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Attrition rates in language learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 25 of 25 05 February 2012 at 2:34am | IP Logged | ||
Actually that applies to everything that can be learned and taught. How powerful any of these factors are should also vary from one activity to another, ranging from 0% (irrelevant) to nearly 100% (the only one that counts). As a mental experiment, let's consider healthy individuals of very similar age and levels of education and training in any given particular sport. I think we can find much more diverse levels of performance in the sport than levels of ability in the native tongue. I infer this from the simple observation that other than very special cases like the mentally handicapped (and even so!) every child learns his/her mother tongue close to perfection within some limits, while even at the school level we can find good and bad players of everything that have similar levels of training. This would suggest genetics has little to do with learning languages, except to make everyone very good at it. OTOH still within reasonably homogeneous groups, performance on 2nd, 3rd and nth languages can be extremely variable again. This would imply that the original equipment isn't used to learn any more (or we would get the same results again) and something essentially different (a formed brain) is used instead. But this we already knew. Do you think quality of materials or methods are irrelevant given enough interest, especially at the higher levels? What about the opposite? And if we take time into account? Edited by mrwarper on 05 February 2012 at 2:45am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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