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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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“
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.
[+] [-] krspykrm|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MrsPeaches|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ngokevin|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] allenu|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stephenhuey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toufka|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aeyes|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] outworlder|5 years ago|reply
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.
It is astonishing.
[+] [-] hakeberio|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] saghm|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] emmanueloga_|5 years ago|reply
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippo_Family_Club
[+] [-] jodrellblank|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elchief|5 years ago|reply
"this money is for me and him"
"for him and I..."
[+] [-] ghaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmm|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] xapata|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwolfi|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] etripe|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jarjoura|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ngokevin|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] titzer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ablekh|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] borroka|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fiblye|5 years ago|reply
I'm fine with watching TV without subtitles because usually it's made with the assumption that people actually want to hear the dialogue.
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677256
[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).
[+] [-] friendlybus|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] react_burger38|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lurquer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] disprofuse|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hoka-one-one|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outworlder|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|5 years ago|reply
It's just hard cause you have to re learn the system you know unconsciously.
[+] [-] distant_hat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moosey|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zumu|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lottin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syspec|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ivan1783|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jimkleiber|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Dryondristica|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InfiniteRand|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] auganov|5 years ago|reply
http://archive.gameswithwords.org/WhichEnglish
[+] [-] czzr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 01100011|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gbronner|5 years ago|reply
Haven't seen any studies on this, but it holds up well when you talk to people who came to the US at different ages.