IMO one of the most prominent reasons - and one that I never see mentioned - that learning a language as an adult is more difficult is that the older you are, the more socially-unacceptable it becomes to point out grammatical and vocabulary errors. When you're a child, elders correcting you is so natural it scarcely even breaks the flow of conversation:
child: "Me and Tim went -"
adult: "Tim and I went."
child: "{pause} Tim and I went..."
As an adult, you simply do not get this kind of feedback. There's no chance in hell I would interrupt another adult to make the above correction. It's simply too disrespectful. And yet it is precisely this disrespectful interruption and correction that enables children to have tight feedback loops which result in fast, effective learning.
Personally, I don't think that is the primary reason adults have a hard time learning languages. Neural plasticity isn't the biggest reason either, IMO.
Rather, the biggest showstopper is that adults tend to always be busy, and fall back to their native languages to get the busy stuff done, and only end up practicing their new language during positive interactions when they have time. Which is really only a very small fraction of their life.
For example, I routinely see people in cross-cultural relationships try to learn each others' languages but fail miserably at learning when they get into disagreements and have that disagreement in English instead of the language either person is trying to learn. And thus, they don't learn. In order to truly learn a language to native fluency you need to be forced to use it for every common life situation, not just the occasional positive interactions. Children are more or less forced to be using the new language 100% of the time.
It seems like it would be a lot easier to learn a second language if you were:
- Surrounded by 1-2 people whose full-time job was to take care of you, and who could only communicate with you in that second language
- Unable to do basic things by yourself without communicating those needs to your caretakers
- Unable to entertain yourself with any material written or spoken in your first language
- Somehow deprived of the ability to form verbal thoughts in your first language
Immersion gives a very weak version of this, e.g. if all the signage or menus you read are in the second language, and if you engage with service industry folks in your second language. You can make it better by trying to restrict your entertainment material to the second language, but this usually involves seeking out kids' shows to try to find something comprehensible at your small vocabulary level, and to me it ends up feeling more like work than entertainment.
Agreed. Many adults attempt immersion by e.g. moving to a place where the language is spoken but then set themselves up in an expat bubble, which is roughly equivalent to wrapping a sponge in plastic and then immersing it in water.
In order to truly immerse yourself you need to actually need to have a life, friends, coworkers in that language, and the things that occupy your mental energy for 80% of the day (probably work, but in the case of children, schoolwork and homework) need to also be in that language.
Adults also often get "homesick" and create those expat bubbles for themselves to have a piece of home. Understandable, but children don't get homesick in the same way -- they didn't have any prior culture to think back to, and they don't have a concrete sense of self-identity until later in their childhood.
In many cases one may find that the locals actually are a force against immersion if their English is better than your knowledge of their language. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem but I do feel the right time for adult immersion should probably be after you've surpassed the local average English level, which then turns the local language into the preferred working language. If you haven't gotten there yet, you may find that you move, and then everyone wants to use English with you because time is money (and in some cases they want to practice their English, but less so in the workplace). And then -- you don't learn.
Children are at a huge advantage here, because schools mandate a certain language be used regardless of who knows what other languages to what level.
> You can make it better by trying to restrict your entertainment material to the second language, but this usually involves seeking out kids' shows to try to find something comprehensible at your small vocabulary level, and to me it ends up feeling more like work than entertainment.
I suspect I'm probably not alone in this given how popular Japanese anime/games/manga/lightnovels are among non-native speakers, but outside of 1 year of Japanese class in high school where I was taught some fundamentals (could probably be replicated in a 1-month online course), I managed to acquire, pretty much exclusively through media consumption, enough proficiency to consume most Japanese entertainment I'm interested in today, rarely ever feeling the need to reach for translation (watching untranslated anime, reading untranslated manga/light novels, playing untranslated games, etc). In fact today I actually find translated material extremely frustrating and actively seek out non-localized Japanese versions of games to play so I can enjoy the original text.
Though of course I can't really claim to be a fluent communicator in Japanese because consuming media passively doesn't really exercise the brain and face muscles needed to communicate to others. When I went to Japan last year I was actually able to understand pretty much everything that was said to me, but really struggled to formulate responses (luckily I was able to eventually communicate my ideas for the most part, but I'm pretty sure it was dead obvious that I wasn't a native speaker). Writing in Japanese without some kind of IME is as you might guess a complete non-starter for me as well for similar reasons.
I would love to hear more about how you did this. I've been doing serious, but slow-paced, Japanese studying for the last few years (I've got my N3 certificate; know ~1500 kanji; etc.) but media consumption still feels like a chore.
In particular:
* Most anime leaves me behind. If English subtitles are on, ~80% of the time I can say "oh yeah, that does match what they said". If Japanese subtitles are on, I can't read fast enough. If no subtitles are on, I get confused when sentences get long, involve lots of proper nouns, or just too much unfamiliar vocabulary.
* Reading feels like a chore. I have to look up a word every sentence or three, and longer sentences can get me twisted up on the grammar, wherein I resort to Google-translating the whole sentence or reading the corresponding English translation if available. So it feels like just a very roundabout way of reading the material. I try to mitigate this by adding the words to an SRS deck, but that just increases the feeling of it being a chore.
Any tips from your experience would be much appreciated.
To set expectations, it's been more than 10 years since I started learning, so I don't want to make it sound like it was an easy/short process for me either.
But regardless, here's a few notes from my experience that might/might not help:
I'd recommend starting out by consuming untranslated material only for titles that you can enjoy without actually fully understanding every piece of dialog/text, and being at peace with the fact that you might not have understood everything, as long as the experience of consuming the content was still enjoyable. Light-hearted slice of life comedies and titles that involve mostly mindless action can be good candidates (you can give the first episodes/chapters of every new title a try without translations to see how it goes). For everything else, definitely keep using translations.
Number one priority should always be to enjoy the content. If you're like me then that's what motivated you to learn in the first place, to enjoy the content more, so be sure to not confuse the end goal with the means you're using to get there.
Slowly, over periods of years, as you watch/read more titles without translations, you'll get better and better at picking up on contextual queues to fill in vocabulary that you don't already know, not by explicitly looking things up, but from pattern matching on actual usage. This will massively accelerate your learning as time goes on, and will also gradually expand the pool of content that you can enjoy without translations, forming a virtuous cycle. Eventually you'll find yourself no longer even thinking about the meaning of words/phrases in English, having learned their meaning from their context in Japanese speech/writing alone.
Some mediums are better suited for this process than others. Anime is especially great because it progresses on its own without giving you time to stress about the meaning of every word of dialog and look things up, which forces you to exercise those pattern matching muscles. Most other mediums let you progress through the story at your own pace, so you actually have to exercise restraint yourself. Of those, manga is probably the easiest to start out with to learn reading since it's still a very visual medium with lots of non-textual contextual cues, and shounen manga especially has furigana over every kanji so you can learn their pronunciation. Visual novels are also great in that they let you exercise both reading and listening skills simultaneously, but are probably not quite as good for beginner-level learning in either area compared to anime/manga. I'd leave fully text-based light novels for last after you're comfortable with reading manga with no furigana and visual novels, as they're pretty impossible to enjoy until you've built up a really solid foundation for reading.
At the end of the day I think there's no substitute for sheer time spent and volume of content consumed, but as long as you keep enjoying the content and the process of learning itself, you'll eventually get there. Have fun!
You and the parent comments have said basically everything that I feel about learning a new language, but I'll still add..
When you're a kid playing with dinosaurs with other kids, you're all saying things like "dinosaurr! Rawrrrr! Dinosaur! Pshhh!" But with adults the conversation would be "Dinosaurs have been extinct for 60 million years, but there's substantial evidence that birds are the evolved form of dinosaurs today." As a new learner you would never understand that, but from the kids you would learn the word "dinosaur" very well.
So as an adult, how do you find other adults who want to play with dinosaurs
That's still basic-level language learning. To speak like a native you need:
1. Weeks, possibly months of professional voice coaching to teach your mouth muscles to move in ways that eliminate all trace of an accent.
2. Mastery of idiom - learning at least the most popular idioms and knowing when to use them.
3. Mastery of social register and nuance - learning the subtle differences in grammar and word choice that indicate social class and educational level and knowing how and when to indicate both.
4. Some awareness of regional accents, so you can hear where someone is from.
Anyone with a reasonable IQ could master these within a year or two - if they worked on them full-time.
But that wouldn't leave a lot of time for having a normal life.
So probably around half the population never loses the ability to learn a new language with complete fluency. What they lose is the free time to do it, and access to the resources to do it well.
Social register can be a huge problem. E.g. UK English is notoriously indirect and passive-aggressive. When someone in a meeting says "I'm not sure that's a good idea" they often mean "That suggestion is literally idiotic."
Unsurprisingly, foreigners get very, very confused by this.
The Dutch on the other hand are far more direct, and English-Dutch meetings can get very... colourful.
> Social register can be a huge problem. E.g. UK English is notoriously indirect and passive-aggressive. When someone in a meeting says "I'm not sure that's a good idea" they often mean "That suggestion is literally idiotic."
This reminds me of how in Singaporean English you may often have hawker centre or restaurant service people ask you something like "You want a drink or not?"
In US or UK English that might be perceived as rude, especially the "or not" part, but in Singaporean English it is not rude at all, and is in fact just imported from the Chinese "要不要" grammatical construct, which literally translates to "want-don't-want" and is a polite way to ask if someone wants something. In Chinese it is probably the most neutral and polite way to ask the question because you present both options ("want" and "don't want") on equal footing for the other side to choose, and that idea is carried over to English in Singapore.
It's even harder now with smartphones and internet. Any info you want or need is easily accessible in your first language. For example imagine you want to look up info to get some work done. Go back to 1990 and you'd have to ask your colleagues in the new language but for the last 20 or so years you'd just go online and check in your first language.
For the last 10 years, getting around you can just use google maps in your native language where was 15+ years ago you'd probably have to deal with native maps.
With streaming, even TV/Movies can stay in your first language regardless of where you are in the world.
It's also free to call almost anywhere in the world now so calling back to family and continuing to talk to friends in your original country is trivial. Go back to the 90s and the costs were high enough that you'd likely rarely do it.
I agree with others, the biggest problem is that as an adult you're busy. You have responsibilities and a large set of family and/or friends that you'll generally need/want to do in your first language.
I have opposite experience. I won't leave my country (Japan) so circumstance is something differ.
Without smartphone or PC browser that has useful translation and dictionary feature, I wouldn't start reading English texts initially.
Some Netflix content only has sub (no dub). It helps listening English. I can even show multiple subs for learning purpose. Even dubbed, Netflix supports to show sub and some foreign dramas are useful to learn cultures. Amazon Prime Video is worse for sub/dub perspective.
I found that English YouTube content is very well made, interesting, and English spoken by YouTuber is relatively easier to hear and understand, compared to like CNN. And YouTube's auto sub feature works very well for English. It's really useful so I wish I can use it for other sites.
I studied abroad in Costa Rica when I was 19 and I remember getting really sick and at something like 2am, my host mother kept trying to chit-chat with me in Spanish and I was feeling so frustrated. But, it helped me learn faster, because I had to struggle through it, not having an English outlet.
Also, I learned Swahili mostly because I didn't have much money in Tanzania and had to negotiate with the local transport so I didn't get charged a super high price.
Along those lines, I've heard that a quick way to learn a language L is to take a job in the kitchen of a restaurant where the staff only speaks L and is willing to put up with you but never speak your language.
> For example, I routinely see people in cross-cultural relationships try to learn each others' languages but fail miserably at learning when they get into disagreements and have that disagreement in English instead of the language either person is trying to learn.
This made me smile. My partner and I have different native language backgrounds. During the few serious disagreements we've had, she would curse in my native language. Following your line of thinking, that would prove her excellent language mastery. Even if I'm on the receiving end of the cursing :-)
New languages are hard and require focused attention. I've learned several. In my current job I'm exposed to a lot of Russian. I can read Cyrillic and recognize parts of conversations. It's frustrating not to be able to fill in the gaps to understand fully, but I just don't have the time because of my job. Plus if I did try to switch over, it would leave out other people who only speak English, which is a consideration in group environments.
As a consolation I switched my phone to Russian. :)
I had to learn Cyrillic in one day once. I was visiting Bulgaria without a smartphone, had a paper map with the street names printed in English/Latin characters and the actual street signs were all in Cyrillic. I had to match them up to get around and make the correct turns while walking. It ended up not being that hard, whereas I think trying to learn it in a classroom with a whiteboard would actually be much harder because there are no experience-based memory aids. Like, I remember getting off the train to a big "Централна гара София" sign and was like
"София" -- cool, that kinda looks like it should be "Sofia", I mean, one of the 3 words on the sign has to say Sofia, and the Greek-like "phi" in the middle is probably an f, makes sense ...
"гара" -- that looks like a greek capital Gamma, a, something, and an a ... Oh! it's probably just "Gara" like the French "Gare" or Romanian "Gara" I've seen elsewhere
... so "Централна" kind of looks like ?ehtralha if you imagine л as a lambda and we just learned that р was an r ... and considering where I am, it's actually something that means central, like "Milano Centrale" or "Amsterdam Centraal" as you would see elsewhere ... "Centralna"! (actually more like Tsentralna, as I learned later...) Makes perfect sense!
But there, I just learned about 1/3 of the Cyrillic alphabet within 5 minutes of getting off the train. Somehow that just doesn't happen as fast in a classroom.
These days people might probably just use Google navigation, and don't even use their head anymore, sadly.
> These days people might probably just use Google navigation, and don't even use their head anymore, sadly.
I have done some very long journeys through South America. It used to be the case that anyone spending a whole year or more in South America backpacking or cycling would learn Spanish. Why not, if Spanish is considered easy to learn and you have all that free immersion in the language?
But on my last long trip, I was amazed to find that most other shoestring travelers I met were simply using Google Translate on their phones to communicate with the people they met: whether waiters in restaurants, their drivers if they were hitchhiking, local people they struck up a conversation with, etc.
When I said, “Why not learn Spanish if you are here for a whole year?”, the response was basically them rolling their eyes and saying “Whatever, grandpa.”
This is very much an english speaking country phenomenon. We are used to having lots of people speak english, often incorrectly and are much more tolerant of people making mistakes (and therefore don't correct them).
You should spend some time in Germany.
I once had my German corrected by a casheir at a fast food restaurant.
So from my experience, I don't think this is the reason that people stop being able to learn languages.
I wouldn't say it's just a English speaking phenomenon. Learning Korean in Korea and people are often far to polite to correct you, they're just pleased that you're learning the language, and let you get away with making a lot of mistakes. I continually tell people they should correct my pronunciation and teach me how to form sentences better, but even my friends rarely correct me, they say it just feels too rude.
Contrast that with Turkey where I lived for a couple of months: “You sound like a child!” they all gasped in astonishment as I tried out 3 verb tenses. My adult Turkish friends had NEVER heard a non-native speaker of Turkish! So different from the USA where we hear non-native speakers all the time (and I expect plenty of Koreans hear non-native speakers on occasion).
I once got invited to lunch at the house of a German lady. So I said I would make an apple pie and take it for dessert.
The next day, she takes a look at it and says that that is not how you make apple pie and produces a pie that she had baked (and which she ate, ignoring the one I had taken).
I have done so for a pretty long time and no, such behavior is not common for non-dickish people. If anything, people in the countryside tend to be a lot more relaxed and the situation forinti describes sounds like some old grandma who thinks the youth these days can't do anything right.
> Well, the real point is that children have full-time tutors, their parents.
That's not universal, though. Many children are neglected to various degrees, and my understanding is they'll still work out their language if they get adequate exposure to it.
You probably only need a tutor the master the intricacies of the more prestigious registers, but that's a different thing than fluency.
The English will correct your accent, by lightly making fun of it. It is most clear when you are an immigrant from an english speaking country or switch class brackets.
I assume they are talking about moving from "working class" to "middle class" (N.B. It's not really possible to move from "middle class" to "upper class" unless by marriage and then it's only really your kids that would move class bracket.
In England, accent/grammer usage is a strong indicator of class (as I assume it may be in other countries).
Basically what MrsPeaches said and with more stratifications. I see way more than 3 brackets, the accent groups and all the other trappings of class stretch from the mythical heavenly top, people you can only theorize to exist all the way down to missing teeth and barely speaking english in hell underneath the poverty line.
I've been lucky enough to see a lot of the levels, it's vastly different to my home country which only really has the three levels (it isnt discussed) and is largely culturally homegenous.
Hehe, I've had my Mandarin corrected by an old woman selling fruit on a stick in China. It struck me at the time, just because it would never happen in the UK, but actually I was greatful.
The article isn't about the ability to learn. It's about the ability to use the language at a native level. You can get "fluent" and still not have a native level of using a language.
Perhaps it's more likely if you are in a deep relationship with a native speaker, since often that's a reason why people want to learn a language.
This is sort of a plug, but I just started a new project to help couples to learn each other's languages (https://learncoupling.com). Since my wife is Chinese herself, and I've been learning Chinese for quite a while. Most couples around me have tried and failed to learn each other's language as well since they expect each other to be their sole on-demand language teacher.
For me, I think it works if I do mostly self-study with Anki. We schedule a certain time of day for like 5 or 10 minutes where I'm just running through my flashcards and my wife can correct me or clarify things. And if the corrections can asynchronous through an app, it'd feel less awkward as you say.
One issue is that often it takes someone who has had language instruction experience to properly explain nuances. I've often asked my spouse questions about grammar usage, and since it is instinctive for her and not a premeditated decision like it is for me, she is unable to clearly delineate the proper context and edge cases where a certain grammar would apply. Same with vocabulary. When you have a dozen synonyms, each with a different nuance, it's often tedious and difficult for a non-language instructor to provide clear explanations.
I think it's best to use native speakers as oracles: you can give them a piece of language and they can tell you if it's correct/natural or how they'd phrase it. You can't expect people to go beyond that, and trying to explicitly systematize the grammar isn't necessarily important or that valuable anyway; you need to internalize the grammar (as one has done with a native language) and that's not a conscious process.
I think this really depends on the individual learning style. Some people are able to extrapolate from examples and internalize it (e.g. those people who learn language simply from watching TV), and others need a more explicit structure to guide them before they really start internalizing. No method works for everyone all the time.
Yeah, I talked to a lot of couples and am totally aware it's hard to explain your own language or teach a language if you're not a teacher.
I actually even know cases where language teachers that failed to teach their own language to their partner.
So I'm more gearing it for having your partner act as support, practice, clarification, and reinforcement along with prescribed self-study. And also just make it fun!
What pitfalls did you run into? From what I heard, the learner often expects the other person to become their personal on-demand language teacher. And then patience burns out quickly. I think it works if the learner is committed to self-study but only relies on others for a bit of reinforcement, clarification, and practice.
I once had a girlfriend from Ukraine. I was 20 and so much in love that I spend 4 hours everyday studying russian. After a year I got to a point where I could be in any conversation.
Now I am 39 and for 10 years I try to learn French. The needs are there, but the will and motivation just doesn't want to be there.
That's pretty awesome! I have a friend studying Ukranian right now since his fiancee is Ukranian. Are you with a French person right now? I'd love to just make it a fun little activity you do every day. Just a few words a day (N + 1 daily), maybe 5 minutes help with a partner. And make it an enjoyable activity versus burnout grinds.
Anki is nice but for exemple my wife is chinese too and we live in Hong Kong, I m having so much laziness learning canto, I just reply "I already have to learn english" when the rare troll ask me why im still an idiot after 7 years. And my wife isnt getting any better at French either. Our 2yo daughter however, she gets everything we all say in any language lol
If chinese was mandatory to survive, like maybe it is in China mainland, maybe I d have been able to learn it more.
This is a seriously cool project. My girlfriend is Chinese and I currently attempting to learn her native language and have often run into the problems you mention.
Awesome, I'd love to help you pick up some of their Chines!. I really enjoy learning it, and there's just so much magic and history in each word and phrase. It's fun learning with a partner if done right. I knew an American/Chinese couple that burned themselves out by trying to go "only talk Chinese" for 2 weeks.
I don't think it's the lack of feedback that's the issue. I think it's more that people are less willing to risk using the language wrong as they get older (regardless if there is or is not feedback coming).
Growing up in Canada, we had to learn French. I was not fluent in it, but clearly knew enough to get by if I ever visited France. Well, when I was 28 I did visit France. When I got there, I did not want to try any of my French for fear of getting it wrong. (And yes, it was about 10 years since I had been using it in school.)
However, I encountered an American who had been in France for a couple of months by that point and he was using every bit of French he had in all conversations, even if it was broken. I was jealous because he was actually communicating and putting an effort into it. He didn't have the fear of getting it wrong, so he would try and try and try. Meanwhile, I would just keep my mouth shut and not learn at all for fear of failure.
That experience did stick with me when I tried learning some other skills years later. I realized I had to push myself to fail and get things wrong before getting them right, otherwise I would never make any progress. I'd think of that guy and his attempts that sometimes wouldn't land, but that he'd make progress.
My linguistics professors tended to believe children pick up languages more easily not because they’re being coached more but because they practice with fewer inhibitions than adults. Whereas adults might feel more self-conscious about making mistakes, kids more often don’t worry about it and just try to communicate all day with whatever tools they have, and practice—even with lots of mistakes—helps the brain get better at using the language.
Not only this, but play talk seems “silly” to adults and is not widely seen as acceptable.
Trying to learn new vocabulary during a hearing or negotiation just isn’t going to happen.
I recall being overseas and hanging out with 1st and second graders and none of us had any shame just asking “what is this?!” And pointing at a rock or a tree or a ball and correcting each other. I learned more practical vocab in a few hours from a 6yr old than from studying in a book over a week.
There is another reason: People understand you, interrupting with corrections hurts the conversation. I often ask for corrections but nobody ever does it. When I'm unsure how to say something I sometimes ask to get some feedback. Sometimes I only understand 70% of what a person is saying (mostly due to dialects), I rarely need to ask them to repeat it because the brain is capable of piecing it together.
Another problem is that unlearning something you always did wrong is extremely hard. You need to get it right from the beginning.
That's the beauty of language school, they point out your mistakes early and you can learn from the mistakes of other students in your group. If you take the time and take real classes, you'll have that tight feedback loop you need.
In my experience, people are helpful. Sometimes, in Norway, it means folks speak English with me. Not so much now, but once I struggle, out comes English :D But it also means that folks will let me know the right words for things or help with sounds. But at other times, folks will let things slide as long as I can be understood.
I can't recommend actual language classes enough. I was in Norwegian classes for two years - immersive classes for adults, taught by native speakers, about 15 hours a week in class. All in Norwegian, from the beginning. It was so wonderful getting real-time corrections and as an added bonus, a lot of culture/civics was worked into the lessons as well, in no small part because vocabulary centered around fairly practical subjects. If I ever need to learn another language, I hope I can have something similar.
I took them in Norway: Part of my immigration required that I take Norwegian classes. They were free for me, and were the ones offered through the kommune (here in trondheim) though I think they cost around 9000kr per 6 weeks. The class was mostly filled with folks with family immigration and folks fleeing bad situations in other countries (at the time, a lot of folks from Syria and Eritrea).
We used the books "På vei" and "Stein på stein" the first year. The second year I took "helsenorsk" and we used different materials, but for the general learning we mostly used "Norsk gramatikk", which, as you guess, concentrates on about a B1-B2 level of grammar. The first year books come with optional audio, which we used in class, and both have workbooks. I used one other book, but I don't remember the name. If he's determined, he can work through the books but understanding folks is going to be difficult (some dialects are still difficult for me).
NTNU offers a free online beginning course: They also offer classes, but those are filled with current students first.
I'll add that the level of Norwegian he'll need depends on what he'll be doing here: If he happens to be getting married and is from outside the EU/Schengen area, he'll probably have classes. If he goes to university, he'll need Norwegian for a bachelor degree, but a lot of classes above that are in English. Work really depends on the field, but even in fields with lots of English in the professional realm, knowing some norwegian will help lots.
> the older you are, the more socially-unacceptable it becomes to point out grammatical and vocabulary errors
That is a factor. It can't really account for how amazingly fast children are.
I've witnessed from absolute zero to conversational English in 3 months. Fluency within a year, with no discernible foreign accent (even got the local accent)
It took me years (late teens to early twenties) to achieve the same level that was attained by a child in a single year. My brain wasn't even old by any means. I got plenty of exposure, daily (advanced) classes, where I would be corrected by experienced teachers. Plus I had some early exposure to written English.
The kid got... a normal class at a public American school. Nothing special apart from an exercise book we got from a teacher, to help with basic concepts.
Similar theory I have is that it's acceptable for most children to learn their language full-time; whereas for adults, usually it's a side thing on top of their full-time work.
If given the opportunity to immerse in language learning full-time for 3 years (time it takes for most children to speak somewhat coherently) and with an open mind, adults can react fluency, I think. Maybe even faster than children, since adults have more context to bind and commit new information to long-term memory.
As a kid, memorizing vocabulary words was a brute force task because I had no relevant context (Latin/Greek, history, etc), but now I can pick up words, even foreign words pretty quickly because I have "hooks" in my mind to which I can attach them.
I think your theory has been pretty well proven with the huge online polyglot community who learn foreign languages regularly as a hobby, as well as other adult language learners like diplomats, random expats etc. You can even look at institutions like the US govt defense language research institute who give specific times to learn specific languages for a native adult English speaker.
> As an adult, you simply do not get this kind of feedback
I think that's partially because most adults react pretty strongly to someone telling them that they're wrong about something, especially something considered as trivial as grammar. Kids are just more open to being corrected in general (whether through natural disposition or conditioning, I'm not sure).
Recently learned about LEX [1], they have a method that attempts to fight exactly this issue. Also, they attempt to learn as crazy number as 11 languages or so at at time, and apparently, it works...
With no support except armchair making things up, I think that children talk to themselves a lot, describing what's happening through the day. "Now we're going to get into the car and drive to the shops, right mommy?" "yes, dear".
Adults who talk to themselves are seen as insane, and as an adult you get into the car and drive to the shops on autopilot without using any words for it, and go your whole day without thinking of the words for anything you touch - plates, bowls, cutlery, doors, clothes, vehicles, places, bus tickets, and you can get by day-to-day in a foreign country by already knowing wordlessly how to exist. Children don't know how to exist, and are continually asking, describing, or being told, the ways of daily life in their native language(s). Adults don't have that either.
It isn't just talking to yourself that I mean, your childhood family will say things you wouldn't think of. In the same way the parent comment says that adults won't correct grammar because it's impolite, adult visitors to your house won't tell you to pick up your toys, or lift your arms up to put a sweater on, or brush your teeth, or how to set the table. You won't get constant feedback on the day-to-day minutuae of life - and the constant use of sentences around the vocabulary. If you don't know what "toothpaste is" you're unlikely to stop brushing your teeth and go and look it up. If you do, and you make up sentences and say them to nobody, outside a specific classroom environment nobody will tell you if you're making mistakes.
Just imagining a situation of child immersion vs adult immersion vs adult trying to make sentences up:
Adult making sentences up: "I am put on coat. Two arm".
Adult immersion: "What is the word for coat?" "'coat'", "Thank you. I am put on coat". "nearly, we say 'putting on my coat <blah blah>" "Thanks, I am putting on my coat".
Child immersion: "Come here and put your coat on, we're going out, you will get cold", "No I don't want to gone", "don't want to go, say it", "don't want to go", "ok but we're going, so blue coat or rain coat?", "blue raincoat", "warm coat or small coat?", "warm", "good, now put down what you're holding, how will you get your arms in?",...
It's so much more everything, more words, more contexts, more sentences, more connections, more interactions, more moments of feedback, more continuous through the day, through every day, more immersive.
It's tempting to make up sentences you know, using words you know, harder to make up sentences using words you aren't sure of and sentence structures you aren't sure of. Easy to do in situations where you have some free time and remember to do it, hard to have it ongoing even when you're busy. And with scant feedback. Surely more effective than not generating anything, but equally effective? Can it possibly be?
Agreed, child immersion is more effective for the oral language. I just tried to say that diglossing one's interior monologue with the L2 is not only possible, but has proven effective IMX. Adults have to learn in a different way, but we do have two advantages: (a) money[1], and (b) literacy[2].
[1] with which to pay someone to instruct and correct us, who will often describe things deductively in grammatical terms, taking advantage of our adult L1 knowledge, instead of exclusively inductively by example. Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716468
When starting part-time language instruction, an adult learner is behind even a four year old. After two years, an adult learner will be dealing with more complex sentences than a six year old.
"Dinosaurs have been extinct for 60 million years, but there's substantial evidence that birds are the evolved form of dinosaurs today." is a fine example of a sentence that an adult learner should be able to grok before two years, even if they might parse it at first as "Dinosaurs splodge extinct for 60 million..."
[2] Unless one is seriously hipster or hermit, we are surrounded by the written word. (My italian is nearly nonexistent, but I do try to follow cooking directions in it, before falling back to the languages I have.)
One language teacher of mine observed that she could tell within a few weeks which of her students read or not: the non-readers were advanced in oral comprehension and generation over a limited conversational domain, while the readers were less fluent orally but used a much wider range of grammar and vocabulary.
Having seen celebrity twitter, I concur with her reader/non-reader dichotomy.
Look on this board. The person who corrects breaks to brakes, loose to lose, etc. is going to be viewed as at least mildly pedantic. Granted, people make mistakes typing they wouldn't make speaking but the principle is at least similar.
I’m one of those who feel the urge to correct to/too, their/there/they’re, etc. errors. But, I recognize that the main issue is I don’t know who is on the other side. Is it someone for whom English is a second language? Is it a native English speaker that doesn’t know or doesn’t care to know proper grammar? Is it someone who knows proper grammar but just made a simple mistake? Is it someone who welcomes correction?
I don't think that's very plausible. I believe children don't consciously think of the language they're learning, let alone about linguistic abstractions like gender, tense, case,... The concept of a correction doesn't occur to them, in my experience when children are corrected they don't understand that the sentence fragment uttered applied to what they said. Besides, in many cultures children's speech is never corrected, and they all turn out speaking fine at the same rate.
The example you give is a bit ironic too, the linguistic shift from "X and I" to "me and X" happened centuries ago and even though it's become a classical example of an "error", there is little hope in ever reversing it. It's always been curious to me that this "error" is pedantically pointed out, but nobody cares about the same "mistake" being made in "Who wants cake? Me!", "He is older than me", "They are going to the beach, but me, I'm staying here" and of course "It's me". By the same reasoning of applying case, in all these sentences "me" should be "I", and especially the last one should be "It am I" (as it is in German and Dutch, translated word-for-word).
As a tourist in Greece, locals would stare in bewilderment as I sounded out all the words like a 5-year-old. I guess most tourists either know Greek or don't try.
But it can be compensated by much higher cognitive skills, like mapping grammar rules theoretically without even using sentencing, or knowing what to ask exactly to reach the point you re trying to make.
I ve had both successes and failure learning languages as an adult: english was easier because close to my mother tongue, vastly interesting, nearly mandatory for what I do. So I could listen to podcasts all day, chat with trolls at night, watch movies on the weekend, read novels and eventually move abroad anywhere to finally speech practice etc.
I had less success with Japanese: I could quickly learn the writing, because of cognition (kids spend years, an adult can just spend months 2 hours a day), grammar was a matter of habitual exercising, but then the fact it s not mandatory, not everywhere and not as interesting an opening as english was, well I gave up eventually and dont even care: that s what s hard in language learning at any age.
Having learned a different language through immersion at adult age (30+), whether or not you get the feedback is culturally dependent. In France, you would get this feedback more often than in, say, the Dutch or Swedish language areas.
That said, I think it's not just getting feedback that counts, it's also being open to feedback. Relative to an adult, a child doesn't mind getting embarrassed as much. Adults often don't want to lose face, and are then less likely to learn the language with full abandon. Natural language learning ability aside, I made quicker advances than other people because I didn't care about making silly/stupid mistakes but others did.
Steven Pinker argues against that stance in The Language Instinct.
There are plenty of cultures where it is not normal to correct children in conversation and there are even cultures where you generally don't talk to children before the child starts talking.
That's why as a non-native I'm glad I have a native girlfriend who's also an English teacher. She definitely corrects me, especially about pronunciation, and I'm grateful for that, because I can see improvements I didn't think I needed.
I'm in a relationship with a native speaker too (I'm American, she's Chinese), and am actively learning. I talked to a lot of couples and some people have patience to teach and some don't. It's nice though that couples are close enough to correct each other and help each other out.
I had a friend learning French that was French teacher, and she gave up after two sessions, not having the patience.
Actually, I just started working on an app to help couples improve each other's languages. You're pretty fluent already, I wonder in what other capacity's your girlfriend who is an English teacher helps you!
I think your example is instructive. That's not really an "error", so much as a rule people learn in school about how English "should" be spoken and may or may not pass along to their children. But consider this conversation:
child: "My brother said me -"
adult: "My brother told me"
child: "{pause} My brother told me..."
That conversation just doesn't happen. Those are the real grammatical rules of English, and the ones that native speakers of Spanish, in this example, violate. But a child doesn't learn that from an adult interrupting them and correcting them, they just internalize it and know it on their own.
Sadly it seems there's a whole generation that's been raised without anyone correcting them on this specific point (that it's "Tim and I"). Not that this means I disagree with your greater point.
To be fair, a decent number of people also overcorrect and use "Tim and I" for the objective case as well (e.g. "The teacher told Tim and I that our grammar was incorrect"). I think simply giving the correct construction for the case that the speaker actually used isn't sufficient for using proper grammar; one needs to be able to identify which case is which to be able to use "correct" grammar.
The real fun is when someone corrects you for saying "The teacher told Tim and me" and then you give them a grammar lesson to the use of the objective case. I'll admit to a little bit of smugness when that happens.
Otherwise no, I don't correct people's grammar unless they've specifically asked me to review something.
Nicely put, I didn't realise it but I am, as you say, overcorrecting in this way myself. Interestingly I have a friend who has quietly tried to point this out to me (a counter example to the greater point) but you have explained it better.
Whether something is “correct” or not in this particular grammatical regard comes down to cultural factors, not objective linguistic ones. If we look at the languages of the world, we can see plenty of cases where the nominative form of the 1st person singular pronoun was gradually replaced over time by the accusative or oblique form. Therefore, people coming to say “Tim and me” instead of “Tim and I” is a completely natural linguistic change and complaining about it is simply being pedantic.
I've authorized a friend to correct me like that whenever he sees fit (I'm ESL and I really want to be able to speak English like a native speaker), and I've learned a ton since then.
I don't actually agree with the corrections, though.
Those phrases are similar, but subtly different. It depends on whether you meant you hear them every day, but not always a lot... Or whether you hear them constantly throughout the day, every day.
> I would interrupt another adult to make the above correction.
I interrupt my girlfriend all the time for this very reason and I wish more people would correct me. Nobody's been correcting me for years so I assume it's-a-perfecto, when it's not.
Along the same lines, as adults, we often take these corrections personally (perhaps as a matter of habit) and therefore avoid situations where they may occur (conversation groups for new speakers, explicitly asking native speakers to correct you etc).
Schooling in an extremely significant factor. By the teenage, a child has undergone more than ten thousands hours of schooling (say, 6h * 250d * 8y), in the language of the country they grow up in. It's an extensive and, by an adult learning a second language, irreplaceable experience.
Children who have one parent from a foreign country, even if they communicate extensively with such parent, will have a considerably more developed native language.
I think its important to call out that, it's entirely possible to become a fluent speaker in any secondary language you commit to, at any age. I've seen it and know people who've put in the hard work.
However, the distinction here is that, the older you get, the harder it is. A lot is stacked against an older brain, both in its ability to quickly make room for the massive amount of new knowledge required and your life's ability to make time for it.
If you persevere, you can get there, but you're just going to have to understand that it's going to feel like climbing Mount Everest. If you're a kid or teenager, it will come to you much faster and maybe like taking a walk up a small SF street.
Kids can learn a new language simply by watching a subtitled TV show or listening to music in that language. Adults on the other hand need structured exercises, dedicated studying time and immersion.
Yeah, anyone can learn a language quickly. I'm not sure how much the old brain affects it or at what age it cuts off. But people that put in the time or are in the right environment can pick up a language in months. Polyglots do it all the time, and they aren't geniuses, they just found methods that worked for them and have fun with it.
I just don't think there are popular good methods out there. The most successful is complete immersion, but that's extremely hard to be in that situation. Most people want to learn a language for fun. People first default is to rely on Duolingo but everyone I talked to don't learn anything from it even after using it for hundreds of days.
I get by with Anki, but definitely helps to have native speaker nearby to help and practice.
> But people that put in the time or are in the right environment can pick up a language in months.
The time aspect cannot be emphasized enough. Time is a huge issue for adult language learners. You simply need to spend a lot of time listening, speaking and forming relationships in the target language.
As a child, socializing and learning is your full time job, so it's a lot more straightforward. No pesky job or dependents to take care of.
Another issue people don't discuss much is personality / identity. As a child, we are so much more malleable with regards to that. It can be very difficult for adults to fully step back out of their cultural and social sense of self and enter a new context where they are totally clueless and inept.
As a child getting set back a few years temporarily isn't a big deal—you just get put in a few ESL classes and you can still play games and socialize with your peers. But to go from a high functioning adult to a toddler is quite taxing emotionally.
> ... enter a new context where they are totally clueless and inept.
Fortunately those of us on HN relearn software ecosystems every few years, to teach us humility.
I often wonder if there had been a class distinction in the "it's all greek to me" saying in english? For some englishmen, the simile would be saying that it was incomprehensible foreign squiggles, and they'd never understand, but for others it would be saying that it was incomprehensible foreign squiggles, yet with a bit of swotting and practice they'd eventually understand.
CASSIUS: Did Cicero say any thing?
CASCA: Ay, he spoke Greek.
On the other hand, an adult brain has an advantage in that it already knows another language fluently, so complex words and concepts in the new language can be explained by way of translation, analogy, and deconstruction into the native language. An adult also has the advantage of structured learning and applying the most efficient language-learning strategy: systematic study of vocabulary and grammar, etc.
Adults do have a disadvantage as far as accents and fluency are concerned though. For that, you need total immersion (i.e. no relying on prior language as a crutch) and to completely reset oral posture rather than letting the oral posture of their native language influence speaking habits.
In the very early days of learning a language, about the only native-speaker conversations one can follow are between mothers and small children.
A year later, however, one is capable of participating in conversations that are much richer than those mothers are still having with the same children.
> ... most of us will not be able to master grammar like a native speaker — or probably sound like one either.
I disagree with the "mastering grammar" point. I think that many native speakers are less than perfect in terms of mastery of their language grammar, especially in various tricky / special cases. Native speakers' ability to use correct grammar stems from combination of language environment immersion and some formal teaching in school. However, I believe that the immersion plays lesser role in grammar mastery and larger role in fluency (due to "thinking in native language"). On the other hand, formal grammar of any language is a relatively limited set of rules, so, given appropriate determination, time and effort, it could be mastered to a native or near-native level regardless of the learner's age. In my opinion, the most difficult aspects of learning a foreign language are richness of vocabulary, idioms, fluency in embedding cultural references, and accent-free pronunciation.
Linguistically, there is no such thing possible that a native speaker not being a master of their languages. It is by definition true that all natives speakers who do not have intellectual disability are masters of their mother tongue and are idiomatic, except for idiosyncratic (personal/creative) phrases. However, the issue is, languages live as a complex cloud of many mutually intelligible dialects and argo. The language you learn in school can really not be the language you learned from your parent; that does not mean you're an imperfect native speaker. It is just the case that over the 19th century many nation states (such as Italy, Germany etc...) had to standardize their languages so that there is a way for all citizens understand each other; like a lingua franca except easier to learn.
Following this thought, it is possible for a non-native speaker to absorb the "formal" grammar of a language, however learning idiomatic speech and tiniest differences in connotation is a completely different deal. It is very plausible that a non-native speaker cannot master non-formal, "human" aspect of grammar.
Languages are formalized by people, so that we can teach them to other people. The assumption is that, although English is not a universal language, human brain has certain universal concepts, such as logic, that can be understood by everyone. Then we exploit this feature of this brain, we construct human languages as formal languages, so that we can study them. Purely speaking, languages are not formal objects, they're just whatever native speakers use to communicate.
We can use physics as an analogy. Surely the universe does not operate with mathematical formulas and calculations. Humans observe the nature, then build models that predict nature. And the more predictive a model is, the more useful it is. If you're designing a car Newtononian physics can be a very useful tool to understand the nature, but that doesn't mean nature, intrinsically, uses Newtonian physics to "behave". Similarly, we can observe human languages and construct imperfect models of them (grammar) after the fact. This is only good enough to explain 99% of the spoken language (good enough for all citizens to communicate).
> Linguistically, there is no such thing possible that a native speaker not being a master of their languages.
Is this a necessary distinction? Taking this to the extreme, there would be no such concept as a grammatical error. Or even syntax, for that matter.
If a native speaker says 'loose' instead of 'lose' (or 'rouge' vs 'rogue') did they just create a new dialect? Shouldn't we consider these as being 'mistakes' - until such a time these forms are the new accepted norm?
What about vocabulary? There are natives who never bothered reading a book, and thus are limited in their vocabulary. Are they 'masters' of their language? Is the lack of knowledge about certain words also to be considered a dialect?
I am not sure one's upbringing gives them any authority on language usage. Collectively, sure. Not on an individual basis.
It is the only possible way to study languages scientifically. You don't go prescribe physical objects, you look at physical objects treat their behavior as a black box and build models to predict them.
> Taking this to the extreme, there would be no such concept as a grammatical error. Or even syntax, for that matter.
Correct, as I said there really is no such thing as grammar error. A native speaker cannot, by definition, talk in wrong grammar. You need a point of reference to judge sentence to be off grammar. In order to do so, you need to have a formal language which is a model of natural language. The only possible way for you to do this if you observe N native speakers and capture their language formally such that your model can predict sentences they would use to communicate.
> Or even syntax, for that matter.
Not following you. Syntax is a property of formal languages. English, as defined by institution X, python, Lojban, typed lambda calculus are all formal languages, which have well defined axioms and rules of inference. Natural languages however do not. This is the same distinction between natural numbers and models of natural numbers (Paeno arithmetic, Q, etc). Or electrons as they exist in themselves, and physical theories that predict behavior of electrons.
> If a native speaker says 'loose' instead of 'lose' (or 'rouge' vs 'rogue') did they just create a new dialect?
Everything I said is about spoken language not written. It's possible for native speakers to make spelling mistakes, it's not possible for them to pronounce a word wrong or make grammatical mistakes. (modulo human errors, of course if a native speaker accidentally says something wrong, they can pick it up and fix themselves)
> What about vocabulary? There are natives who never bothered reading a book, and thus are limited in their vocabulary.
Register, argo etc. I'm sorry but these are all well understood concepts available to you in first couple chapters if a Linguistic 101 textbook.
> I am not sure one's upbringing gives them any authority on language usage.
The whole point is there is no authority. Just like no one can judge what is the correct way for an atom to behave, no one can judge what is the correct way for a person to speak. The way you learned from your mom and practice daily is the language you speak as it is.
This seems weirdly asymmetric: the same intuition that forms sentences also recognizes some of the sentences it hears as incorrect. In the former activity it’s always right but in the latter it’s always wrong?
What’s happening when I identify a mistake while proofreading my own writing or listening to a recording of my own speech? When I can’t figure out how to make a sentence work because none of the ways I can think to phrase it sound good?
I’d totally believe that the workings of this recognizer are too slippery to conveniently model and study. But I can’t believe that it doesn’t exist or is completely personal. There are definitely communities with broad alignment on some intelligible sentences being good and others being bad.
I'm not sure if I have ever encountered such an extreme definition of descriptivism. I am a descriptivist, but I still believe that you can sensibly state that some otherwise intelligent native speakers are "wrong" in their use of the language and certainly not everyone deserves the title of master; it is still sensible to talk about different levels of native language mastery.
Consider that there are certain types of grammatical errors that only native speakers make due to regional idiomatic usage. Those people will agree that their usage is incorrect (they were likely taught so in school) and other native speakers from other regions may struggle to understand them. Are they truly a master of the language, or are they a master of their dialect? Can they switch off their dialect and speak flawlessly without major effort?
Then consider that there are more non-native speakers of the English language on Earth than there are native speakers. Usage of tense, articles, prepositions, and so on is a cultural artifact. A group of non-native speakers can in some case carry on a conversation fluently that a native speaker will struggle to understand because of frequent usage of uncommon grammatical artifacts which they are not comfortable with. Is the struggling native speaker truly a master if they take so long to parse rare correct grammar?
I much appreciate your thoughtful comment. It appears that, speaking about core of the issue, we are on the same page (at least, based on your second paragraph above). Because, in my original comment, when mentioning "grammar", I was referring to formal grammar (i.e., rules), rather than other aspects of a language, including idiomatic expressions.
I speak English and Spanish well, I'd say fluently (my native language is neither English nor Spanish). I studied English in high school (2 hours a week), but I first chatted with native speakers ~ 15 years ago. I have been living in the US for 10 years and I use English continuously: I read in English, I listen to the radio in English, podcasts, TV. I have a very rich vocabulary, I'd say in the top 15% of native English speakers. For the life of me, I cannot watch movies without subtitles. That does not happen with podcasts, radio, or live talks. It is not that I understand nothing, but I struggle. My hypothesis is that the movie dialogue is not "natural" or "intuitive" and I cannot predict in some way what will be said. That prediction—I hypothesize—is needed when, allow me to use this image, the language is still not "yours". I still make mistakes when writing, I forget "s" all the time when using the third person and other minor mistakes that native speakers basically never make. I just don't feel the language they way I feel my native language.
I have yet to meet someone who has learned a language in their 20s and became as fluent as they are in their native language. The brain is increasingly less plastic the older we get and that is undoubtedly true for anyone who is not living in fantasy world for both motor and cognitive abilities.
PS, I am sure there are some typos, despite me having read my post a few times.
I'm American and watch movies with subtitles. The audio balance is generally fucked up and there's some weird fuzziness to the sound or people suddenly start whispering only to have massive explosions and metal being torn apart 5 seconds later. (Yes, I know people say to adjust audio balance and settings but it doesn't fix the problem.) It's impossible to follow the dialogue otherwise.
I'm fine with watching TV without subtitles because usually it's made with the assumption that people actually want to hear the dialogue.
My wife and I both constantly complain about the voice level in movies and TV. We've even hooked up a nice stereo system and let it calibrate itself, only to find out that we had to crank the center speaker up to hear them properly. And for crappy audio that isn't properly stereo, that still doesn't help because too much goes through the center speaker.
I'd say the main difference for me is that I have no problem whatsoever understanding movies in my native language. I love watching movies and it is quite frustrating for me not being able to get the dialogue as clearly as I get it in my native language.
I think it’s just the way American movies are produced. 80s and 90s movies are no problem for me. Starting around the 2000s I can’t pick up half of what they say. I have American friends who use subtitles for the same reason.
I have no trouble listening to dialogue in movies in my second language, so I think comprehension isn’t the problem.
I never have problem hearing what is said, but I continually have to turn music down! It's almost normal to have a scene with quiet talking, then scene with really loud music, then quiet talking.
So I guess for people who don't adjust the volume throughout, either the music is way too loud or the dialogue is often inaudible. I don't get why music in movies is so often so relatively loud. Not sure if it's just US movies or not.
But mostly I watch movies/series with subtitles, in other languages than English - as a side benefit, don't even have to turn it up when planes go over!
You are not alone. I have a friend who has the same issue with French. I don't. I'm not sure what the root cause is, maybe our brains are wired differently. Amd he's invested a ton more time in learning it.
There's a big difference between learning a language to a useful level and learning like a native speaker.
I am fortunate to live in a multilingual country, and it is obvious when experts and politicians are speaking in their mother tongue[1] versus in one of the other national languages or even in english. However, we judge them by what they have to say and how they express it[2], not by their accents or minor solecisms.
For what it's worth, the US State Department has ranked their experiences with teaching languages to anglophones going on foreign assignment, which corroborates my (and my friends' and colleagues') experience of closer to 2 years than to 30 for an 80-20 knowledge:
[1] which is not necessarily what the academies and middlebrows of other countries would consider the "correct" form of "their" language https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351229
[2] Somewhere I heard the joke that french politics is full of dull people attempting to sound intellectual, but english politics is full of educated people attempting to sound common. Our politics is closer to the former than the latter. I just heard an interview with a train driver on the radio, and although her vocabulary revealed frequent repetition, she did her best to speak with a "langage soutenu" (a refined style, as opposed to the "langage de la rue", of the streets).
Do you translate English and Spanish into your native language in your head, or can you parse the meaning fluently without doing so?
As an English speaker I lose track of what people are saying in films. It took me forever to learn how much what people say in films matters and isn't just background noise that fills in the space around action scenes. The combination of visual and music is usually enough to derive the meaning and feeling anyway.
I can parse the meaning fluently. I'd say I noticed English becoming its own entity (that is, I stopped translating a high speeds between my native language and English) a few years ago, although some days are better than others.
Can corroborate even as an American native English speaker - movie dialogue and music lyrics in English were hard for me to understand until I was in my mid to late teens. I'm not sure why that is.
A child spends all their time immersed in their native language... they hear nothing else. There is no other ‘competing’ language. Thus, they learn it quickly.
An adult, on the other hand, can never be immersed into a new language like a child. Even if an adult is in a foreign country 24/7 without any speaking his native language, the adult will still hear his native language in his own head; that is, the adult will think and talk to himself in his native language and will always be a competitor for the external voices he hears.
> An adult, on the other hand, can never be immersed into a new language like a child. Even if an adult is in a foreign country 24/7 without any speaking his native language, the adult will still hear his native language in his own head; that is, the adult will think and talk to himself in his native language and will always be a competitor for the external voices he hears.
I am a native English speaker who learned Italian in my 20s. When I stay for a week or two with my Italian in-laws who don’t speak English, I find myself thinking in Italian after a few days. It’s noticeable because my mind will wander into a topic about programming or something and my internal monologue will hit a technical word that I don’t know. I also dream in Italian and report this to my Italian wife.
It’s not hard to slip into. I think your claim is based on speculation, because my experience says otherwise.
No, because we are talking about the foreign person trying to learn the new (second) language by total immersion. They obviously aren't going to start thinking in the second language until after they've learned it.
> Even if an adult is in a foreign country 24/7 without any speaking his native language, the adult will still hear his native language in his own head; that is, the adult will think and talk to himself in his native language and will always be a competitor for the external voices he hears.
Not exactly. One of the first signs that you have made substantial progress in a foreign language is that you no longer have to translate your internal monologue when speaking.
If you are by yourself, then reverting to the native language can happen. That's assuming you can even 'hear' your internal monologue, that's not a given. Would this impair language learning?
What about children exposed to multiple languages from an early age? Surely the external voices wouldn't always match what's in their head - they still learn very quickly.
Clearly brain plasticity in a youthful brain helps immensely. My point was just that it’s not that straightforward to compare kids with adults in regard to language acquisition. An adult always has an ‘inner voice’ in their original language at first, so there can never be complete immersion as there can with a child who comes to the table with, originally, a blank slate. Or, at the very least, with an ‘original language’ inner voice that isn’t as robust as an adults. That is, I would suspect that an adult’s ‘inner voice’ has a far richer vocabulary and formal grammatical structure than an 8 year old’s ‘inner voice.’
Stated differently, an 8-year old with English as a native language has and ‘inner-voice’ of an 8-year old: limited English vocabulary and limited English grammar. If you immerse the kid in Chinese, that immaturely developed inner-voice isn’t much competition to what’s coming in through the ears. A 40-year old, of course, has an ‘inner’ English voice that is completely formed and has been in habitual use for decades... much more competition to what’s coming in through the ears. Indeed, as other posters have noted, when learning a new language, one must make a concerted effort NOT to translate the new word in one’s head, but rather to let the new foreign word stand on its own two feet. This is easier for an 8-year old, I would think, as there will be multitudes of new foreign words they are hearing that don’t correspond to anything they’ve yet to learn in their native tongue; that is, there are a lot more words for which they won’t be tempted to ‘translate’ into English as they haven’t even learned the English word yet (or, at least, haven’t known the English word that long.)
I think this may be why it’s easier to pick up food words. I know what ‘burrito’ means as an English speaker, because I can’t translate it into English... the word stands on its own two feet. But, the word for ‘stew’? That doesn’t stick as well as I instinctively translate the Spanish word guisado into ‘stew’ in my mind.
This is simply false. E.g., my kid is around speakers of 4 rather different languages. At age 3, he has grasped all 4 languages to a good degree and even translates pretty well between them. I don't think he's particularly unusual and 3-4 language speaking kids are reasonably common around here.
This article, like other things I've read in books like "The Organized Mind", or the class "Learning How to Learn" is that learning for adults is usually difficult not because of reduced learning capacity, but instead individual behaviors, emotional regulation, and culture.
Dr. Levetin suggests that it's mostly around how much frustration you can handle, and how much time you think you have left vs. the amount of value you'll get from what you are learning. Procrastination, a great killer of self-education, is primarily driven by low emotional intelligence/regulation.
This is exactly what I get from this article again: the issue is not brain plasticity in learning, but the willingness to be frustrated, a desire to learn new things (we can't all be Paul Erdos) and the time to learn.
It's more than just willingness. It's having access to the time and support structure necessary to completely learn the language from scratch. What adult can a few years sitting around speaking and listening to a language 12+ hours a day while being able to mostly ignore their native language?
Children go to schools where they are taught and socialized in the target language. They are then able to come home and watch tv, movies and listen to music all in the target culture.
There are some other confounding issues I'm not touching, but I think you're getting to the point. The issue isn't the brain so much as it is the greater systems involved.
The barriers to learning a new language like a native speaker are mostly economical rather than biological. The amount of effort that it requires is just huge and the return is very small, because you don't really gain much from speaking like a native speaker compared to speaking like a foreign speaker. The difference is mostly cosmetic.
> The barriers to learning a new language like a native speaker are mostly economical rather than biological.
Are they? The article doesn't present clear evidence either way. And yet, that would be the most useful finding of this inquiry, were it to be completed.
I spent a year in the US, despite my English being pretty bad, to a point where I struggle to pronounce some words correctly, or often ask the other person to repeat what they've just said.
Despite all that I feel no need to improve my English, since I survived that year somehow. If I was to invest my time in language learning, I would probably start a completely new language instead, due to better ROI.
I'll add my experience (and that of my entourage) in support.
In a more illustrious example, von Braun felt no need to avoid speaking like a foreign speaker, despite having lines like "small motor in the winged fourth stage":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zcU85O82XE&t=25
The situation would change if one were in an economic situation where one has to "pass" as having had a different background, but does that ever happen in civilised areas?
(the Expanse' Skinnies would have yet more issues, as with their distinct phenotype it'd be impossible to pass: Belta, fodagut, mi showxa wit naterash. To mebi tenye delowda sekrip pash setara. To mebi tili tenye walowda kapawu unte imbobo gerowsh wit imbobo okwa ere Sirish. To mebi tili vedi fit inya unte mebi xalte wit kopeng inya. Amash: detim kasi kowl owta inya vedi to, im fosho gonya pense ere kibal!)
> It was shared 300,000 times on Facebook, made the front page of Reddit and became a trending topic on 4chan
Not to take away from the study, which I think is quite valid, and interesting. But, is seeing "became a trending topic on 4chan" written like it is a metric of success along with number of likes is a bit weird.
My mother tongue is Russian. I learned English in school starting at 6. After that I learned German starting at around 22-23. Since 25 or so I am learning French - currently 31. The two difficulties I have is 1. time and 2. immersion. I think its correct that I will never speak like a native speaker but it will be close enough that it will take some minutes for a native speaker to figure out that I'm not a native speaker. Funny enough - I have developed an English accent in Russian because I don't use it so often any more. Actually its hard to say - Russians have trouble identifying where I'm actually from based on the accent.
The worst part about learning languages is that you don't want to miss out. The second worst part is that some languages are very difficult while others are very easy. The third worst part is that I am isolated from those who speak the new language. The fourth worst part is that the older you get the less time you have left both per day and in absolute terms. I don't think it is difficult to learn a third language. It's taking years but what many people miss is that a 10 year old child has worse conversational skills than an adult who has been learning and speaking a foreign language for 10 years.
Being a kid in a culture goes a long way in forming how you speak. Your language is an expression of your culture. So much of my personality, how I speak, words I use, etc has been formed by what I watched and listened to growing up. By the time you're 20, it's past the time to form that same experience. The difference between this speaker and someone who has learned to speak perfect English in their 20's is that the former shapes the language as it continues to evolve while the latter simply learns (though that's not to say that late learners don't shape language.)
I think the ability to learn a language is often related to how much uncertainty we can currently handle. As I get older, I feel myself and others pressuring me more to "know the answer" to things and don't believe I have as much room to be wrong as I did when I was younger. When I was learning Swahili in Tanzania in my 20s, I was wrong a lot but I guess I wasn't as worried about the consequences.
In short, learning a new language can make us look stupid and as we get older, we may feel more afraid of looking stupid :-D
I learnt a second language from scratch as an adult. The neural plasticity thing is definitely real but I think the effect is often overstated. Adults a) rarely spend as much focused time on language study as kids and b) are more afraid of making mistakes/less inclined to say things that they know are not 100% right. I've observed that people who care less about making mistakes (to the point where it's embarrassing to watch) end up learning much faster.
I wonder if there are some differences in how people pick up languages in places where learning a new language is a casual thing (example, India) vs a significant achievement (example, the US).
It does seem possible that just believing that language is easy might change the process in which it is learned, although my impression about studies on the effects of beliefs is that is hard to make high quality studies for this.
Here's the quiz used to conduct this research. It's supposed to predict one's native language. Predicted English for myself even though it's not. Doesn't seem particularly tough. Not sure it's a well-designed test.
“researchers from three Boston-based universities showed children are proficient at learning a second language up until the age of 18, roughly 10 years later than earlier estimates. But the study also showed that it is best to start by age 10 if you want to achieve the grammatical fluency of a native speaker“
Friends of mine who moved to the US as teens have what I would call off-native. Their mastery is definitely native-level but their accent is a bit odd. You might wonder if their accent is just an American one you haven't heard before. A good example of this level of English proficiency is YongYea on YouTube.
One detail the article does not discuss is the distinction between oral and written competence.
I started learning English in my teens. I would judge my reading and writing proficiency to be at the higher end of the native speaker spectrum. I speak fluently as well, but have retained a distinctly non-native accent, and I sometimes have difficulties understanding spoken English (getting older does not help there either…).
> But the study also showed that it is best to start by age 10 if you want to achieve the grammatical fluency of a native speaker
Another angle that should be considered is that, while children learn languages very quickly, they can 'unlearn' just as fast.
One of my cousins spoke fluent Japanese as a young child. Then he moved to another country. A few years later he couldn't speak or understand Japanese anymore. I've since learned that this is very common.
I'd like to know how much learning a second language as a child has impact on this.
I'm a native German speaker and English is my second language. I was very bad in English at school and just got better in the last 5 years and I'm 35 now.
On a side-note, I'm learning Spanish right now with Duolingo (as some kind of social media detox) and I like it. Every now and then I can understand more Spanish Tweets and the lack of grammatical explanations in Duolingo often helps to get "a feeling" for the language instead of really learning the principles. Wouldn't have imagined les explanation could be better.
Doesn't it depend on the language? I've picked up quite a bit of Spanish late in life and I think it came fairly easily. Granted, it helps to be in CA where Spanish is quite pervasive.
I'm now trying to pick up conversational Vietnamese and, wow, that is a whole different ball game. Tonal languages are full of subtleties that don't come easy to someone who has never paid attention to them. It feels like I'm trying to learn perfect pitch.
I think the better question is, when does being able to think and do math quickly in a new language disappear?
Lots of theories in this thread, but pretty much everyone has a mother tongue in which they think and count. There might be tons of outliers, I'm sure, but for the vast majority of multilingual speakers, your native language is the one you go back to in your head when you're trying to calculate the tip or count pennies. Yes, as odd as it seems, we use language when doing math.
Are you multilingual? Have someone give you a basic math problem verbally, and then give them the answer. Which language did you use? Most everyone will switch to their native language, and then switch back.
So again, when does this ability disappear?
I moved to Spain when I was 30yo and learned how to live and work in Spanish, but I'll never be truly fluent. English just is how my mind works, and Spanish is really just a bunch of synonyms in my brain. It's all in one giant bucket, and just like I don't swear in front of small children and use simpler versions of words to talk to them, and use strict noun-verb-object sentences (with no phrasal verbs!!) when speaking "international English" to someone for whom English is a second language, I speak Spanish words in a certain order for Spanish speakers. This is not how truly multilingual people think.
What also is interesting is how growing up in a multilingual environment changes how fast you can context switch. Someone who grew up in say rural France and had no exposure to English, might learn it amazingly well, but if they're in mixed company, you can watch their heads explode trying to swap languages. I love the blank stare they'll give you as they change brains, recall what you just said, and then are able to respond. Then of course you have the Spanglish teens of LA who don't even notice they're mixing languages in the same sentence.
I think all this is to say, it's a tad more complicated than just "when" and "if".
Phrasal verbs, huh. I never thought about it but I suppose English does have a gazillion of those nano-idioms. Turn up, turn down, turn on, turn off, turn to, turn in, turn out. I think I subconsciously avoid them as well when talking to someone with a limited grasp of the language•.
Regarding math, I'm a English non-native and learning to 'think math' in English was something that I, at some point, simply decided to start putting an effort into, as if it was more of a separate skill. I'm not sure if it's the best indicator, but I definitely did stick with my native language for math for a while, although only for simple counting and arithmetic.
I've experienced the language switch brainhalt myself, it's pretty funny. For a moment it feels like someone spoke alien to me.
[•] modulating language to make it go down through google translate smoother is something that I've noticed myself and some others do on the English-Japanese barrier, from both sides.
P.S. Hey sweet, clever.io paused the timer while I was busy typing all this out. Neat!
Hey there! Thanks for that insight!!! Adjusting our written language in order to compensate for automated translation is a really interesting emergent behavior! Not too different from SMS-speak working it's way into every day communication like OMG or LOL.
And thanks for checking out Clever! I hope you enjoy it! After a few years, I'm still only about half way through.
> "There are three main ideas as to why language-learning ability declines at 18: social changes, interference from one’s primary language and continuing brain development."
Social changes probably, you just don't have the time.
At 30 I took a year off, went to school to learn a new language which I never had any contact with. After one year I started to work in tech again only communicating using the language I started learning a year ago.
After 2-3 years I had no communication issues at all anymore, working with dozens of people.
The article focuses on native grammar skill and that is a problem I have. Every language has grammar (and vocabulary) which is rarely used. I struggle with some of the rarely used but more advanced grammar. I know that I could master it if I studied for 3-6 more months full time but I just don't see the benefit of investing that time. My time is better spent working.
I have been thinking about doing it all over again for a while now. Mandarin should be an interesting challenge.
Please continue studying the language, it is frustrating hearing non-native speakers say this. Your bad grammar or foreign mind will always hinder how you can interact with the community you are in. English is pretty strange in this way, I feel the cultural part is so estranged from the language, the width of the english speaking community is just too vast. You can get by with much less english than in other languages IMHO.
Agreed. Anyone can learn a language. It's not even just time, but keeping up the streak and motivation. Learn a little per day, keep up at it, and you'll progress at an N + 1 level. I think it's important people don't burn out, and find outlets in which they can practice.
child: "Me and Tim went -"
adult: "Tim and I went."
child: "{pause} Tim and I went..."
As an adult, you simply do not get this kind of feedback. There's no chance in hell I would interrupt another adult to make the above correction. It's simply too disrespectful. And yet it is precisely this disrespectful interruption and correction that enables children to have tight feedback loops which result in fast, effective learning.