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An age limit to achieve fluency? | ||
Tags: Age | Learning Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4449 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 17 of 38 22 February 2013 at 4:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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Depends on how serious you are learning. Older people who are retired have all the time on their hands.
The bottom-line is time. Like the way I started playing piano a few years ago. You put in the time, you get the results. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 18 of 38 22 February 2013 at 6:26am | IP Logged | |||||
The question isn't results, it's what kind of results. I'm not 10 or 15 or 19 and I am reasonably intelligent, but if there's one thing that I regret it is not having learned to play a musical instrument at an early age. Sure, it's never too late, I could do it now. Or I can wait until I retire. The same thing with languages. Sure, you can start at any age and do reasonably well, especially if you have lots of time. Tell this to those parents in Canada who wait in line all night or who have to resort to a lottery system to get their children into a French-immersion program. I'm sure there are parents who say, "Big deal! Why subject my children to learning a foreign language when they can learn it at a later age?" That's OK, but I'll send my kids to a bilingual or even a trilingual school any day. I think that most people - but not all - here at HTLAL feel that way. As much as we talk about the possibilities of learning a language at an adult age, the plain fact is that it is best to start at an early age. I don't say this to discourage anybody, it's just self-evident to me and to all those parents who are trying to get their children into a bilingual education program. Edited by s_allard on 22 February 2013 at 6:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4656 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 19 of 38 22 February 2013 at 11:52am | IP Logged | |||||
*giggles madly* Planning so far ahead, Alex? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 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 20 of 38 22 February 2013 at 11:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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The advantage of immersion is not that you "innately learn to speak better
English/Swahili/Lojban" through immersion. That's rubbish - I did English immersion and after six years, everyone spoke fluent English but many people still retained accents and made mistakes (although they were probably more minor). Pronunciation, intonation, accent is a separate skill set you need to work on actively. The advantage of immersion settings is that you are forced to use the language 24/7 without recourse to an alternative, which means that if you hear the word 100 times in context you will know for sure what that word means. It has nothing to do with it being better to immerse children than adults, it's just that children go to school and adults have jobs. If I was an adult and in an immersion setting that forced me to learn Chinese from scratch with no recourse to anything else, I would speak fluent Chinese in a few years too! The important thing is constant exposure, practice and feedback and speaking a foreign language in an immersion setting gives you exactly that. That's why moving to a country is not immersion - I spent two years wandering about Belgium without learning much French beyond the basics I already had. I only learned French when I consciously blocked other things out to speak French at home with my flatmates. And that is something you can always do regardless of age. If you do it earlier it means your child has a transferable skill which is useful when they're looking for a job, but there is no reason why you can't do it at 40. Edited by tarvos on 22 February 2013 at 12:00pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 21 of 38 22 February 2013 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
After scratching the old noggin considerably, I give up. I really can't make head or tail of this argument. As I said earlier, there are people here at HTLAL who do not believe that it is worth exposing their children to foreign languages at an early age because they believe that languages can be learned just as well at a later age. I won't say what I think about this idea because I would probably get booted from here, but I'll just say that I wished my parents had sent me to a bilingual or an immersion school and had me take violin lessons when I was 6 years old. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 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 22 of 38 22 February 2013 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is better to do it at a young age so that the ability to hone these skills is
improved at a young age, nobody said anything to the contrary.
Citations please. Believing that you can do immersion later does not mean it isn't positive when you do it as a child
I did this and got guitar lessons, not violin lessons, plus I had to do a sport. Of course that was beneficial. But that has more to do with honing your personal development which is always a good thing to do no matter whether you're 10 or 50 years old???? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6156 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 23 of 38 22 February 2013 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
If that happened to myself, I'd probably hate the violin now and avoid language learning. I was forced to learn Irish in school from the ages of four to eighteen. I'm only returning to the language now after a very long absence. If I wasn't made learn it, maybe it would be my other spoken language, and not Spanish. It was a similar experience with French from the age of eleven, but practicalities overcame that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5386 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 24 of 38 22 February 2013 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was in my 30’s when I decided to teach myself the piano and was eventually able to accompany myself on
stage as a singer-songwriter. While I wouldn't consider myself a musician, you can certainly learn enough to guarantee your own enjoyment, at any age. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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