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Learn like a child? | ||
Tags: Children | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Axystos Pentaglot Newbie Antarctica Joined 6831 days ago 20 posts - 43 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French, Russian Studies: Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Japanese, Czech, Polish | Message 9 of 26 25 May 2012 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think that is because the adult brain is actually NOT like a memory drive; it does not have a maximum capacity as such. The fact that we sometimes forget, say, vocabulary, is simply because we're not practicing it often enough. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 26 25 May 2012 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm raising two children, and they're been exposed to French and English
since birth. My wife and I have spent some time researching what's required to raise "biliterate" children—that is, children who will eventually have all the skills of educated adults in both our languages. It turns out that true biliteracy is neither easy nor cheap. There are excellent two-way immersion schools, which often claim things like "your child will generally be able to have a fluent conversation within the first year, but we strongly recommend a 7-year commitment to the program to develop age-appropriate academic skills." And our own microsnout, with his roughly B2-level French skills, occasionally supplies vocabulary to Canadians who went through such a program. What's more, the world is full of kids who understand their parent's heritage language at a level comparable to (say) anywhere from B1 to C1, but who have only rudimentary speaking skills. Kids, like just about everybody else, learn the languages they need to interact with their peers. They're better at some stuff than adults, certainly. But they have oceans of time and overwhelming motivation. But seriously, take an adult, cut them off from their native language, and encourage them to identify with a different culture as desperately as any 8 (or 18) year old wants to fit in and belong. Give them comprehensible input and reasonably patient native speakers (or at least enough study time to get them near B2, so they can more- or-less interact like adults). And then give them 5 or 10 years of full time immersion. Plenty of adults will reach C2 under these circumstances, and at least 5% will become nearly indistinguishable from native speakers, judging from the academic literature. Goodness knows I've seen plenty of international PhD students move to the US and develop rock-solid English after 10 years, especially if they use English with native speakers at home. In fact, I would argue that many adults can learn a relatively easy language (such as French for an English speaker) to a very useful level with just 6 months of something like Assimil and 6 months of full-time immersion & study. I've probably put in less total time than that, and I'm now spending my DELF B2 prep time debating social issues in French with my tutor. It's kind of a linguistic train wreck sometimes, but I can at least make my point. Children and adult language learners do lots of things differently. But children aren't as magically gifted as myth would have it, and adults can do surprisingly well if they're subjected to equivalent pressures. Edited by emk on 25 May 2012 at 8:10pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| PillowRock Groupie United States Joined 4732 days ago 87 posts - 151 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 26 25 May 2012 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
To be fair, English language spelling is an entirely different matter than learning word so as to be able use it in conversation. I remember reading a research result a number of years ago that found that the percentage of children who had total recall was roughly 10 time the percentage in adults. As one anecdotal example, I can remember when I was a teen I sometimes would answer questions on tests by "looking" at the relevant page of the text book in my mind and "reading" the answer again to copy it down. I still have a pretty decent memory, but *that* kind of memory ability started sliding away while I was in college (which was I really needed to start to learn how to study; my grades really suffered for about a year during that transition). The statistics from that study would seem to suggest that children tend to have "stickier" memories than adults, on average (though that obviously leaves room for some adults to memories superior to some children). Edited by PillowRock on 25 May 2012 at 7:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 12 of 26 25 May 2012 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4747 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 13 of 26 25 May 2012 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not quite true. Neuroplasticity and synaptogenesis are more limited in adults than in children. Once you've reached a certain age, some activities will be limited (for example scoring higher on IQ tests). Subconscious learning may be more efficient than ''decoreba'' (Brazilian Portuguese word for excessive memorization and learning by heart). And this subconscious learning (learning by osmoses) is more effective in children than in adults. It's not impossible, but it's just much more difficult when you're adult. Let's say you have an American woman and an American man living in Japan, who have been living there for 10 years. They have a child. In 15 years time, the child will be practically a native speaker of Japanese, but his/her parents will still have problems with reading, and writing Japanese, as well as perfecting the pronunciation (pitch accent). To most children learning Japanese or Chinese, learning how to write is interesting and fun. To most adults, it's difficult and boring. I would only learn Chinese and Japanese, if they paid me a million British pounds to do so. Otherwise, I would have no motivation at all. For me, for the time being, learning these languages would be a major torture. Edited by Camundonguinho on 25 May 2012 at 11:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5128 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 14 of 26 26 May 2012 at 2:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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David Long from AUA Bangkok makes the credible case that learning like a child, including an extended
silent period (800 hours, if I remember correctly), leads to superior results in an overall shorter time frame than traditional language study, with him being one of the successful examples. I don't know where people get the idea from that brain plasticity is restricted to a young age. There's a lot of research, e.g. on stroke patients, demonstrating that older brains remain remarkably plastic. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 26 26 May 2012 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
In this story, if we go by the stereotype, their daughter spends every day at school hearing Japanese, playing with kids who speak Japanese, getting teased for not speaking Japanese, copying thousands of kanji by hand, reading books in Japanese, getting crushes on Japanese speakers, and trying to desperately fit in with her peers. The parents, meanwhile, speak English to each other at home. Since they're both completely illiterate by Japanese standards, they have to use English at work, too. They read books in English, watch TV in English, and hang out with English-speaking friends. One partner probably learns "survival" Japanese (A2 to B1) and acts as a translator when absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, their child speaks fluent conversational English at home. But if she ever decides to go to a university in America, she gets a nasty shock: She's a native speaker with the vocabulary of an 8-year-old, trying to take university-level courses. She's never had to wrestle with academic English, and her vocabulary is about 15,000 words smaller than her peers'. She spends a year or two getting up to speed. Let's change the story around a bit. Take an American man who, for whatever reason, is obsessed with Japan. He watches anime all day long, listens to J-pop, and studies the kanji. He spends hours every day reading and watching Japanese. He moves to Japan, falls in love with a Japanese woman, and gets a job with Japanese-speaking coworkers. He actively avoids English-speaking expatriates. When has trouble reading kanji, he thinks of it an "adult literacy problem", as khatzumoto puts it, and feels slightly ashamed. His house is full of Japanese books and DVDs, and all his friends are Japanese. Although he's too polite to ever say it, in his heart he secretly believes that he's Japanese. In 10 years, his Japanese will be fine. He's probably got an accent, but it's charming and perfectly comprehensible. You can probably tell that he's not a native speaker, but in practice, he's good enough that it doesn't matter. It's not like he has any choice: If he ever wants to have another adult conversation again in his life, he's going to have it in Japanese. There's just no way he can spend 30 years sounding like a toddler. When comparing children and adults, compare their daily lives and their motivations, not just their age. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4747 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 16 of 26 26 May 2012 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Norwegian stroke patients seem to re-learn their language just fine, but they are never perfect, most of them are tone-deaf, they have problems with hearing and producing the pitch accent. So, their Norwegian is not exactly 100% native-like. So, in a way, they relearn Norwegian as if it were a foreign language. And adult foreigners who learn Norwegian find the tones of Standard South Eastern Norwegian extremely difficult to imitate. Even the Swedish people have problems with the Norwegian tonal accent (because the Swedish tonal accent although phonologically similar, it's completely different phonetically that is, it sounds completely different). (But this is a problem in Norwegian, you are easier to pass for a Norwegian in Oslo if you speak Bergensk, Stavangersk or another dialect than if you speak/imitate the Standard Eastern Norwegian dialect/accent - in most other languages, learning how to speak with a ''standard'' accent is a formula of success and near-nativeness, in Norwegian it's a formula for disaster, it screams: ''you're a foreigner, you're not from here, you want to sound like an Osloite but your tones are all wrong''). I'm not against at ''children methods'', but they have limitations. I have a Spanish dictionary for children because, unlike most adult dictionaries, after every irregular and semi-irregular verb, there is a mark (it's conjugated like THIS). Edited by Camundonguinho on 26 May 2012 at 2:34pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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