When do we become unable to learn a language like a native speaker? (2018)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
"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.
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.”
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.
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).
Adults don't. Closest you can get is date someone who wants to help you out.
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.
> That's not universal, though.
Also: children whose parents immigrated.
The parents may never end up learning the language of the new country, but their children often will.
Can you elaborate on that? What does that mean?
In England, accent/grammer usage is a strong indicator of class (as I assume it may be in other countries).
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.
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 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!
Translating "oder" or "eben" is surprisingly difficult, just to name a few examples.
If chinese was mandatory to survive, like maybe it is in China mainland, maybe I d have been able to learn it more.
But Ill check your site, who knows!
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.
Imbobo xunyam gut. Imbobo rowm oso, keya? (The classroom is important. But also the pub, innit?)
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.
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.
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.
Nevøen min lærer norsk fordi han vil bo i Norge, og I want to suggest some more resources or options to him.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
Detim to xunyam wa lang, mogut fo to showxa sif. (language learners should talk to themselves)
A while ago we had a thread on production vs recognition for learning in general, not just languages...
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?
[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.
"this money is for me and him"
"for him and I..."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Maybe it is a specifically German thing.
Otherwise no, I don't correct people's grammar unless they've specifically asked me to review something.
AmbiguousParseError: consider punctuation, or for 'on a daily basis' try 'throughout the day'.
> I'm not too polite to correct,
MissingObjectError: unknown direct object of 'to correct'.
--
(Just kidding :))
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.
And mostly I really was just kidding, actively looking for anything to nitpick on in a comment talking about correcting people's grammar.
'to correct' without a (with an implied) direct object is also fine in colloquial speech, or internet comments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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 fine with watching TV without subtitles because usually it's made with the assumption that people actually want to hear the dialogue.
I have no trouble listening to dialogue in movies in my second language, so I think comprehension isn’t the problem.
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!
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).
TIL the CFL network is complex enough to have a circuit.
Bonus wiki: https://lb.wikipedia.org/
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.
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.
Desh walowda we fo du owbit owta we. (there's more than one way to transfer orbits)
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.
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.
It's just hard cause you have to re learn the system you know unconsciously.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716521
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!)
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.
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.)
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
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.
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…).
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'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.
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.
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.
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".
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!
And thanks for checking out Clever! I hope you enjoy it! After a few years, I'm still only about half way through.
A few minutes after the final exam, usually.
> "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."
I wonder which is the most dominant?
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.
Little kids are studying hard in a total immersion environment for 12+ hours a day, with no other language to fall back to
I think an adult who puts the same incredible amount of effort into it can learn another language and get to a native level
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.
Malay is my challange, going pretty well.