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The experience of "picking" up a language | ||
Tags: Immersion | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4911 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 25 of 39 18 September 2013 at 8:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm a teacher in the UK, and I have known several students who have had no English until they came to England. Some have been as you describe: good advances in spoken English but their written work is fairly poor. I have known others to become more articulate, both in writing and speaking, than most of their native English classmates. Like with any student, it comes down to personal motivation and home environment. Bringing in "true academic fluency" is a red herring in this discussion, because most natives don't achieve that either. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 26 of 39 18 September 2013 at 10:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Again I think we are down to definitions here. By the term "picking up a language", I would understand that
you can speak it and understand it passively, not write an academic paper. And two years sounds like a loooong time to gain basic fluency in an immersion situation. Also there are different variants of immersion situations. If you move to another country with your family, which would be the normal situation, you are really just in a half immersion, because you will speak your native language at home, and maybe you have an adult that can translate for you in difficult situation. Even so I would guess that most kids would be pretty much age appropriate orally fluent in 6 -9 months. When you do full blown, hard core immersion the way I did as a kid, living alone in a foreign family in a place where nobody could speak English, the timeframe changes dramatically. In both Spain and France it took me 3-4 weeks to be able to do basic communication, three months to basic fluency/fluency and 6-9 months to fluency/ native fluency. Now obviously I could not have given a speech on an academic topic, and only my oral skills could match those of my peers. In writing I would have been absolutely rubbish, because I did not do any. We did however last year see a link to an article about three American kids who went to a Russian school for two or three years, who arrived knowing no Russian at all, and who after about a year or so could compete with the other kids academically. So do not underestimate the force of a kid's mind :-) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 27 of 39 18 September 2013 at 11:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Fluency is not perfection. Fluency is fluency. They're KIDS. They will be in an
environment where the foreign language is all around them in a sink or swim situation. They'll learn. If they learn how to write an essay at an academic level later, good for them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 39 18 September 2013 at 2:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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For me the all important factor is linguistic relationships and intercomprehensibility, and the availability of written materials - preferably bilingual - is also very important.
I have sometimes been in the situation that I had to read things in unknown languages, as in several threads here where I had meddled into threads about specific problems in languages which I haven't really studied and even less heard. For instance I have written about Old High German, Old Saxon, Old English and even a rarity like Old Gutnish, and in all these cases I have just spent some time reading about them (including their grammar) and spelled my way through some texts with a dictionary and a translation plus my knowledge about Modern Icelandic to guide me. I did for instance this with the Anglosaxon poem Beowulf and the Old Norse Völuspá, but for instance when I then had to discuss word order in prose for a HTLAL thread I couldn't find matching texts in Anglosaxon and English or Old Saxon and Low German so I just had to fight my way through the extant chronicles with the occasional help of a small dictionary plus some Google look-ups. Today I can still not read Anglosaxon and Old Saxon fluently, but I would say that I can understand more than half of the old chronicles in these languages. But once again, I can only read them, hardly understand the few spoken texts (like the epic Battle at Brunenberg on Youtube) and certainly not use any of them actively. I can't even speak Old French, which I actually did study long ago. When intercomprehensibility breaks down many of my learning methods do too, and I have to resort to intensive studies to establish that feeling of comprehensibility which is paramount to achieving anything more. And therefore it has taken me several years and many study hours to get a foothold in Russian and Greek, and in both cases I still need an avalanche of comprehensible speech and a little bit of actual conversation in an immersive situation to get to the next stage, which is to speak them effortlessly. But once I have reached at least passive fluency it can be used for tasks in related languages, like I have done with the old languages above where my fragile Icelandic has been very useful. Or now Polish, where I feel I just have to imagine how the words would look with Cyrillic letters in my lopsided Russian. PS: I'm 59 and still not quite senile. Or maybe I already have used that punchline already somewhere already.. Edited by Iversen on 18 September 2013 at 2:37pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 29 of 39 18 September 2013 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Don't they? It must be the poor quality of the teaching then. :-) Seriously though, how do you know most of them don't? That does not seem to square with the target of 50% of school pupils going to university (don't know how well this has been achieved). i assume they don't all do PE and media studies (although even media studies undergraduates must presumably have to be vaguely literate). Edited by montmorency on 18 September 2013 at 9:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 30 of 39 18 September 2013 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Memory is the first thing to go, Iversen. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 31 of 39 19 September 2013 at 12:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Is there a cut-off point after which it becomes more difficult to acquire a language? I recently read a claim on
an ex-pat forum that learning becomes very tough after the age of 35. Sounds to me like someone is seeking a convenient excuse to avoid making any effort. At 41, I feel I'm just as capable of improving my skills as I would have been at 21. Probably more so because I have more life experience and I know which methods work for me. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4490 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 32 of 39 19 September 2013 at 6:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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How I wish I could just pick up Mandarin and the Chongqing dialect during my tour of duty here in
Chongqing, China. It seems possible, but Iife is too short, time and willpower is limited, so deliberate study of languages is the only road to fluency. I have four and a half years left in this city. I did notice through that as I learn more and more through study I get to pick up more and more on the street. One disadvantage at the start that's increasingly becoming an advantage is that because I look Chinese, people who don't know me assume I am one and when I speak to them they just rattle away while I clutch through the cacophony for familiar words and phrases, giving me a good exercise in listening comprehension. For distinctly foreign-looking persons, the tendency would be for locals to enunciate more clearly when speaking to them. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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