Comment by Escapado | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Escapado | Hacker News Reader

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I keep hearing this but sometimes I am not 100% sure if they are _much_ better so asking honestly: Is there any reputable quantitative analysis of this in the context of language learning?

For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?

My strong suspicion is that children just have no responsibilities and are socially allowed to not be able to talk while everyone will speak at their level with a great deal of patience.

speaking to a child at their level is the best way to keep them from speaking well. I never did it with my son and it didn't hold him back one bit. Everyone remarks his incredible vocabulary and language skills for his age. IMHO holding back with kids is an anti-pattern.

My aunt used baby talk with my cousin so much she accidentally invented a new language with him, and he ended up needing a bit of speech therapy to get back to a "standard" level of English for his age.

Perhaps coincidentally, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone else I personally know, and leveraged that into a consulting career.

Yes. Also, they don't need much vocabulary, no grammar concerns, no reading/writing.

We much overestimate how well kids learn, and how "easy" is for them. Many kids have language difficulties, and they usually know, and they don't feel too great about it.

I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language.

The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.

> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.

It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.

But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.

I appreciate the clarification, but does it provide any actionable insight on how to learn to discriminate those sounds as an adult?

That can be very difficult. Fundamentally, you need to keep trying to tell samples of the two sounds apart until, eventually, you figure it out. You will need a trustworthy source for the sounds.

It will probably help if you practice producing the sounds too, but that's not enough.

A friend of mine put in a lot of effort to learn English by listening to the radio. And her English is very good.

But like most Mandarin speakers, she can't tell the difference between "th" (as in "thick") and "s" ("sick"). I was able to teach her how to produce "th"; that was easy.

Since she learned by listening instead of reading (which is the correct way to do it if you want to interact with people rather than books), she has no mental model of which "s" sounds in English are real "s" sounds and which ones are secretly "th". So if you talk to her now, it will be essentially random whether any of those sounds is produced correctly or as its evil mirror version. You'll hear a lot of stuff like "thingle".

It's not obvious to me that this is an improvement over her original practice of using "s" in all cases.

I looked into this once and couldn't find anything -- after all, vanishingly few people practice total, 100% immersion in their new language, where you must either speak or not get what you want.

Based on my experience I don't believe it's true.

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