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Comment by semitext | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that the younger you are the easier it is to pick up a foreign language. Whereas that doesn't appear to be the case for computer languages. Learning either creates opportunities for life changing opportunities for the better, but I think it would be a mistake for people to forego learning a foreign language at that age. If they want to learn programming languages as well they will, but I know lots of people that regret not learning a 2nd language earlier in life.

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> My understanding is that the younger you are the easier it is to pick up a foreign language.

The latest research I've seen indicates that this is false. When you look at vocabulary in "words learned per hour of study", adults actually do much better than children. (I'm sure I've seen a study of this involving the U.S. State Department or some such, but I can't find it right now.) This isn't surprising to me: adults already know noun/verb/adjective/adverb, how [a] grammar works, a big pile of cognates/loanwords, etc.

The reason children seem to learn quicker is because they're exposed to the language every hour of the day. They have no choice. If they want to do anything at all, it requires using the target language. They make up for lower efficiency by brute force.

Adults tend to do poorly at learning foreign languages because they only spend an hour or two a day with it. Learning a language feels like a lot of work, and adults usually fail because they have the resources to be able to avoid interacting with it. This is also why "full immersion" (living in a place where they speak that language) is fast and effective even for adults.

(Think you're going overboard by spending 3 hours a day studying French? That's less than 1/5 of your waking hours. Any child in Paris will learn French 5 times faster, not because they're younger but because they're putting in an extra 13+ hours a day exposed to French.)

> I know lots of people that regret not learning a 2nd language earlier in life.

Sure, and I know people who regret not learning to dance, getting in shape, playing a musical instrument, etc. I also know people who started these things as adults and are just as accomplished as those who started young. And I know many people who started these things when they were young, and then gave them up -- and have basically lost all the effort they put into it. (After long enough, you can even forget your first language.) This fascination with youth needs to end.

I see it more as several stages of life, some easier than others:

baby/toddler growing up in a multilingual environment = fairly easy

baby/toddler growing up in a monolingual environment = difficult

Young child -> teenager (e.g. I actually began learning french in primary school) = slow and difficult

Late teens -> young adult = the best time after baby/toddler

+40 = more difficult but not impossible

>The reason children seem to learn quicker is because they're exposed to the language every hour of the day. They have no choice.

They also have an environment of understanding adults willing to explain their mistakes and teach how to say what they want.

If you’re already an adult, this is hard to find. People will either switch to your language, ignore you, or find some common language (even ad hoc hand signs) to communicate.

This is sometimes the case. But in my experience, a lot of people (strangers even) are more than willing to help you out. They are excited that you are learning their native language and want to see you succeed.

A good portion of the time, what you're describing stems from the language learner defaulting to an easier version of communication or trying to avoid embarrassment.

Learning a foreign language is more than just learning grammar and vocabulary. It is also learning to distinguish the different sounds of that language and the ways to make those sounds. I can't do the searches for it right now, but from what I recall, people lose the ability to distinguish sounds that they don't hear often by a very young age, since their brain figures it's not important to distinguish those, so that it becomes increasingly harder to pronounce and understand those languages which use different sounds. This is why L and R differentiation is very hard for Asian speakers, and tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese are very hard for English speakers.

> My understanding is that the younger you are the easier it is to pick up a foreign language.

IIRC, while that's long been a popular belief, it's not all that clear that it's true; a major effect, if not the whole effect, comes from it being easier to spend more time on it when younger. This portion of the effect is equally true of computer languages.

While the “critical period” hypothesis is not proven, language acquisition is an automatic process for almost every human child, given that they are in an environment where they are being spoken to.

Also, recent research suggests that the ability to differentiate sounds of a certain language rapidly narrows after a child leaves the baby stage.

> By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/health/views/11klass.html

I feel like I could pretty easily be fluent in more natural languages if, as with programming languages, "fluency" included being able to look things up in reference manuals, and if my expression of the language was limited to reading and writing, rather than listening and speaking.

Yes, you have identified why computer language “fluency” is not on the same level as foreign language “fluency”. While you can communicate with reading and writing in a foreign language, it limits your ability to connect with people. Whereas with computer languages, it is almost all reading and writing, especially in whiteboard interviews :)

That's actually how classical languages (Latin, Ancient Greek, Babylonian, etc.) are generally taught. Even professional classicists are generally not expected to speak their ancient tongues and using dictionaries are par for the course for making translations.

Clearly, I should have opted for Latin in fulfillment of my required foreign language credits in college. :-)

Based on my understanding, children have a much easier time for several reasons, none of which are inherent to being children, but are extremely common among children, specifically.

* Massive amounts of input data (Just all over the place) * Involuntary immersion (Your parents can just choose not to speak to you in your first language, a shop teacher can't) * Contextual examples (people very clearly pointing at things and labelling stuff when they use language) * 1 on 1 tutelage (This one is super important and extremely expensive for adults)

An adult given this situation willingly will learn a language extremely quickly.

The biggest argument against young people learning languages more easily than adults is the learning outcomes of children without bilingual parents in school language classes.

I learned my first programming language, Basic, when I was 8 years old, and reading code feels like a natural language to me. I think the complication is that programming involves both a language and a logic system. While language may be created naturally before puberty, having the requisite logical reasoning requires something extra. I had very early access to formal logic training, and this combined with self-motivated interest helped me overcome that barrier. I think it would be a deal breaker for others. It's one thing to be able to read a language, quite another to understand what it says.

Another factor is that the kind of language children are very good at learning is the spoken kind. Human capacity for reading and writing is not necessarily natural. You don't find many children learning Latin on their own without some other factor lowering the barrier for entry, either. Having a parent with whom to speak Latin would be that kind of factor.

> I had very early access to formal logic training

Can you please expand on this? Montessori School?

No. I am simply lucky to have been born into a family of Russian Intelligentsia who could provide me with a real education.

In 1st grade, I enjoyed learning math too much, and the teacher found this disruptive, so the school found an excuse to get me classified as learning disabled and put me in special education where I spent all day isolated in a detached cottage with 2 teachers and no other students.

The teachers had no lesson plan or anything for me to do, so my mother bought logic puzzle books for me to play with to relieve the boredom. I had already gotten a strong foundation in reading from my family, so I enjoyed filling them out on my own. I also had plenty of educational video games to play at home that I greatly enjoyed. Learning to program was just another toy to play with.

Oklahoma education system at its finest!

Thanks for the detail, it seems like you and your mother were able to "home school" yourself inside the school system.

Yep, precisely that.

The jury's still out on the Critical Period Hypothesis the last I checked. But in any case, you're right that there is a big difference between acquiring natural languages and learning a programming language. Language acquisition is a special kind of learning, an innate capacity we have for natural languages that mostly takes place without conscious effort. We certainly don't start learning our mother's programming languages while in the womb.

>I know lots of people that regret not learning a 2nd language earlier in life.

I was watching an interview on youtube of a family sailing around the world in a sailboat and one of the parents said college is good, but learning a 2nd languages is really equivalent to getting a college degree.

And I completely agree.

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