IMO one of the most prominent reasons - and one that I never see mentioned - that learning a language as an adult is more difficult is that the older you are, the more socially-unacceptable it becomes to point out grammatical and vocabulary errors. When you're a child, elders correcting you is so natural it scarcely even breaks the flow of conversation:
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.
Personally, I don't think that is the primary reason adults have a hard time learning languages. Neural plasticity isn't the biggest reason either, IMO.
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.
> 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.
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.
I would love to hear more about how you did this. I've been doing serious, but slow-paced, Japanese studying for the last few years (I've got my N3 certificate; know ~1500 kanji; etc.) but media consumption still feels like a chore.
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.
To set expectations, it's been more than 10 years since I started learning, so I don't want to make it sound like it was an easy/short process for me either.
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!
You and the parent comments have said basically everything that I feel about learning a new language, but I'll still add..
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
That's still basic-level language learning. To speak like a native you need:
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.
> 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."
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.
It's even harder now with smartphones and internet. Any info you want or need is easily accessible in your first language. For example imagine you want to look up info to get some work done. Go back to 1990 and you'd have to ask your colleagues in the new language but for the last 20 or so years you'd just go online and check in your first language.
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.
I have opposite experience. I won't leave my country (Japan) so circumstance is something differ.
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.
I studied abroad in Costa Rica when I was 19 and I remember getting really sick and at something like 2am, my host mother kept trying to chit-chat with me in Spanish and I was feeling so frustrated. But, it helped me learn faster, because I had to struggle through it, not having an English outlet.
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.
Along those lines, I've heard that a quick way to learn a language L is to take a job in the kitchen of a restaurant where the staff only speaks L and is willing to put up with you but never speak your language.
> 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.
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. :)
I had to learn Cyrillic in one day once. I was visiting Bulgaria without a smartphone, had a paper map with the street names printed in English/Latin characters and the actual street signs were all in Cyrillic. I had to match them up to get around and make the correct turns while walking. It ended up not being that hard, whereas I think trying to learn it in a classroom with a whiteboard would actually be much harder because there are no experience-based memory aids. Like, I remember getting off the train to a big "Централна гара София" sign and was like
"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.
> 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.”
This is very much an english speaking country phenomenon. We are used to having lots of people speak english, often incorrectly and are much more tolerant of people making mistakes (and therefore don't correct them).
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.
I wouldn't say it's just a English speaking phenomenon. Learning Korean in Korea and people are often far to polite to correct you, they're just pleased that you're learning the language, and let you get away with making a lot of mistakes. I continually tell people they should correct my pronunciation and teach me how to form sentences better, but even my friends rarely correct me, they say it just feels too rude.
Contrast that with Turkey where I lived for a couple of months: “You sound like a child!” they all gasped in astonishment as I tried out 3 verb tenses. My adult Turkish friends had NEVER heard a non-native speaker of Turkish! So different from the USA where we hear non-native speakers all the time (and I expect plenty of Koreans hear non-native speakers on occasion).
I once got invited to lunch at the house of a German lady. So I said I would make an apple pie and take it for dessert.
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).
I have done so for a pretty long time and no, such behavior is not common for non-dickish people. If anything, people in the countryside tend to be a lot more relaxed and the situation forinti describes sounds like some old grandma who thinks the youth these days can't do anything right.
> Well, the real point is that children have full-time tutors, their parents.
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.
The English will correct your accent, by lightly making fun of it. It is most clear when you are an immigrant from an english speaking country or switch class brackets.
I assume they are talking about moving from "working class" to "middle class" (N.B. It's not really possible to move from "middle class" to "upper class" unless by marriage and then it's only really your kids that would move class bracket.
In England, accent/grammer usage is a strong indicator of class (as I assume it may be in other countries).
Basically what MrsPeaches said and with more stratifications. I see way more than 3 brackets, the accent groups and all the other trappings of class stretch from the mythical heavenly top, people you can only theorize to exist all the way down to missing teeth and barely speaking english in hell underneath the poverty line.
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.
Hehe, I've had my Mandarin corrected by an old woman selling fruit on a stick in China. It struck me at the time, just because it would never happen in the UK, but actually I was greatful.
The article isn't about the ability to learn. It's about the ability to use the language at a native level. You can get "fluent" and still not have a native level of using a language.
Perhaps it's more likely if you are in a deep relationship with a native speaker, since often that's a reason why people want to learn a language.
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.
One issue is that often it takes someone who has had language instruction experience to properly explain nuances. I've often asked my spouse questions about grammar usage, and since it is instinctive for her and not a premeditated decision like it is for me, she is unable to clearly delineate the proper context and edge cases where a certain grammar would apply. Same with vocabulary. When you have a dozen synonyms, each with a different nuance, it's often tedious and difficult for a non-language instructor to provide clear explanations.
I think it's best to use native speakers as oracles: you can give them a piece of language and they can tell you if it's correct/natural or how they'd phrase it. You can't expect people to go beyond that, and trying to explicitly systematize the grammar isn't necessarily important or that valuable anyway; you need to internalize the grammar (as one has done with a native language) and that's not a conscious process.
I think this really depends on the individual learning style. Some people are able to extrapolate from examples and internalize it (e.g. those people who learn language simply from watching TV), and others need a more explicit structure to guide them before they really start internalizing. No method works for everyone all the time.
Yeah, I talked to a lot of couples and am totally aware it's hard to explain your own language or teach a language if you're not a teacher.
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!
What pitfalls did you run into? From what I heard, the learner often expects the other person to become their personal on-demand language teacher. And then patience burns out quickly. I think it works if the learner is committed to self-study but only relies on others for a bit of reinforcement, clarification, and practice.
I once had a girlfriend from Ukraine. I was 20 and so much in love that I spend 4 hours everyday studying russian. After a year I got to a point where I could be in any conversation.
Now I am 39 and for 10 years I try to learn French. The needs are there, but the will and motivation just doesn't want to be there.
That's pretty awesome! I have a friend studying Ukranian right now since his fiancee is Ukranian. Are you with a French person right now? I'd love to just make it a fun little activity you do every day. Just a few words a day (N + 1 daily), maybe 5 minutes help with a partner. And make it an enjoyable activity versus burnout grinds.
Anki is nice but for exemple my wife is chinese too and we live in Hong Kong, I m having so much laziness learning canto, I just reply "I already have to learn english" when the rare troll ask me why im still an idiot after 7 years. And my wife isnt getting any better at French either. Our 2yo daughter however, she gets everything we all say in any language lol
If chinese was mandatory to survive, like maybe it is in China mainland, maybe I d have been able to learn it more.
This is a seriously cool project. My girlfriend is Chinese and I currently attempting to learn her native language and have often run into the problems you mention.
Awesome, I'd love to help you pick up some of their Chines!. I really enjoy learning it, and there's just so much magic and history in each word and phrase. It's fun learning with a partner if done right. I knew an American/Chinese couple that burned themselves out by trying to go "only talk Chinese" for 2 weeks.
I don't think it's the lack of feedback that's the issue. I think it's more that people are less willing to risk using the language wrong as they get older (regardless if there is or is not feedback coming).
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.
My linguistics professors tended to believe children pick up languages more easily not because they’re being coached more but because they practice with fewer inhibitions than adults. Whereas adults might feel more self-conscious about making mistakes, kids more often don’t worry about it and just try to communicate all day with whatever tools they have, and practice—even with lots of mistakes—helps the brain get better at using the language.
Not only this, but play talk seems “silly” to adults and is not widely seen as acceptable.
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.
There is another reason: People understand you, interrupting with corrections hurts the conversation. I often ask for corrections but nobody ever does it. When I'm unsure how to say something I sometimes ask to get some feedback. Sometimes I only understand 70% of what a person is saying (mostly due to dialects), I rarely need to ask them to repeat it because the brain is capable of piecing it together.
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.
In my experience, people are helpful. Sometimes, in Norway, it means folks speak English with me. Not so much now, but once I struggle, out comes English :D But it also means that folks will let me know the right words for things or help with sounds. But at other times, folks will let things slide as long as I can be understood.
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.
I took them in Norway: Part of my immigration required that I take Norwegian classes. They were free for me, and were the ones offered through the kommune (here in trondheim) though I think they cost around 9000kr per 6 weeks. The class was mostly filled with folks with family immigration and folks fleeing bad situations in other countries (at the time, a lot of folks from Syria and Eritrea).
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.
> the older you are, the more socially-unacceptable it becomes to point out grammatical and vocabulary errors
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.
Similar theory I have is that it's acceptable for most children to learn their language full-time; whereas for adults, usually it's a side thing on top of their full-time work.
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 your theory has been pretty well proven with the huge online polyglot community who learn foreign languages regularly as a hobby, as well as other adult language learners like diplomats, random expats etc. You can even look at institutions like the US govt defense language research institute who give specific times to learn specific languages for a native adult English speaker.
> As an adult, you simply do not get this kind of feedback
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).
Recently learned about LEX [1], they have a method that attempts to fight exactly this issue. Also, they attempt to learn as crazy number as 11 languages or so at at time, and apparently, it works...
With no support except armchair making things up, I think that children talk to themselves a lot, describing what's happening through the day. "Now we're going to get into the car and drive to the shops, right mommy?" "yes, dear".
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.
It isn't just talking to yourself that I mean, your childhood family will say things you wouldn't think of. In the same way the parent comment says that adults won't correct grammar because it's impolite, adult visitors to your house won't tell you to pick up your toys, or lift your arms up to put a sweater on, or brush your teeth, or how to set the table. You won't get constant feedback on the day-to-day minutuae of life - and the constant use of sentences around the vocabulary. If you don't know what "toothpaste is" you're unlikely to stop brushing your teeth and go and look it up. If you do, and you make up sentences and say them to nobody, outside a specific classroom environment nobody will tell you if you're making mistakes.
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?
Agreed, child immersion is more effective for the oral language. I just tried to say that diglossing one's interior monologue with the L2 is not only possible, but has proven effective IMX. Adults have to learn in a different way, but we do have two advantages: (a) money[1], and (b) literacy[2].
[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.
Look on this board. The person who corrects breaks to brakes, loose to lose, etc. is going to be viewed as at least mildly pedantic. Granted, people make mistakes typing they wouldn't make speaking but the principle is at least similar.
I’m one of those who feel the urge to correct to/too, their/there/they’re, etc. errors. But, I recognize that the main issue is I don’t know who is on the other side. Is it someone for whom English is a second language? Is it a native English speaker that doesn’t know or doesn’t care to know proper grammar? Is it someone who knows proper grammar but just made a simple mistake? Is it someone who welcomes correction?
I don't think that's very plausible. I believe children don't consciously think of the language they're learning, let alone about linguistic abstractions like gender, tense, case,... The concept of a correction doesn't occur to them, in my experience when children are corrected they don't understand that the sentence fragment uttered applied to what they said. Besides, in many cultures children's speech is never corrected, and they all turn out speaking fine at the same rate.
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).
As a tourist in Greece, locals would stare in bewilderment as I sounded out all the words like a 5-year-old. I guess most tourists either know Greek or don't try.
But it can be compensated by much higher cognitive skills, like mapping grammar rules theoretically without even using sentencing, or knowing what to ask exactly to reach the point you re trying to make.
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.
Having learned a different language through immersion at adult age (30+), whether or not you get the feedback is culturally dependent. In France, you would get this feedback more often than in, say, the Dutch or Swedish language areas.
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.
Steven Pinker argues against that stance in The Language Instinct.
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.
That's why as a non-native I'm glad I have a native girlfriend who's also an English teacher. She definitely corrects me, especially about pronunciation, and I'm grateful for that, because I can see improvements I didn't think I needed.
I'm in a relationship with a native speaker too (I'm American, she's Chinese), and am actively learning. I talked to a lot of couples and some people have patience to teach and some don't. It's nice though that couples are close enough to correct each other and help each other out.
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!
I think your example is instructive. That's not really an "error", so much as a rule people learn in school about how English "should" be spoken and may or may not pass along to their children. But consider this conversation:
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.
Sadly it seems there's a whole generation that's been raised without anyone correcting them on this specific point (that it's "Tim and I"). Not that this means I disagree with your greater point.
To be fair, a decent number of people also overcorrect and use "Tim and I" for the objective case as well (e.g. "The teacher told Tim and I that our grammar was incorrect"). I think simply giving the correct construction for the case that the speaker actually used isn't sufficient for using proper grammar; one needs to be able to identify which case is which to be able to use "correct" grammar.
The real fun is when someone corrects you for saying "The teacher told Tim and me" and then you give them a grammar lesson to the use of the objective case. I'll admit to a little bit of smugness when that happens.
Otherwise no, I don't correct people's grammar unless they've specifically asked me to review something.
Nicely put, I didn't realise it but I am, as you say, overcorrecting in this way myself. Interestingly I have a friend who has quietly tried to point this out to me (a counter example to the greater point) but you have explained it better.
Whether something is “correct” or not in this particular grammatical regard comes down to cultural factors, not objective linguistic ones. If we look at the languages of the world, we can see plenty of cases where the nominative form of the 1st person singular pronoun was gradually replaced over time by the accusative or oblique form. Therefore, people coming to say “Tim and me” instead of “Tim and I” is a completely natural linguistic change and complaining about it is simply being pedantic.
I've authorized a friend to correct me like that whenever he sees fit (I'm ESL and I really want to be able to speak English like a native speaker), and I've learned a ton since then.
I don't actually agree with the corrections, though.
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.
> I would interrupt another adult to make the above correction.
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.
Along the same lines, as adults, we often take these corrections personally (perhaps as a matter of habit) and therefore avoid situations where they may occur (conversation groups for new speakers, explicitly asking native speakers to correct you etc).
Schooling in an extremely significant factor. By the teenage, a child has undergone more than ten thousands hours of schooling (say, 6h * 250d * 8y), in the language of the country they grow up in. It's an extensive and, by an adult learning a second language, irreplaceable experience.
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.
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.