
A powerful, precise language aptitude test is entering civilian life - dang
http://nautil.us/issue/12/feedback/secret-military-test-coming-soon-to-your-spanish-class
======
crazygringo
I thought I was terrible at learning foreign languages -- French was the only
course I flunked in high school, and I only barely passed Chinese in college.

Then I moved to Brazil and was speaking Portuguese fluently in about 6 months.
Nobody was more surprised than I was.

Then, after spending a few years teaching English as a foreign language, I
realized a few things.

First of all, pretty much anybody can pick up a new language, since pretty
much everyone speaks a native tongue. Learning a second language really isn't
any different. I was shocked at how natural it felt, picking up Portuguese --
I just felt like I was 3 years old again.

But second, unless you move to a foreign country and spend all day in the
language, very few people have the time or exposure to learn a second language
this way. It's just not realistic.

So third, this is why traditional language-learning classes fail for most
people, because the teaching style bears so little resemblance to the natural
way our brain picks up language. (This is not a criticism, it's just the
reality of what you can do with a very limited amount of time and the
classroom format -- and believe me, I know!)

But fourth, a few students thrive in the classroom format and pick up the
language anyway. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily that they have better
innate language aptitude -- they just seem to be the lucky few who are more
compatible with the classroom format.

So I wonder, is the test described in this article identifying people who are
actually better at learning languages "naturally", or people who are better at
learning them in the very different environment of the language-learning
classroom?

~~~
ekidd
I learned French in my 30s, through a mix of immersion and an overly large
Amazon.fr bill, and I speak it a bit below a "professional" level. I agree
that if you "burn your ships", language learning can be surprisingly easy and
natural. If your brain can't retreat into an English bubble, it will suck it
up and internalize the new language.

One other interesting wrinkle: I know quite a few bilingual families. It turns
out that kids are only amazing language learners when they have no choice.
Kids will master the languages used on the playground and in school. But they
don't always learn their home language to an especially high level.

So both children and adults seem to best when they don't have much choice. Or
when all the cool books and TV shows are in another language.

~~~
r00fus
> It turns out that kids are only amazing language learners when they have no
> choice. Kids will master the languages used on the playground and in school.
> But they don't always learn their home language to an especially high level.

Two additional factors: 1) Language aptitude is a continuous range, not
discrete and 2) unused/unpracticed skills can atrophy. This is particularly
evident in very young immigrants who exhibit "receptive" skill in their mother
tongue even though they may have had fluency in earlier years. Immerse them in
the native language, and they'll often pick up much much faster.

~~~
wwweston
> This is particularly evident in very young immigrants who exhibit
> "receptive" skill in their mother tongue even though they may have had
> fluency in earlier years. Immerse them in the native language, and they'll
> often pick up much much faster.

Do you have any cites for this?

I suspected it might be true, and tried actually putting together a paper on
this for a class in the early 90's, but pretty much ran into a dead end
looking for literature to review at the time.

~~~
e12e
Mother tongues are special. Generally immigrants will do better at foreign
language(s), if also getting proper education in their mother tongue. There's
also been studies with brain scans showing that even "bilingual" people
usually have one mother tongue, and treat all other languages as "foreign"
(separate parts of the brain deal with the two "groups" of languages).

On a more anecdotal level, I had a funny experience when I went to Japan -- I
was somewhat passable in French before I went, and after about half a year of
being in Japan (before I had really become fluent in Japanese) I tried
speaking some simple French with a French teacher. It was impossible -- every
sentence started in French, and ended in Japanese :) After I got better at
Japanese, my French started coming back too -- but I'm still hoping to spend a
month or two in France to really get it up to a usable level. Interestingly, I
didn't have any problems with my English while there -- probably because I was
already fluent in English (my mother tongue is Norwegian).

~~~
visarga
I, too, was starting mixing up French with Japanese. I learned French in
school and Japanese on my own.

------
bazillion
I took the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery) along with all of the
other military students who went to DLI (Defense Language Institute). DLI is
without a doubt the most intense language school in the world, where you have
to go from learning the alphabet to reading, speaking, and writing at a
college level, and have at most 1 and a half years to do it. In the class that
came after us, 2 people passed the arabic course out of 30.

As far as the predictability of someone's aptitude, the DLAB was a good
baseline to show that a person had better language acquisition than the
average student. When students barely met the baseline of 100 points on the
test, they had an incredibly tough time in the beginning with a language as
different from english as arabic. What the test didn't measure, however, is a
person's will to persevere through the slow progress, constant mistakes, and
utter frustration. Although the low scoring students had a tough time in the
beginning, most of them passed in the end. The student's that ended up failing
out of our class were, ironically, the students that did exceptionally well in
the beginning. I mostly attribute this to them relying on the ease of
understanding in the beginning, rather than studying at the level that the
lower scoring students had had to learn how to do when they had started out.

Language learning is not a linear path where you can acquire x amount of words
per day. Your language learning is affected by so many factors such as sleep,
healthy living, happiness, motivation, among others. There also seems to be a
point for almost everyone I was with where constant study results in a moment
of clarity, where you start to believe in your skill in the language and lose
the fear of failing in conversation.

All in all, I would say that learning a language is almost exactly like
learning programming. The material to learn either is readily available on the
internet, and each purely depend on your desire to learn them. There will
always be those that just can't quite jump high enough to get past the initial
hurdles, and that's what these tests are there to provide -- a way for them to
get filtered out before money is invested in their ability. In that, it's
similar in a way to giving someone a fizzbang test. It won't tell you that you
have a great programmer, it will just give you a baseline assessment that you
don't have someone that shouldn't be a programmer.

~~~
EddieLomax
Fellow DLI alum here (Persian-Farsi, '98) and I agree with everything you've
said. The DLAB was a decent stab at predicting my success of completing DLI,
but it was grit and determination that allowed me to pass the DLPTS with 2s.

Funny that you associate it with programming-- I used that same hardheadedness
to learn Python and now I write software for a living.

------
grifpete
A lot of the comments here seem to be missing the key point. The question is
not whether immersion is a good thing or is better than classroom. The
question the theory set out to investigate is what does it take for someone to
become an outstanding learner of a foreign language, even when older. Why can
some people do what is widely regarded as being impossible, achieve true
native level fluency when learning >18?

------
byuu
I've been attempting to pick up Japanese for about 15 years now. I've found a
general pattern that I can go at it intently for 6-12 months, with about 4-6
hours a day of study. With that, I ultimately get to a point where for each
new character or word I learn, I seem to forget a different one. Testing
myself with flashcard-like custom software appears to confirm that. Eventually
I burn out and cease studying for a year or so, which of course decimates a
lot of knowledge and is really horrible to do.

It frustrates me to no end that this is the one thing I've really wanted to
try and learn and do and failed at completely. Which is evidenced by why I
still haven't given up. I refuse to be beaten, and I'm most certainly going to
die trying.

Realizing it's not going to happen, I think it's time to start trying
something new. So I'm currently looking into SRS algorithms and nootropics
(piracetam et al.) I'll be curious to see if it helps or not.

In my case, the 2000+ characters aren't such a burden. It's the words that can
have 500 different meanings (like the verb "kakeru") and the particles that
can have 20 different purposes each that really ruin me. I find myself just
guessing through all the different meanings and picking the least terrible
sounding one, and I learn nothing from that exercise. I know it's all context,
but I feel like I can't learn enough to clue into the contexts.

I can 'somewhat' handle the types of multiple-meaning words that are really
just one underlying concept that we don't have a single one-to-one translation
for. But some of these words just have so many of these that it's impossible
to get a 'feel' for their underlying intent. And practically no language
learning material out there tries to teach you these underlying meanings at
all. They just give you the possible valid translations and leave you to it.

~~~
loomio
If you're serious about learning Japanese, you need to move there. I'm not
sure there is any other way to properly understand all the uses of "kakeru"
besides simply hearing them all hundreds of times to the point where you just
"feel" when it's right to use it. There's just no substitute for immersion and
pure exposure.

I studied Japanese at one of the most demanding University programmes for two
years intensively (an hour of class, another hour or two of language lab time,
another two or three hours studying PER DAY) but I honestly did not really
start internalizing any of it until I lived it every day. It was watching TV,
hanging out in bars, hearing the subway announcements, and texting my friends
that actually let me become fluent.

It's like any other skill, actually... could you learn painting by reading
about it but not using a brush all the time? Could you learn gymnastics
watching demonstrations but never trying to do a flip? I'm not saying you
don't practice - it sounds like you've worked very hard - but immersion is a
completely different kind of experience. If there's any way you can, don't
give up on your dream Move to Japan, even just for a year. Once you really
internalize the language, it will be a part of you forever.

~~~
pixelcort
Even living in Japan is not enough. I'm able to get by for days in Tokyo with
only please and thank-you's. Even one or two days using English-only, my SRS
flashcards indicate I'm forgetting more vocabulary than I'm learning.

My suggestion is, wherever you are, find one or more native speakers to talk
with at least every day. If aren't any in your local area, use Skype or some
other video chat to talk with native speakers.

Just watching movies and TV shows and reading books doesn't usually work. You
need to see the facial reactions of a native speaker as they listen to you
speak.

------
jjacobson
My brother learned Cantonese fluently as a LDS Missionary. He then enlisted in
the army after 9/11 and was given a battery of aptitude tests. I'm assuming
this was one of them because he ended up at DLI learning Arabic and speaking
that fluently as well.

DLI and being a Mormon missionary are about the two best places you can learn
to speak a 2nd language fluently in a short amount of time.

~~~
vorg
> Before the participants took the half-day long tests they’d been sorted
> according to how well they knew a second language

Does doing well in the tests reflect how well someone _will_ learn a second
language, or does having _already_ learnt a foreign language (e.g Cantonese)
affect how well someone _will_ learn another (e.g. Arabic) ? It could all be a
mixup of causation and correlation!

------
aaron987
I have made great progress learning Italian by simply changing my homepage to
google.it instead of google.com. I search for words in Italian and read my
news in Italian as much as I can. I also watch Italian TV.

I'm not an expert yet, but my point is that learning a language just takes
more effort than most people are willing to put into it. They are looking for
some silver bullet that will teach them without any effort. Just like learning
how to code, or run a business, you just have to jump in and get your feet
wet. Make mistakes and learn from them. The "silver bullet" is to immerse
yourself in it.

------
mildtrepidation
Well crap. After reading the intro I hoped to find and take it (in order to,
of course, confirm my own rather egotistical beliefs about my language
aptitude), only to further read that it "will eventually be available for
civilians." Oh well.

~~~
bovermyer
Actually, from reading the article, it sounds like you can get an
approximation by taking tests designed to measure your working memory and
associative memory.

~~~
gohrt
Yes, it's not so much a "languistic aptitude test" as it is a test of general
intelligence. The isn't about separating the math geniuses (or whatever) from
the language geniuses, it's about separating the lower intelligence enlisted
men from the higher intelligence enlisted men.

~~~
gwern
It'd be a waste of everyone's time if all their results were just a bad IQ
test. I checked the first paper, and as expected from competent researchers,
they did check for general intelligence, using RAPM scores:
[http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/files/2013/06/Psycho...](http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/files/2013/06/Psychological-
Science-2013-Frost-0956797612472207.pdf)

------
kator
I wonder if over time they'll adapt this sort of testing to computer science.
I've often found learning new computer languages stimulating and exciting,
frustrating at first but so much fun when I get closer to mastery. However
many people see to lock into a language or a set of languages and never
venture far from that root. I wonder if the same sort of issues are at play
here. Perhaps we've all been pointing fingers at each other saying stuff like
"languages are tools" and "right tool for the job" when perhaps the reality is
some people are going to be really good at a handful of computer languages and
we should focus them on problems that fit them well. Meanwhile others may be
really good at a lot of languages and perhaps they should be part of the
process of determining the right type of languages to apply to given problem
sets?

Just a thought. I find it fascinating having coded for 30 years now that some
people resist changing tech or languages so much. I still write in C often but
most of the original languages I wrote in are dead now. I suspect if I get to
write for another 30 years I'll still write in C once in a while and a whole
new set of tools. Or maybe the computers will just code themselves finally..
:-)

------
MichaelAza
I wonder if high natural language aptitude translates to high programming
language aptitude, that is, not the ability to write good code but rather to
write code in diverse languages.

It seems the skill set often associated with good programmers in my general
impression as well as in some papers I read (good working memory, good
implicit learning) is present in language aptitude as well so this sounds
likely to me.

~~~
coldcode
Even more interesting to me is if one could create a test for prospective
programmers that could be taken before one even knew how to program and would
distinguish people who would be good at programming and those who wouldn't. Is
this even possible? Programming is more complex than learning a new human
language in that there are a lot more things that go into it than just knowing
the language. But it's clear that some people are better at both programming
and learning new programming things. Could one find a verifiable way to
predict this ahead of time?

~~~
asher
I suspect that at least two aptitudes are involved, and different programming
languages/platforms place different demands on those two aptitudes.

One aptitude is essentially the math/engineering ability. The other is
linguistic.

~~~
ds9
Also the working memory and a certain willingness to sit there doing purely
mental work for significant periods of time (well I guess the latter is part
of 'math/engineering ability'). The working memory aspect is what makes this
sub-thread not a complete digression.

------
dm2
I already know my language aptitude and it's very low, it's near impossible
for me to learn another language.

Could the language part of my brain be utilized for something else? Perhaps
code? If so, I'd rather not know another language, English works fine for me.

Anyone have an fMRI I can borrow? [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-
parnin/scientists-begin-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-
parnin/scientists-begin-looking-_b_4829981.html)

~~~
langthrow
>Could the language part of my brain be utilized for something else?

Possibly, although as someone who has relatively easily learned as an adult 3
languages to varying degrees of proficiency, I've noticed that I learn the
syntax of new programming languages with great ease, learning multiple PLs in
the process, including ones of different paradigms.

My ability to learn new algorithms, on the other hand, is very much below
average -- at least among my HN peers.

So if there indeed a correlation between learning natural languages and
learning the syntax of programming languages, is possible that you good be bad
at learning a new programming language but much better at algorithms, arguably
more important to the working programmer, and definitely to the computer
scientist.

~~~
dm2
What you said is definitely true from my personal experience, except rather
than algorithms for me it's more that complex systems are easy.

I'd prefer to master a select few languages rather than risk getting syntax,
functions, and language specific concepts confused.

Different languages (including programming languages) require memorization,
and I'm much more of the type of person that can just figure things out rather
than rely on it being memorized, not that either method is better, just an
observation.

------
Tobu
Since working memory is so important, will there be any policy to get children
to practice that while they have the extra mental plasticity? Learning
languages takes skill, effort and dedication, focusing on the skills part
early would give a good return on the teaching investment.

------
tokenadult
Language learning becomes easier for the person who tries a few different
languages, and for the person who formally studies linguistics, and for the
person injected into an environment where the target language is pervasive.
But somehow there is still individual variance in how rapidly and thoroughly
language-learners learn in otherwise identical environments, so it is
worthwhile for the United States government and other organizations to spot
the learners most likely to be successful. For Hacker News readers who have to
learn a natural language (for example, English) whether it is easy or not, I
suggest referring to a set of language-learning tips posted 231 days ago as a
Hacker News comment[1] back in the thread about Paul Graham's article
"Founders' Accents." My tips refer to several issues for language-learners who
desire to be understood by native speakers of their target language for
business or for pleasure, based on academic research and my personal
experience as a translator and interpreter.

I look forward to taking this test. (My background in learning languages other
than my native language, General American English, is disclosed in my user
profile.) I missed one chance to take an earlier general language-learning
aptitude test in one previous employment setting because I was exempted from
the test, having already demonstrated proficiency as a second-language learner
of Modern Standard Chinese. But it would be fun to find out what this test
says about my "natural" level of ability to learn a language ("baseline" would
be a better adjective) after years of studying various languages.

I agree with comments posted earlier here that sometimes each new language
attempted becomes easier than the previous foreign languages attempted. The
first foreign language I was ever taught was German (it was mandatory for all
elementary school pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my school
district in Minnesota, very unusual for the United States). German is also a
heritage language in my family (German-Americans are a bare majority of my
ancestors), so I was happy to keep learning it as an elective subject in
junior high school and senior high school, with some interruptions caused by a
move to another state with a school district where German wasn't available as
a junior high language (even though that state, Wisconsin, has a higher
percentage of German-descended persons than any other state in the United
States). In the years since, I took Russian as a high school and university
subject, and ended up majoring in university in Chinese. Today I can
comfortably read a book on a familiar nonfiction subject in German, but I am
much better at speaking and understanding Chinese than German.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816)

------
0800899g
learning languages

------
Alex3917
"There weren’t enough trained language experts."

There were plenty, the military just fired them all for being gay.

~~~
Alex3917
Not sure why I'm being downvoted:

[http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/58_gay_arab_linguists_ouste...](http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/58_gay_arab_linguists_ousted_from_military/)

~~~
AaronIG
You're improperly conflating the two issues, though I agree DADT was a
horrible policy.

There simply weren't plenty of linguists before or after those discharges
(which obviously didn't make the situation any better). There still isn't for
languages like Arabic and Persian Farsi. Attrition rates for DLI are high.

