native level

[skylee]

I have watched the video at #340. That guy's Cantonese is very fluent. I would say he is very good. He still has an accent, but nothing worse than Faye Wong or Danial Wu or Tang Wei. And some of the terms he uses (like 瘀皮) are not very current (not sure when the video was made, though) but maybe they were popularly used in Vancouver when he learnt the language. But he is very good.

[rezaf]

I can't understand Cantonese but he sounds very natural. The good thing about him is that he speaks fluently without forcing himself too much to sound like a native.

So rezaf, are we going to see you in one of these videos a few years down the road?

As I said I want to use my Chinese for learning TCM and Philosophy not for becoming a showman but if after a few years I naturally get fluent like that Cantonese speaking guy then I might do some 吹牛 as well。

[renzhe]

I don't want to stir up the old discussion, but I've just run into this article (thanks to our friend Benny Lewis who found it first):

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128224.000-age-no-excuse-for-failing-to-learn-a-new-language.html

"The adults were consistently better in everything we measured," says Ferman. When asked to apply the rule to new words, the 8-year-olds performed no better than chance, while most 12-year-olds and adults scored over 90 per cent. Adults fared best, and have great potential for learning new languages implicitly, says Ferman. Unlike the younger children, most adults and 12-year-olds worked out the way the rule worked - and once they did, their scores soared.

...

The results are exciting, says David Birdsong from the University of Texas, Austin - particularly the finding that children's pronunciation is inferior to that of older subjects.

But Robert DeKeyser at the University of Maryland in College Park warns that artificial experiments like this do not necessarily transfer to the real world. Even if adults are better at implicit learning, children are more likely to get the chance to learn implicitly.

[cababunga]

I completely agree that the age is not an obstacle for learning a new language, however the experiment yielded rather strange results. The mere fact that

the 8-year-olds performed no better than chance

means either of two things: 8-year-olds are unable to learn language at all or the experiment didn't test language learning ability.

[renzhe]

They tested a specific aspect of language learning, in particular the implicit learning of rules and the their application to new words. 8-year olds make lots of grammar mistakes.

[jbradfor]

Yes, but a lot of the grammar mistakes children make are following rules, without learning the exceptions. My daughter, for example, will typically make the past test form a verb by taking the present tense and adding "ed", even when that's not correct. e.g. "goed" (instead of went), "swimed" (instead of swam), and "flyed" (instead of flew). Now I'm pretty sure she hasn't heard us say that. In my (limited) experience, kids are really good at picking up grammar rules. I skimmed that article, and all it told me was that adults were faster at picking up the rule.

[realmayo]

Can't speak for the underlying study but the article, taken on face value, looks pretty daft. I suppose I wouldn't be surprised if adults did better than children if you just taught them one rule. But that's very different to how children learn a language -- ie they're not exposed to one new rule at a time in the context of "now I'm going to teach you a new rule".