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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 |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5227 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 1 of 38 18 July 2014 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here is an amusing piece on how trying to learn a language, and even failing, can have tangible cognitive benefits.
Note the passage on the "critical period". The Benefits of Failing at French Edit: link corrected thanks to shk00design Edited by s_allard on 18 July 2014 at 5:05pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3829 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 2 of 38 18 July 2014 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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The link doesn't work.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4241 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 3 of 38 18 July 2014 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here is the correct link:
The Benefits of Failing at French 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4241 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 38 18 July 2014 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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After reading the article, no surprise. There was another similar article from the Express:
Being bilingual boosts brain power There was a documentary made by Canadian scientist David Suzuki on Alzheimer on "The Nature of Things". His parents both suffered from the disease. As we get older, many of us would start losing our memory. Scientific studies now hold promises of being able to delay the onset of memory loss (Dementia & Alzheimer). Language learning, playing music, cards and any activity that uses the brain would keep brain cells active. I know 1 lady who lived to 116 being fluent only in Chinese. There are other factors including regular exercise, proper diet, an active social life and a positive attitude that would allow the mind to stay sharp as you age. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5329 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 38 18 July 2014 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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The cool part of this article is that even a failed attempt to learn a language substantially boosted his scores on CNS Vital Signs, an inventory of brain function. Sweet!
But outside of that, the article is surprisingly defeatist. It contains lots of claims like this:
Let me respond to this on several levels: The scientific level. Researchers have widely accepted that a critical period exists for accent, and that ~95% of adult language learners will retain a residual accent even after decades of immersion. (Note that this residual accent can be faint: My wife has a French accent, but her French accent is pretty close to a neutral New England accent. Plenty of Californians, southerners and Texans have a stronger accent than my wife, relative to local standards.) Outside of accent, the "critical period" is far more controversial. The family level. My wife and I manage to communicate just fine, despite sharing no languages learned inside our "critical periods". My wife was maybe a strong B2 in English in her mid-20s before starting to live in full-time immersion. She now speaks excellent colloquial English. I learned French in my 30s, and I speak it imperfectly, but after several days of intense immersion, I can speak it well enough for ordinary professional interactions. This is the fundamental reason that I believe most adults can learn languages just fine, given sufficient incentive: I see it proven every single day of my life. The childhood level. I've heard many linguists make claim that normal children will acquire languages to a native level 100% of the time. But this is categorically false: Children routinely fail to acquire home languages that are not widely used by the larger community, no matter how heavily those languages are used at home. Quite often, mastery of the home language plateaus as soon as kids find out that nobody speaks it. In my personal experience, the single biggest predictor of whether somebody learns a language to a very high level is not age. That's maybe number 3 on my list: 1. Is this language your primary or exclusive means of communication with your peers? 2. How many years of formal education have you received in this language? 3. How young did you start learning this language? If the answers to (1) and (2) are favorable, then (3) makes the difference between "near-native" and "native." But if (1) and (2) are not favorable, then (3) by itself will often prove insufficient. And what if we're not interested in extremely high levels of proficiency, but we just want to carry on a conversation and deal with basic day-to-day stuff? Well, in that case, I'd guess that the biggest predictors are, in no particular order: 1. Hours focusing on the language. 2. Quantity of comprehensible input. 3. Quantity of output with some kind of occasional feedback, either in the form of corrections, or merely people who say, "Huh? I have no idea what you just said." 4. Difficulty of the language.[1] [1] You know how Khatzumoto and Benny Lewis like to suggest that all languages are equally difficult? As somebody interested in both Spanish and Middle Egyptian, I'd just like to say: HAHAHAHAHA. I have never studied Spanish at all, and I still find it considerably easier than Egyptian, despite the fact that Egyptian is a surprisingly pleasant language. This isn't because Egyptian is innately difficult, but rather because French and Spanish are so closely related. Edited by emk on 18 July 2014 at 6:01pm 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4241 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 6 of 38 18 July 2014 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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When it comes to learning language(s), exposure means everything. I know people living in Vancouver,
Canada with a large Chinese population who are fully bilingual in English & Chinese. Although many cannot write the characters, they can interact socially and shop at local supermarkets in Chinese. There is an ongoing debate about learning the mother-tongue at home to a native level. This depends on the language and the surroundings. Someone like the famous American actor Bruce Lee was raised in San Francisco in the US. Growing-up surrounded by a large Chinese population in Chinatown, it is safe to assume he can retained a high level of fluency in the language to the point of becoming a Cantonese-speaking movie actor in Hong Kong. Part of the equation depends on whether the in-laws speak English fluently and at the same time make an effort to communicate in the mother-tongue. If the kids are seen as interpreters for their parents or grandparents when they go to doctor appointments then the fluency would be higher. A few months ago we had a family wedding. A few of the relatives had lived in Hong Kong and can speak fluent Cantonese. The other half of the family can communicate at a basic level. Some of us would be switching back and forth between English and Cantonese with both at or near the native-level because we went to school in Hong Kong for several years. In other words, learning to speak at home is often insufficient unless you travel frequently between your native and your adopted country or if you have taken language classes available in your area. 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 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? The case of foreign accents: I know a lady who lived in Quebec until her teenage years and decided to move to the English part of Canada. She is fully bilingual in both languages and works as a translator. When you talk to her, you can pick out traces of French accent although it is not very noticeable. 1 lady who studied in Canada and graduated with a degree in Education lived in Hong Kong for many years before moving to Canada. She tends to pronounce her "i"s like "e"s such that "twin" wound sound like "tween". Edited by shk00design on 21 July 2014 at 3:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5227 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 7 of 38 18 July 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||
I personally believe that the "critical period" debate is somewhat irrelevant because it tends to be framed strictly in neuro-biological terms. I like to look more at the sociological component since language is by its very nature a socially learned skill. For example, as emk and others have pointed out, heritage speakers of a language often will not learn the language to very high level of proficiency despite starting at an early age at home. This should not be surprising because a) the language is not often extensively used outside the home and b) there is often little formal education in the language. The huge advantage of heritage speakers is the accent. In passing, although a good accent is just one aspect of learning a language, acquiring a native-like accent because of early exposure is a huge advantage because it is often what is most impressive, rightly or wrongly, when speaking the language, at least to unsophisticated ears. If I look at emk's list of predictors of high-proficiency foreign language skills in adults, I would introduce some major nuances. First of all, let's distinguish between acquisition, maintenance and refinement. And of course we have to look at the different passive and active skills such as reading, writing, speaking, listening and oral interaction skills. I think the reason many people believe in the critical period hypothesis is because there seems to be a parallel with the process by which everybody learns their native language, i.e. first at home in the family and then in the community and then in school. The last two "phases" are simultaneous in literate and industrialized societies. So, by the age of around 16 to 18 a native speaker has acquired a massive amount of cultural, social and linguistic content that will be the foundation for the rest of that person's life. A number of people will acquire more formal education, and some will become very sophisticated users of the formal language because of the requirements of their career. The problem of adult learners of a language is two-fold. One, is that it is hard to reproduce that native acquisition process of that 0 - 18 year period. Two, adults already have their native language that will create havoc forever during the learning and speaking of the second or other languages. The huge advantage of starting a language at an early age is, in my opinion, not so much neurological as sociological, i.e. the opportunity to be inserted, to some extent, in the native or a native-like language acquisition process. We see young immigrant children enter a school hardly knowing the language and within a year they speak it just like the native children. The children are of course surrounded by the language and absorb it like sponges. This is of course the whole idea behind the French immersion school program in Canada. It has its limitations but the fundamental idea is that to produce a good foundation for true bilingualism in later years, it's best to start early with massive exposure to French as the medium of instruction. On the other hand, we observe that adults starters nearly always have a hard time learning a language, especially oral production. Of course, if the adult learner is working or studying in an in-country immersion environment and preferably with a spouse of the other language, then the results will be very good. We see this all the time with adult students and academics who come to North America. If we look at emk's learning environment for French, we see a number of major advantages: a French-speaking spouse and extended family, a French-speaking household and regular travel to France and Quebec. Combined with formal study, these make for great results. But how many language learners are in this situation? Compare all that to the situation of the author of the article in the OP But the question is how does this compare with attending an French international school from age 6 to 18, spending summers in France, dating French boys or girls and passing the International Baccalaureate in French? Like emk, I believe that one can learn a language well at any age, under the right circumstances. The key words here are "under the right circumstances". At the same time, nothing beats starting early and "the right circumstances." 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5227 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 38 19 July 2014 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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What went wrong? The author of the article, William Alexander, is obviously an educated, cultivated and very literate
person. As a matter of fact, he is turning his failure at French into a book. As I read the article in question, it seemed to me that the author did everything right. Self-instruction, formal classes, meetup groups and two weeks of immersion in France. All in a year. Seems like full time studying to me. But why did it not work? The author seems to say that age was the primary factor. 57 is not young as such, but it's hardly old. And most people around here don't believe that age is problem. So, how come Mr Alexander did not learn much French? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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