Language is an interesting one. Maybe it’s my personal bias but it seems a lot easier to learn other things than language as an adult. Instruments, skills, etc.
Emerge yourself in an environment with the language you want to learn. Boost some important words with spaced repetition. You will learn faster than any child.
Accents, on the other hand, that's a different story.
Children do it naturally, given a right environment, and simultaneously for two or three languages.
That doesn't mean it's impossible. "Hard" is relative. But, children's brains quite clearly have abilities that are lost later on.
"Research comparing children to adults has consistently demonstrated that adolescents and adults perform better than young children under controlled conditions (e.g., Snow & Hoefnagel-Hoehle, 1978)."
> Maybe it’s my personal bias but it seems a lot easier to learn other things than language as an adult.
I started to speak properly when I was 4, I was a bit late. But imagine the following:
You'd go to a country that you don't know the language of for the next 5 years. You can assume that you don't need to worry about your survival as food, water and shelter are provided for you among some luxuries like internet. Basically, you achieved financial independence.
The challenge becomes: in this new land you have to learn the local language within 5 years. There is, however, one caveat. You are only allowed to interact with the local population in their (spoken and body) language. You're not allowed to use any other educational resource. In other words, you have to learn a new language exactly like a baby does.
Could you do it in 5 years?
I bet if you set your mind to it, you really could.
Then there are all the really intensive courses/immersion programs where failure is basically forbidden (FSI, DLI, French Foreign Legion) and people reach B2-C1 very quickly, even for 'hard' languages (like Japanese or Arabic for a native English speaker, or French for a native Chinese speaker).
I wonder what Japanese course you're talking about.
It's like having extremely dedicated, enthusiastic tutors for those five years.
As an adult you don't have either. Though dating someone is your only real approximation of the latter.
There are some cherries on top of that, like how a babbling kid doesn't care to make mistakes. But I would think all of them pale in comparison to the two big advantages above.
Now at 30ish, I find I can learn languages MUCH easier. I speak fluent french and am reasonably conversant in Spanish. (I can read it pretty well though.)
We tend to focus on reading, oral understanding & writing. Those fit easily into "sit down and study for 45m" format. Speaking doesn't, and can feel uncomfortable or contrived in classroom settings. One of the big reasons "immersion" often leads to fast breakthroughs is because it comes with a lot of natural speaking. That's often the bottleneck.
You don't stop and think of the correct grammar, words or whatnot when speaking. You just try to make yourself understood as best as you can, with whatever language skills you have. Even 200 words is something. Engaging that intuitive improvisation can be really helpful.
Yes, at some point you'll need to work on pronunciation but that is something different than the type of extemporaneous speaking we are discussing here.
But this probably only goes to show what another commenter pointed out, which is that there is a lot of conflicting advice out there.
-Spaced repetition
-Lots of exposure
That's it. The rest is up to you. Some people swear by their specific app, some people religiously study their Assimil handbook, some people will argue that you should never ever learn grammar, some people swear by total immersion, and Nassim Taleb (who speaks like 7+ languages including like Ancient Greek) just reads a lot of books, but ultimately little of it matters insofar as it does one of the above two. There's an overabundance of learning materials out there for you to grab and use, just have your pick and find what's best for you.
Oh, and it goes without saying, but like with all learning, or indeed all cognitively demanding tasks, you have to actually want to learn. Ideally there should be an external motivator that pushes you and from which you can feel rewarded as you learn, this can range from 'watching anime without subtitles' to 'speaking with your SO in their language' but it has to be something.
But here are my tips: Immediately start by thinking in the language, or at least in terms of grammer. If you think about it, recalling and using words to say stuff you want is one of two primary skills you actually want to develop, so you need to actually practice that. Even if you do this with incorrect grammar, it's still incredibly beneficial. (German is a bit harder grammar-wise, but that's ok, you need to learn to think in the German grammar pattern before you can speak German.)
What does that really mean though? A couple of things: When you think about something you want to say, think about it in terms of grammar. Instead of thinking "I want to go to the beach", think like this: "[pronoun for me] [conjugation of verb "want"] [infinitive "to go"] [noun "the beach"]" Once that skill becomes a habit, speaking is trivial. It's just vocabulary. A note: I will think in terms of bastardized English grammar so that the grammar I'm thinking in conforms to the language I WANT to be speaking or understanding.
Here's an example: If I want to translate the phrase "I want to do it" to french, I'll think in the french grammatical pattern first. Then I just fill in french words if I know them, or english if I don't. Let's suppose I don't know ANY of the french words yet. I'll think; "{I [want]} [it] [to do]" because that's the correct order in french. "{Je [veux]} [le] [faire]".
To practice this, Learn a couple dozen words and a few phrases. Think about every possible combination and modification you can make with those and practice with imaginary conversations in your head. Then start to generate new things, and fill in the gaps with what you do know. This starts to practice the pattern of filling in words you do know. If you don't know them, guess. Look them up. Gesture. You're trying to communicate not do some abstract thing.
A side effect of this, is that it can be a real bitch to switch between languages if you're out of practice. I sometiems start thinking in the wrong grammatical pattern but filling in words from English. It can be pretty funny.
Although I do observe kids having superpowers when it comes to learning stuff, especially language, I find that the primary learning barrier for me is, as ever, time and interest.
It's very frustrating in Polish, for example, when I forget to roll my R's (difficult with my lisp!) and somehow I'm talking alien nonsense.
>Also, your rebuttal does not consider the fraction of those adults who learned those languages when they were young.
That still includes:
-Pretty much all immigrants
-All populations using a regional lingua franca (Modern Standard Arabic, Swahili, Indonesian, French, English, Russian, Portuguese)
-Everyone who learned English as a requirement for their job (that's everyone in business, research, the tourism industry, the software industry and probably a few others I'm missing)
-Everyone who learned another language as part of their higher education (usually English, but can also include languages like French, German or Russian)
Of course the language acquisition is usually far from perfect. You probably won't get rid of your accent as an adult, and your writing may be rife with mistakes. But as a communication tool, most adults manage just fine, because communication is part of being human and humans are naturally good at communicating.
I assume that most bi-lingual or multi-lingual adults today picked up the fundamentals of all those languages as children. They didn't learn them after growing up.
Yet still after 40 years they are not as comfortable as with their original language.
Edit: I'm (re)learning to play Starcraft2 at a higher level and loving those 'elevated plateaus' feeling of learning which does get rare.
Kids can watch cartoons all day, they talk with other native speakers all day without worrying they'll make a mistake and just talking about stuff, etc (Also they're usually at school)
Adults are judged more and have less time to learn, even passive learning (listening intently, etc). They also are understandably more focused on work.
I've learned other languages when adult and it was more a matter of time than "not being able to". Sure, it is harder and I'm not going to deny brain plasticity, but I learned more when I was less able to depend on English.
Kids can learn one or multiple languages extremely fast, and they can do it without formal, strict or even intentional instruction... at a very young age.
There's obviously something different, and for this purpose superior, about a child's brain. There are probably a lot of more subtle examples, language is something that's easily comparable.
Naturally, that's interesting to study. There may be ways of replicating some of the child brain's abilities in adults. But for immediate and practical purposes, it makes sense to just take advantage of this window while it exists. Multilingual childcare seems like an awesome choice, for example.
We should also identify other aspects of learning that are like this, and create the environment for them to engage. I've heard that navigation skills are similar... very easy to develop at a young age... even down to a constant awareness of cardinal directions.
Can they really, though? I have a three-year old nephew who can speak, but not particularly well.
I feel like if you dropped me into another country where I didn't speak the language, and had someone to look after me and respond to me whenever I tried to communicate my frustrations or desires, and I had no other responsibilities other than to exist, I could get to the vocabulary of a three-year old in less than a year.
The analogy isn't perfect and it is open to interpretation. That said, watch your nephew develop over the next three years. Note that there is very little deliberate training or discipline involved. Keep in mind that he could do this for several languages in parallel.
By 5 or 6, his language skills will have progressed much faster than most adults' in a similar period. At 4-6, a few months of immersion (say summer with grandparents) will yield some mind-blowing progress. Again, not impossible for an adult... but rare in practice.
I grew up in a multilingual house. My father was an english speaker. We lived in Israel. He did speak the local language (hebrew), but I spoke it better by 6. I could also handle thick accents (irish) that my mother couldn't understand.
This isn't unusual. Kids translating for parents is a very common phenomenon for immigrant families. It happens because kids learn faster. Adults can make up the difference with discipline, but it's a tough contest.
I've been wondering if it would actually hamper his skills to have to learn more than one language at a time, but your experience at least seems to say the opposite.
That said, I think there are hidden abilities. My younger brother would only speak one language. He understood both, and we both had a smattering of other languages (russian, arabic, polish, tunisian) too.
Seemingly, he wasn't bilingual (2-4yo). But, after a week of immersion (grandparents) he would fully switch language and stop speaking the first one. The ability was there, but he didn't like switching in real time.
If Your nephews get a week or two in Japan, they'll probably unlock another level of language ability very quickly.
The bonus is accent. On this, even a disciplined and talented adult can rarely come near children's innate ability. Accents are usually carried by adults decades after fluency is achieved. Kids don't have this problem. Again, immigrant families give us a wide sample group to observe.