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Can adult learners achieve native levels? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 209 of 303 19 October 2012 at 6:21am | IP Logged | |||||
Let me offer a slightly different perspective with regards to your last sentence. When I was in Cégep, I studied German. I became pretty proficient but then I didn't use it for a good 15 years until last year. I don't personally consider my German to be very good (it works, but it's nothing to write home about), but when I spoke with Sprachprofi in German a while back, she said (and mentioned it on this forum), that my accent would fool most Germans. So, while there is still a lot of work to do -- and I have too many projects underway to worry about German right now -- for me, it's not a matter of reaching for something I will never attain. Whether I will actually work enough on it to attain it or not, I don't know, but I do have the conviction that it's something I could do, so I certainly don't feel like it's unattainable and not worth my time and effort. And similarly, many people who are just starting or who are still progressing and have not reached any kind of plateau may well be equally convinced that it's something they can attain. These people won't be viewing the task as a futile effort, even if you tell them it is. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 210 of 303 19 October 2012 at 8:03am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't understand what the debate is about. As I said clearly in my post, for most people, pronunciation (in German in the case here) is the sign of native-like proficiency, regardless of everything else. But I believe that there is more to native-like proficiency than pronunciation. My questions to @Arekkusu are these: Do you feel that your proficiency in German is comparable to that of a native German speaker of similar age and educational background? Do you feel that you would be comfortable being interviewed on German radio about your work? Could you tell a joke in German? If the answers are yes, then congratulations. Again, as I said in my post, I don't think that I'll be ever able to come close to achieving anything comparable to what I hear on Spanish radio at this stage of the game. But as I said that does not prevent me from doing the best I can. Of course not. But without going so far as Germany, we only have to look at Canada where @Arekkusu and I both live. We know that most adults in Canada have studied French or English as second languages. Historically, the French-speaking Canadians have tended to be more bilingual than English-speaking Canadians for pretty obvious reasons. This is changing as more and more English-speaking Canadians make an effort to learn French. If you look at the people who are perfectly bilingual, one sees some basic correlations that I have mentioned many times here: intensive contact with the other language, being born into bilingual families, having a spouse or partner of the other language and working or going to school in the other language. Here is Canadian question for @Arekkusu: Has he ever met an English-speaking Canadian who has become equally proficient in French at an adult age (let's say over the age of 18)? Nobody has become perfectly bilingual at an adult age solely by taking language classes. Does taking some language classes that one hasn't used in 15 years but having a good accent qualify one as having native-like proficiency? I doubt it but I may be wrong. As I repeat myself for the umpteenth time, achieving true native-like proficiency at an adult age is possible but it's just extremely rare. Edited by s_allard on 19 October 2012 at 8:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| overscore Triglot Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4564 days ago 23 posts - 38 votes Speaks: French*, English, German | Message 211 of 303 19 October 2012 at 8:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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Re bilingualism in Montreal,
For what it's worth, I've (as far as I know) never met anyone who has attained a so-called "perfect accent" having learned the language after the critical period. And bilinguals are a dime a dozen around here. Certainly, you can come very close, and it seems like a great percentage of this forum has near-native proficiency in English, but spot-on? Dubious. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4933 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 212 of 303 19 October 2012 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Literal mastery is needed to compose spot-on texts, and the art of writing is a rare gift among natives as well. In my view a great percentage of this forum's writers have native-level proficiency in written English, if they want to claim it. But when it comes to speaking, really few adults can achieve perfectly native pronunciation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 213 of 303 19 October 2012 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Arekkusu and I have been engaged in a running argument over this questions for months, if not years. The funny thing is that I don't believe that we disagree that much. It's basically a question of semantics, as is so often the case around here.
I systematically use the term native-like proficiency to describe an general set of linguistic skills of which native-like pronunciation is just one. We tend to be obsessed with pronunciation because it is the most visible and awe-inspiring aspect of "speaking" a language. Achieving native-like pronunciation at an adult age is an outstanding achievement in its own right, I certainly agree, but it's not the same as attaining native-like proficiency. Think of what goes into speaking a native language. The thousands of hours of actual social and cultural experiences in the language, of exposure to books, newspapers, television, movies, radio and Internet. Think of what it means to grow up in the country of the language, to attend school in the language. All of this comes to the surface when native speakers who are strangers meet each other. They can read and understand each other in ways that we as non-native speakers can never do. They can instantly detect what part of the country the other persons are from, how much education they have and what sort of social class they are from all sorts of social references. English-speakers from Great Britain are acutely aware of all this. When natives talk to each other, their language will change because of the social dynamics. They can make puns, joke, tease and make all kinds of cultural and historical references that are meaningless to non-natives. This is what I mean by native-level proficiency. And this is what is so difficult to achieve at an adult age. But this difficulty or impossibility, as some would like us to believe, should not lead us to give up trying to achieve the highest levels of performance in our target languages. And this is where @Arekkusu and I fundamentally agree. If sounding like a native-speaker is an important goal for you, then make it your obsession. Other people, like myself, may concentrate on other features of the language, not because we consider pronunciation unimportant - of course not, but simply because we think they may be just as if not more important. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 214 of 303 19 October 2012 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
Questions for Arekkusu and s_allard: 1. Is your English considered by yourself and others as "native"? 2. Did you become "native" in English as an adult? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 215 of 303 19 October 2012 at 2:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The thing about cultural skills is complicated. I remember last time I visited Sweden I looked at a rack full of popular magazines, and it struck me that I hardly knew any of the men and women on the front pages - and that's a neigbouring country from which I can watch three TV stations. OK, TV moderators, quizmaster, some of the politicians and a few persons from the royal family - I'm not totally blank. The same in Germany, UK, USA and France - I do watch TV, but not just anything. But actually I also don't know most of the Danish participants in X factor, Dance-something, actors, backbench politicians, soccer players and social leeches either, though it is harder to avoid seeing and hearing about them when you live here. But if I didn't speak Danish as a native somebody might seriously think that I didn't live here.
On the other hand I have read an insane amount of history books and articles and watched TV programs so I wouldn't be surprised if I knew more about the history of several foreign countries than a large part of their own inhabitants do. But that wouldn't save me from being recognized as a foreigner, albeit a foreigner with a certain interest in their country. Being accepted as a native speaker, although not from your own area, is for me primarily a lingustic problem - and being a non-native speaker is not quite the same as being a foreigner (and native speakers can also be seen as foreigners, which some people with 'foreign' looks will have experienced). Let me do a thought experiment: put a native speaker from Quebec, a native speaker from Haiti, a full-time Francophone from Senegal and a non-native, but fluent speaker from Bruxelles and a late immigrant who had lived in Tours for twenty years in the same room. Would it be their accents or their shared cultural knowledge that made it possible for 100 random inhabitants of Tours to pick out the non-natives (if they could, of course)? It doesn't seem to me that there is a lot of shared cultural background at play here. Each of these persons represents a certain culture, and each person knows THAT background exceedingly well (which might give some kind of confidence which could be detected by the jurors). But where is the shared cultural background between the persons I mentioned? I do not deny that cultural ballast is important for language learners, but mostly because popular culture etc. leaves specific footprints in the spoken language which you probably will miss if you don't interact enough with local speakers in a certain area. Which I can't claim I do, hardly even during my travels. I get my cultural savvy from written sources and from TV and the internet, and that's different from living in a certain place. But quite sincerely: do I care? Not really. I don't claim that I have a native pronunciation in a dozen languages and this means that I don't have the pressure hanging over me to prove it. I just have to prove that I can have sensible discussion with locals AND that I can read and understand their language. In the long run I may get better and better at this game, but I can't see myself as a future secret agent in a foreign country. Edited by Iversen on 19 October 2012 at 3:22pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4933 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 216 of 303 19 October 2012 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
Some educated Britons surely discern Received Pronunciation from Scottish low-class accent in an instant and act accordingly. However I seriously doubt some Texas hillbillies will. On the hand I would bet on my better ability of detecting, listening to an English accent alone, which neighboring country the speakers come from and which social group they belong to. I perfectly agree that certain skills require particular exposure, but it is no reason to overstate social aspects. Social skills vary within natives as well, a hippie of Melbourne moving to Irish countryside is still a native speaker of English despite the culture chock. Edited by petteri on 19 October 2012 at 3:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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