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Benefits of failing to learn a language | ||
Tags: dropping a Language | Brain | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| wv girl Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5239 days ago 174 posts - 330 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 38 21 July 2014 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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[QUOTE=shk00design]
And then there is the case of the Chinese-American author Amy Chua and her 2 daughters. In her much debated book: "The Battle Hymns of the Tiger Mother" she described herself as Fukienese Chinese with a parents from the Philippines. She and her Jewish husband are basically English-speaking but wanted to raise Sophie & Lulu as bilingual in English & Chinese. They hired a Chinese nanny who only spoke to the daughters in Mandarin. They were fluent enough to be interviewed on Chinese TV. Did they attend Mandarin classes as well? I don't want to derail the topic, but I read this book and was particularly interested in the mother's decision to have both daughters learn a language spoken only by the nanny. I wondered how well their Mandarin was maintained once the nanny's services were no longer needed. Did they watch TV in Mandarin, have other friends who used this language ... even if you have all the advantages of language learning as a child, if you have no one to use it with on a regular basis, just how long does it last? I'm not expecting an answer, just wondering. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 18 of 38 21 July 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here is my take on why Mr. Alexander claims he failed at French. First of all, as somebody mentioned, Mr.
Alexander certainly learned some French, after all, he's not a dummy. The problem is that he never learned to speak it well. That's the problem. All his studying did not really focus on speaking the language. And for that contact - prolonged contact - is essential. He probably got to around an A2, which is not bad, but not enough to really feel at ease. If we look at the various wonder stories of people who learned to speak a language at an adult age, we often see two things: moving to the country of the language and a spouse of the language. This latter factor is extremely important because it is instrumental in learning to actually speak the language. Someone to speak with, someone to correct you, someone to answer your questions, someone to listen to. I'm not saying that the spouse is expected to be a full-time language teacher or tutor, but it is as huge advantage for those so lucky to have one. I'm not implying that Mr Alexander's problem was that he did not have a French spouse, although it would have helped immensely. The fundamental problem was that he did not have the opportunity to speak informal French daily for an extended time. Two weeks in a good immersion school was certainly helpful, but he need lots of time just speaking the language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4444 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 19 of 38 21 July 2014 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
Back in the 1980s, there was a lot of trade tensions between the US & Japan. Specifically the US accused Japan of dumping products in the US and widened the trade imbalance. PBS featured a story of 2 people who met by chance in Miami. An American was at the airport to pick up someone. Along came a Japanese man with a dictionary asking for directions. Due to some misunderstanding one thought the other wanted to propose ("will you marry me") kind of thing. The American packed her bags and married the Japanese not knowing where she would end up. She settled into a farming village and became fluent in the language. The locals thought that she was "more Japanese" than they were. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5207 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 38 22 July 2014 at 11:06am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with most of the other posts, and I'd also add that one year isn't a very long time in terms of language learning, especially when it's your first foreign language. It took a few years of consistent (albeit mostly part-time) study for my French to reach anything resembling "good", and even after one year of Italian, a similar language, I was relatively conversational but far from fluent. Plus, while we all agree that age isn't a deal-breaker, it does seem widely accepted that someone in their fifties isn't going to learn quite as quickly as someone in their twenties so I suspect that is a factor, although his attitude about the critical period is indeed exaggerated and defeatist.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 21 of 38 25 July 2014 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Those who read the article will remember that the author thought that he could speak like a 3-year old French-
speaking child until he actually had to converse with one and realized that he was out of his depth. I think the observation is a bit tongue in cheek, but the there is a lot of truth there. Considering that a 3-year old native cannot read or write, has a very limited vocabulary and no formal schooling, how do this child's language skills compare with those of an adult who has studied the language basically full time for a year? The huge difference is that the child can actually speak the language because of massive exposure to the spoken language and constant correction. Here's a bit of elementary math. Let's assume that starting from day 1 a child hears two hours a day of spoken French randomly. Over three years, that's 2190 hours. Let's skip the babbling and early baby talk stage to the last year from two to three. Let' assume that the child interacts linguistically for two hours a day - that may be a bit high. That's 730 hours of speaking and interaction. And that interaction includes a lot of correction from parents and surrounding adults. How does this compare to our 57-year old adult over a year? There's no real comparison in terms of speaking the language. The child wins hands down. The end result in the child is perfect accent, great fluency and good grammar and vocabulary, as limited as the latter may be. All this with zero writing and reading skills. By the way, for those readers who know that one of my mantras is that you don't have to know many words in order to speak a language well, the example of young children is an excellent example of that phenomenon. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 38 25 July 2014 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
According to various studies, a typical native 3-year-old will have been exposed to somewhere between 9 million and 36 million words of spoken input. (The children who succeed in school are closer to 36 million.) I'd guess that at least a quarter of that input will have been comprehensible. For the sake of comparison, the reading portion of the original Super Challenge was about 2.5 million words. So a well-off three-year old already has the equivalent of multiple Super Challenges under their belt. Pretty much everybody on HTLAL who finished the original Super Challenge wound up with at least B2 receptive skills, and many reached C1. Those of us who also have the opportunity to use our languages on a daily basis generally speak at a B2 level or above. Unlike the author of this article, I can converse with a French-speaking three-year-old without feeling hopelessly outclassed. The three-year-old will win on accent and might give me a run for my money on gender agreement, but I can keep up without any trouble and my vocabulary is vastly larger. Sometimes, when listening to English speaking toddlers, I translate everything they say into French in my head. It's not particularly difficult. I can translate in real-time with some 5-year-olds. Now, the author of this story has far less exposure than a native three-year-old. Instead of the ~9 million words of comprehensible input, or at least three Super Challenges, he spent two hours a day with Rosetta Stone and Fluenz. I don't know anything about Fluenz, but I've never had an interesting conversation in French with anybody who learned using Rosetta Stone, which makes me suspect that it's not very good. The author also went to a lot of Meetups, which are sometimes pretty useless once you get past B1. (My biggest problem right now is getting my French up to full native speed, and most Meetups are a total joke for that, because they force me to slow way down.) There was also a two-week course and a bunch of weekends, which presumably helped a fair bit. But let's divide language learners into three categories: 1. People like the author who study language courses (some of which may not be very good), and who search for conversational opportunities when they can. 2. People who are immersed in a community language, but who can create secondary immersion in another language. This includes people like me and tastyonions, but also most heritage learners. It also includes a lot of bilingual anglophones in Montreal, who interact frequently in French, but who often retain the option of falling back to English for tricky stuff. 3. People who have no choice but to use a language full-time, for everything. This includes most native children, a few immersion students at expensive language schools, and (from what I read) a monolingual American woman who married a nearly-monolingual Japanese farmer and who moved to rural Japan. In general, people in category (2) can learn languages regardless of age, and the adults might have a slight advantage. In category (3), the children become native speakers, and the adults generally become near-native given several years. People in category (1) can and do succeed. But if they're struggling, like the author, their best best may be to try to move into category (2) via massive media consumption and a huge amount of Skyping. I've been following the saga of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a journalist who works for The Atlantic, who has been studying French for the last two years. He's worked very hard with a good tutor, and he's willing to feel like an utter idiot, and he's reached maybe a wobbly A2. This puts him in category (1). But he recently began a 7-week immersion course at Middlebury, and now he's firmly in category (3), at least for a while. My prediction is that he'll reach B1 within a few weeks, and that he'll make real progress towards B2 before the end of the course. It's not fair to compare adult students against native toddlers unless the adults are in total immersion, and have no choice but to sink or swim. And under those conditions, adult language acquisition can happen remarkably, almost implausibly quickly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 23 of 38 25 July 2014 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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emk has demonstrated very well my point. By the way, it was the author of the article who brought up the
comparison with 3-year old native speaker. My conclusion from all this is that massive exposure and immersion are really the major success factors for everybody, adults and children. Duh. Is this surprising? Not to anybody around HTLAL, I think. The real problem for most of us, especially in North America, is that we don't have access to such an effective learning environment. French immersion education in Canada is great. Spanish is somewhat available in the US. For the other languages, a summer class at Middlebury will help a lot, but you're looking at a $10,000 bill. This, of course, is where Europeans have a huge advantage of us. So, what about the rest of us who are not in emk's categories 2 and 3? This is where technology such as the internet and smart learning techniques come into play. But that's a story for another day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 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 24 of 38 25 July 2014 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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...Are you saying the biggest problem is the availability of immersion classes? The real issue here is motivation.
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