Comment by mynameisash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynameisash | Hacker News Reader

> the age-old question of why it’s so difficult to learn a second language as an adult

This immediately jumped out at me, the rest of the article notwithstanding. My hot take is that there are at least two strong reasons why it's so difficult:

1. You're not serious about it.

There's a man in my weekly French meetup who when I joined was a little bit better than me (which wasn't saying much -- I was horrible). Since then, his French has improved almost none. He can't conjugate, he can't pronounce, he can't even stay in the language: stumbling halfway through a simple sentence, he just gives up and switches to English. He's not serious about trying to improve. For him, I think, he just likes the social aspect of the group.

2. You worried about failing.

Far too many people I've seen want to be fluent to the detriment of becoming fluent. When in conversation, they think very carefully about what they say, practice pronunciation in their head, etc. Saying something embarrassing or even just slightly off is seen as a hindrance to their goals, but it's just the opposite: you have to make mistakes in order to get better.

Not to say that it's not hard to learn a language, but I've talked with so many people who just say, "Learn Spanish? At my age?! Impossible." But I can get by pretty well by myself in France with patient native speakers, and I'm self-taught. It's not as hard as people think.

I think people often forget how much time kids actually spend learning their mother tongue. They don’t go to a night class a few times a week, they spend hours each day for several years, both at home and then later at school, before becoming “fluent”. How many adults truly do that, and can’t speak the language afterwards? Brain plasticity is definitely a thing but it’s not as big of a dealbreaker as people often make it out to be.

It's this. Anything else is mostly copium, you can probably learn a new language faster as an adult. But you can't do it if you only have 1h each week.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis

There has been and continues to be a lot of research behind that cope. The effortless mastery over e..g. phonology that children emerge with is very difficult to replicate in adulthood, even after decades of speaking.

You're right, and kids are so successful because they simply have so much time into it. (And literally everyone around them is a free language teacher, correcting mistakes.)

Adults don't have those luxuries; however, we can be taught and easily comprehend rules that kids don't get. Since I'm familiar with French, one such rule might be that you use a pronoun before the verb but a noun goes after. « J'aime ma femme » compared with « Je t'aime ». The contractions here, too, are things that you are likely to very easily understand (je + aime = j'aime; te + aime = t'aime, and 'je' isn't contracted).

People will actually effectively say j't'aime when speaking fast. But yes, the written form is always je t'aime.

Conversely, people often forget how few children are actually good at foreign languages.

> Far too many people I've seen want to be fluent to the detriment of becoming fluent. When in conversation, they think very carefully about what they say, practice pronunciation in their head, etc. Saying something embarrassing or even just slightly off is seen as a hindrance to their goals, but it's just the opposite: you have to make mistakes in order to get better.

I was confronted in Japan with the choice of putting my crappy Japanese into practice and being thought a jerk, or attempting to speak English to the locals and removing all doubt. I gained considerable facility with the Japanese language in those two weeks. Still not within spitting distance of fluent, but a whole lot better than I was when I boarded the plane.

> 1. You're not serious about it.

I've seen ESL make serious progress in a few months after moving to the US and starting a new job. Immersion really works.

3. You don't have the environment an actual child would have when learning their first language, which has the crucial elements of:

a) constantly needing to interact with native speakers in their language to accomplish goals (obtain food, get them to stop screaming at you), and

b) those native speakers attempting to figure out what you want and telling how to say that.

I suspect that the supposed greater ease with which children learn languages is mostly explained away once you control for those factors.

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