, like lifting weights. If you practice ballet and you have to go to tennis, you will get stronger from ballet, but it won’t necessarily give you the skills to do tennis. You have to practice for what you want to learn.

According to the U.S. State Department, it takes an English speaker roughly 2,200 hours to learn Chinese. Is that investment worth it for someone who comes here on a, say, business contract, who isn’t trying to get into Chinese academia?

I definitely think that all foreigners should learn some Chinese before coming to China, if it is at all within their means. It is a matter of respect. But beyond being respectful to your host country, there are serious cultural and cognitive benefits to learning even just a little bit of a foreign language.

This is an agenda I’m really passionate about promoting: the benefits of “dabbling” in foreign languages even if you’re not sure that you’re ready to commit. I really don’t want people to be put off from the prospect of learning a foreign language just because they think they don’t have the time, or the ability, to reach fluency.

I committed to learning Chinese because I knew that China would always be a big part of my life, no matter where in the world I ended up. China just seems to have that kind of gravitational pull for me. But I’ve dabbled in over a dozen other languages, and I’ve experienced over and over how just a little bit of a language can lead to such unique experiences, and help you make connections with so many interesting people.

What are those “cultural and cognitive” benefits?

Well, the cultural benefits of learning a language should, I think, already be pretty obvious to readers of The China Project. We’re so privileged to get to live in China and engage with China, a country that has such a rich history, that is so dynamic, that has already demonstrated such a startling capacity for innovation. This is a country that has hurtled into modernity using very different strategies and perspectives than those used in the West: you may not agree with all of those strategies or perspectives, but there is certainly much to be learned from them.

The ability to enjoy your Chinese friends’ WeChat moments, to scan Weibo for interesting opinions, to have a beer with someone who has not learned English and who has not been steeped in Western culture…that’s an invaluable opportunity that you can only access via Mandarin, and you don’t necessarily need to be fluent to access these benefits. Although of course, the more you learn, the more you will access.

As for the cognitive benefits: this is what I think is the really exciting part about dabbling in foreign languages, maybe partially because it is what I studied as an academic working in the field of psycholinguistics. Learning a language changes your brain for the better: it changes the structure, and it changes the function. And this happens even when you learn a language as an adult. Most exciting: it happens even if you don’t learn a language to fluency.

Can you provide an example?

You might have heard about a groundbreaking study by researchers at York University in Canada, which showed that bilingual patients with Alzheimer’s experienced the onset of symptoms an average of five years later than monolingual patients. Many other researchers are now studying the potential of bilingualism to create a “cognitive reserve” that functions as a sort of backup supply of cognitive ability, to be drawn upon when resources run low.

Other studies suggest that as adults of all ages learn a second language (and even if they’re not yet fluent) those cognitive benefits “transfer” to other non-linguistic cognitive abilities. For example, task-switching. We all switch between tasks all day long: you might be working on a memo for your boss when a colleague comes up to ask you what you want for lunch. Then your phone pings and you see that you need to set the time for your dentist appointment. Then you need to get back to the memo so that you can turn it in by 3 p.m. Several studies have now shown that learners of second languages are more efficient at task switching, even if the tasks are nonlinguistic.

If you’re just getting started with a foreign language, you will also be relieved to learn that these benefits appear to be linked less to the strength of your ability in a second language, but more to how often you use that language. So even if you haven’t yet mastered Chinese grammar, or even if you always forget the proper tones, you are still working out your brain and reaping the cognitive benefits just by making the effort.

Do you have any recommendations for our readers who are in the middle of this process and maybe frustrated by it?

Prepare to celebrate the small wins, because they will all feel small. Sometimes it will feel like you’re not making any progress at all. Then one day, years later, you will suddenly realize that you convinced your internet provider to remove a charge from your bill and — you did it in Mandarin! And even then, you will probably still feel hesitant calling yourself fluent…because it turns out that fluency is a moving target. The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.

As for strategies and tools for language learning, apps like Duolingo are fun and can help with motivation, but for more reliable progress I wouldn’t rely on them alone. For maximum efficiency I really recommend finding an online tutor. It is the best way to fit learning into a busy lifestyle. I use italki and Preply to find my tutors.

Then, with your tutor, target exactly what you need to know. Don’t let your tutor waste time on shopping scenarios or obscure Chinese history if what you really need is to be able to discuss electric vehicle charging stations, or if what you really need is to be able to discuss geopolitics with Chinese journalists.

And what about your own experience learning Chinese? Where would it rank in difficulty among all the languages you’ve studied?

I’d rank it third, definitely behind Korean and probably behind Nicaraguan Sign Language, because Nicaraguan Sign Language has no online resources, so you have to learn Pocahontas-style: you point at this — table — and then yourself, me Sara Maria.

When I started learning sign language in college, it really brought home this really cool idea that your brain has the capacity to use the skill of language in a very predictable way, no matter where you’re born in the world. There’s something genetic in us that helps us learn languages. That really appealed to me and started giving me the building blocks to figure out why I wasn’t really progressing before.

As for Chinese, even though I like to consider myself a “professional language learner” — I like to think I have a pretty efficient approach — it still took me about 2,000 hours to pass the HSK 6. I had probably been studying for about four years before I could show up to a Chinese dinner party without serious anxiety.

But you still think the process is valuable?

Absolutely. Learners of Mandarin are lucky in that the value of this language is so clear. You probably won’t have very many friends or family members asking you, “But what’s the point of learning this language?” This is a language spoken by about 15% of the world’s population. Wherever you go in the world, you will find Mandarin speakers. It won’t be that difficult to stay motivated. So just try to enjoy the process.

You started a translation company in 2015. How do you think AI will affect translation specifically and the business of language-learning in general? Do you think it’ll be disruptive?

Massively. But in an exciting way.

Google Translate was already really good for us because it showed what a hard problem language translation is, because even Google couldn’t figure it out for a long time. I mean, it’s good, but you’re not going to put your contracts into Google Translate, or your website material on there. Obviously it’s a hard problem to solve.

But machine translation and LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT are getting scarily good. We still need humans to drive them and train them, to build the LLM — if we need an LLM for Hokkien, we need humans to collect, annotate, and feed data — but just as of last week, I started questioning whether humans will always be necessary for that.

Last week?

That’s when Elon Musk put out this letter, signed by other scientists, asking people to pause their work on large language models until we can figure out where we’re going with this and keep it safe, because they were starting to realize what capacity it has for really dangerous uses. The problem is that models can now become very powerful off of very little data.

At the same time, I’m really excited because the most obvious benefit is it’s taking away the grunt work from people. Translators are already using [translation software]: they don’t have to literally type out every word, they edit text that is first machine translated. The same goes for writers. It’s a skill you’re going to need.

It’ll be painful at first because we’ll be nostalgic for our old ways, but you won’t have to necessarily give up the old ways. You have a computer but still write on a notepad. But I think everyone is going to have to learn how to use LLMs, especially those who want to stay ahead of the curve.

Sara Maria Hasbun blogs and consults on topics related to language learning and language technology. You can follow her on Twitter (@mslinguistic) and Instagram (@misslinguistic).