Postby zgriptsuroica » Sun Sep 25, 2022 1:37 pm
I would say that, at best, it's drastically overstated and lacking some necessary qualifications. I don't think it applies to those who learn without some sort of formal study of the language, so, for examples, children who pick up a second language when they move to another country at an early age probably wouldn't necessarily see the same benefits. If you go through some formal study of another language, I suppose it will eventually make you more aware of grammatical structures in most cases, which could help with things like understanding when to use "whom" or what the difference is between adjectives and adverbs, but this is all stuff you could do with proper studying of English. Picking it up via a second language just might make it simpler because the examples might have more morphological complexity than their English counterparts, making it easier to distinguish things like direct versus indirect objects, or what have you, since the cases/particles/whatevers are actually distinct.
If you happen to pay a great deal of attention to these elements in your writing, I'm sure it helps to refine your writing, by I think this claim is mixing up correlation and causation. Individuals who learn several languages to a high level likely have to grapple with these concepts at some point or another in their studies, but advising someone who otherwise has no interest in a second language to learn one in order to improve their first strikes me as misplaced time and effort. By the time you reach the point where this grammar would really start to be drilled into your way of thinking, I imagine you could have completed several satisfactory grammar courses in English and learned much the same.
5 x