Language and Intelligence

Part 1 International Students

I learned from my girlfriend and her friend that your language ability determines your intelligence, particularly for an international student. Intelligence can be decomposed into two parts. The first part is whether you can understand some materials and come up with good ideas, which I assume should not be difficult for many students. The second part is whether you can convey your thoughts to others (intelligence). Unfortunately, I found that many international students, including myself, are struggling, because our ability to speak the language (e.g. English), can sometime significantly limits how we express our understanding and ideas. This could give others an impression that this guy is not intelligent. Or think about an extreme case where I was thrown to Moscow. Without knowing a single word in Russian, I cannot express anything through language. So to the Russians, I am equivalent to a complete idiot.

So it is very important to improve one's language to improve the perception of one's language by others.

Part 2 Mathematics

Many people say math is hard, and they cannot learn math well because there are not that intelligent. But it might be the case that they have the intelligence to learn math, but they do not have the language to read math. Using the example in Part 1, if I am in Moscow, I cannot book a hotel or visit the hospital, although nobody would consider these two tasks are beyond a normal human being. I cannot do these things because I don't know Russian. Similarly, you cannot do math if you don't know the language. The language of math looks a little bit intimidating, but I think it should not be more difficult than a human language (might be related to Chomsky hierarchy [2]). So I think people who are afraid of learning math can just view it as learning a new language. Learning a new language requires constant input and practice, so this explains why we should learn things (e.g. math) constantly as well.


References:

[1] The Figure. http://edl.ecml.at/Portals/33/images/EDL_Logo1.jpg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy