native level

[wedge]

Sorry for going off-topic but speaking of super-precocious young 春晚 performers:

迷你小迈克-小宝

Can't help but smile.

[carlo]

I get a sensual, almost physical pleasure in imitating the sounds other people make when they talk. Or at least that’s why I think I enjoy learning languages as an adult. Committing to memory thousands of words is not as enjoyable, although it may be more useful. My 2-year old son speaks perfect Chinese, dialect included, but would do poorly in a job interview.

The “functional” standard of fluency is boring but practical. People like Da Shan are masters of the art of language acquisition: pleasing to the ear and equally at ease with colloquial and literary expressions. But it’s not fair to compare them to those who began learning the language as children. Take for example Ai Hua, another TV personality who sometimes appears with Da Shan.

[renzhe]

So are you saying you put as much effort into becoming conversational in your native language as you did for Chinese?

With me, it was probably more.

I've read about 10 full books in Chinese. I must have read a couple of hundred in my mother tongue.

Also, I've had around 400 hours of exposure to spoken Chinese. I had that much in my mother tongue in one week of elementary school.

[anonymoose]

So were you not conversational in your mother tongue before you had read those books?

I think you misunderstood what I meant by "effort". Of course your exposure to your mother tongue was more than any other language, but did you have to consciously put effort to become conversational in it? I doubt it.

[aristotle1990]

What I meant was to compare a non-native leaner at age 10 with a non-native learner at age 30. I don't think the former is going to have a big advantage; if anything, on average the latter will be able to learn more quickly. (With the exception of immersion situations where the two are forced to speak the language everyday and are just learning it passively.)

[David Wong]

My gut tells me the 10 year old will do better at pronunciation, everything else being equal. 三十岁的舌头比较硬.

[gato]

What I meant was to compare a non-native leaner at age 10 with a non-native learner at age 30. I don't think the former is going to have a big advantage; if anything, on average the latter will be able to learn more quickly. (With the exception of immersion situations where the two are forced to speak the language everyday and are just learning it passively.)

That's a big exception. You are really saying that the older student will learn more effectively because of the greater motivation or better discipline. Those are things really outside of "pure" language learning ability -- motivation and discipline apply to learning anything.

If both the 10 year old and 30 year old are in a full immersion environment, you can more or less discount the motivation and discipline factor. In that case, I think most of us would be in agreement that the 10 year old would learn the language much faster. Right?

[aristotle1990]

Yes, I agree with that, though it does not appear Eddie is in such a situation.

[rezaf]

I don't think that we can say anything for sure. Kids have faster learning instincts but adults are wiser. Wisdom can help in choosing better methods for learning which can speed up the process. So it really depends on the person but as wisdom needs focus and some effort whereas instinct is almost effortless, I'd say kids have the upper hand in general.

[renzhe]

So were you not conversational in your mother tongue before you had read those books?

Conversational, sure, but at an extremely basic level, and with constant grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation mistakes. I did start reading quite early, though, so it might or might not be representative.

I understand what you mean by "effort", and you're right, I didn't go through mind-numbing flashcard torture that I have to do with Chinese. But at the same time, there was serious effort going into the language besides the obvious immersion advantage. Most kids learn Croatian palatalisation, sibilarisation, adjective comparation rules, as well as arbitrary spelling rules such as č/ć, dž/đ, ije/je, correct declensions and conjugations etc. the same way everybody learns it -- you get it on a piece of paper, and you memorise like an idiot. I still remember how many dictations I had to go through before I could get spelling nuances right, and how often I had to be corrected by adults when uttering simple sentences using improvised declension and conjugation rules.

Without this effort, I'd still be speaking semi-fluent broken, incorrect Croatian. Perhaps better than my Chinese, but nothing to brag about. I think that the same goes for any language -- I remember 6-year olds in Canada confusing me/I, mangling tenses ("I have gave" instead of "I have given"), having serious pronunciation issues which needed constant correction, etc. Kids are good at learning from immersive environments but people often forget just how much work goes into language acquisition even for your mother tongue.

If my goal were to talk like a 4-year old, I'm sure that I could accomplish this in 4 years in China, if I do nothing other than learn

If both the 10 year old and 30 year old are in a full immersion environment, you can more or less discount the motivation and discipline factor. In that case, I think most of us would be in agreement that the 10 year old would learn the language much faster. Right?

If you want to make the situation the same, then you should also provide the same immersive environment. The 10-year old spends time playing with his peers, who are more tolerant of accents and mangled grammar, and don't expect huge vocabulary.

If you put the 30-year old in an environment where he does not work, has no bills to pay, no contracts to worry about, has 24/7 company of native speakers, and spends all his available time learning and practicing the language, I think that he/she can learn very quickly.

If you put the 10-year old into school and 30-year old into an office, then it is obviously a completely different situation.

[aristotle1990]

If you put the 30-year old in an environment where he does not work, has no bills to pay, no contracts to worry about, has 24/7 company of native speakers, and spends all his available time learning and practicing the language, I think that he/she can learn very quickly.

This is key. I think a lot of the reason why we think kids are such language learning geniuses is because they are immersed in the language constantly and have an extremely strong motivation to learn it. In fact, children are generally quite stupid by adult standards and make numerous cognitive errors adults simply don't make. If an adult were in the exactly same situation, the kid would probably pick up the accent better and maybe the grammar too (provided both were learning passively, though remember how many grammatical mistakes kids make in their native languages), but I don't think the adult would be that far behind. I still hold that the major thing is the accent. Wikipedia has an interesting article about this.

[wedge]

I think grammar is another big obstacle.

If the debate here is whether, all things being equal (effort, exposure, environment), a 30 year-old can learn as quickly as a 10 year-old, then I have no opinion.

But if the question is whether the 30 year-old can learn to speak as well as the 10 year-old, then I absolutely don't think he can.

Why is it that 15 year-old children of immigrants speak the local language with fewer grammatical errors than their parents, who have already been in the country for double the amount of time their children have been alive?

[aristotle1990]

Why is it that 15 year-old children of immigrants speak the local language with fewer grammatical errors than their parents, who have already been in the country for double the amount of time their children have been alive?

Because they often make absolutely no effort to learn the language. This is a good read:

If Immersion Works So Well, Then Why Can People Live In a Country For Double-Digit Years And Never Learn The Language?

A large part of the answer may simply be, well, is, the fact that many people who seem “100% immersed” aren’t really immersed. Period. They illustrate the simple truth that just because you’re near the water, that doesn’t mean you’re taking a bath — one must actually enter the tub. You will find that these people continue to mostly/only read books, watch movies, work with and talk to people in their primary/native language. There are many Western men married to Japanese women, with Japanese-speaking Eurasian children, who know no Japanese beyond the basics. Many first-generation Chinese immigrants in the US may have lived there for decades, yet can barely speak English. There are Western men who have lived in Korea and Arabia for 10+ years who can neither speak nor read these phonetic scripts. What happened to the kanji excuse? They have all physically walled themselves in.

But their wall is also psychological. You see, it turns out that pride is another factor. Many adults feel silly making the sounds of the new language. And they are so invested in their current identity, that they will cling to their current intonation — whether or not it be appropriate to their new language — as a way of “feeling themselves”. They are afraid of making the sounds of the new language and being made fun of. Ironically, their strong foreign accents are the silliest-sounding thing of all — as you’ve no doubt experienced, someone who at least tries to sound Turkish when speaking Turkish, or French when speaking French, or Japanese when speaking Japanese, is much more pleasant to the ear.

[renzhe]

I don't think that it's some sort of magic ability that you "lose", it's more a case of very bad habits you gain as you age. And it is certainly not a black-white situation, but depends on the person. I've met 30-year olds who will kick any of your 10-year-olds' butt.

People who don't pick up such habits have fewer problems learning new languages, and fewer problems picking up the correct accent. Some examples include:

- Exposure to foreign languages while growing up. People who only ever hear one language find it more difficult to learn new ones.

- Speaking more than one language. People who grow up monolingual tend to get set into certain grammatical patterns that are hard to drop. People who grow up speaking 3 languages pick up new ones very easily. I have yet to see a trilingual person where this isn't the case.

- The number (and type) of phonemes you can differentiate. Here your mother tongue plays a large role, but also your musical skill. Musicians tend to pick up language melody and tones much better than tone-deaf people. Look at Julian Goudfrey linked in this thread -- a professional cellist.

- The number (and type) of phonemes you can produce. Even if you can hear different sounds, often it can be difficult to pronounce them, because muscle memory prevents you from doing it. Again, people who speak a number of languages growing up don't fall into this trap (as much).

- Many adult language learners have a really good command of their mother tongue and are often well educated. Their expectations are big, and the results of learning disappointing, leading to discouragement. If you can read serious literature in your native language, you will want to read something comparable in the target language -- this is much more difficult than "baby want milk".

- Many adult language learners fear ridicule and loss of face when making mistakes. Most pre-adolescent kids are totally pain-resistent in that respect.

The bottom line is -- adults bring a number of skills to the table, including better learning strategies, patience, hard work. But they also bring habits from their native language which are hard to break and a whole set of fears. They are also in a very different learning environment.

If you give me a quadri-lingual 30 year old who lived on three continents and a regular monolingual 5-year old and give both a year to learn a completely new language, I'm picking the former. The ability of kids to learn language is exaggerated, IMHO. They have advantages, but also disadvantages.

[anonymoose]

If you give me a quadri-lingual 30 year old who lived on three continents and a regular monolingual 5-year old and give both a year to learn a completely new language, I'm picking the former. The ability of kids to learn language is exaggerated, IMHO. They have advantages, but also disadvantages.

I think this really would depend on how you assess their language ability at the end of the year. Of course the 30-year old will be able to discuss a wider range of topics using presumably a more complex vocabulary, but then we're not purely assessing language skills but also including understanding of the ways of the world. On the other hand, I'd expect the 5-year old to have better pronunciation and probably a more natural feel to the way he talks.

Now if you change the 1 year to 10 years, I guess the originally 5-year old would be indistinguishable from a native speaker, whilst the originally 30-year old will probably still have an accent and still be making the odd mistake here and there.

[realmayo]

I don't think that it's some sort of magic ability that you "lose", it's more a case of very bad habits you gain as you age.

Some people believe that the brain changes as we get older in some very uniform ways, certain things (willingness to eat almost anything) disappear after a number of years, the theory being that children's brains are wired to make it easy for them to learn language, but that ability does tail off as you get older.

This, from Stephen Pinker, whose "The Language Instinct" I thought was an extremely book:

Many explanations have been advanced for children's superiority: they can exploit the special ways that their mothers talk them, they make errors unself-consciously, they are more motivated to communicate, they like to conform, they are not xenophobic or set in their ways, and they have no first language to interfere. But some of these accounts are unlikely, based on what we learn about how language acquisition works later in this chapter. .....

The chapter by Newport and Gleitman shows how sheer age seems to play an important role. Successful acquisition of language typically happens by 4 (as we shall see in the next section), is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter. Maturational changes in the brain, such as the decline in metabolic rate and number of neurons during the early school age years, and the bottoming out of the number of synapses and metabolic rate around puberty, are plausible causes. Thus, there may be a neurologically-determined "critical period" for successful language acquisition, analogous to the critical periods documented in visual development in mammals and in the acquisition of songs by some birds.

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/pinker.langacq.html

[renzhe]

I think this really would depend on how you assess their language ability at the end of the year. Of course the 30-year old will be able to discuss a wider range of topics using presumably a more complex vocabulary, but then we're not purely assessing language skills but also including understanding of the ways of the world. On the other hand, I'd expect the 5-year old to have better pronunciation and probably a more natural feel to the way he talks.

This is quite likely, and also why I said that it's not black and white, and that they both have certain advantages and disadvantages.

Adults picking up new languages without accent are quite rare, even very talented and motivated ones. I'm not sure how much of it is nature, and how much nurture, though. I'm obviously not going to argue with Pinker or Chomsky on these issues since it's clearly not my field, but I understand that the issue is far from being settled in linguistic circles.

I am also deeply convinced that anyone is capable of learning pronunciation to the point where it doesn't matter from a communication point of view -- correct pronunciation which is slightly off. Which is good enough for most purposes.

[Scoobyqueen]

I have sometimes met people who had lived in another country when they were small (below seven years of age) and were completely fluent in that language. Later on when their family moved on and they didnt have the opportunity to practice they lost the language. However what is baffling is they also lost the listening comprehension. If you compare that to an adult having learnt a language in the past. He might also lose the ability to converse and forget words when it all goes rusty but you never really lose the listening comprehension of that language once you have learnt it. it would be interesting to know why children can lose everything whereas adults seem to retain more such as the listening comprehension. But maybe this is off topic.

[wedge]

Because they often make absolutely no effort to learn the language.

I get this rationale for why American businessmen in Hong Kong and why Chinese immigrants in Flushing never learn the local language, but to me why more assimilated immigrants don't learn to speak native-like English.

I'm going to take my father as an example, who emigrated from Hong Kong to the US in the late 60s. He went to college in the US and just retired from a 30+ year career at a US company. When I was growing up, probably 90% of the books in the house were in English. We never got one of those satellite dishes to get Chinese TV channels -- it was all local American channels. He's read Businessweek and Newsweek regularly longer than I've been alive. I'll grant that he is married to another Hong Kong native and he socializes most often with other Chinese immigrants but he also has many native-born American friends. He absolutely has tried to work on his English -- he was a member of Toastmasters and I still regularly catch him practicing pronunciation to himself.

His listening and reading comprehension are at least college level, but to this day, after over 40 years in the US, my father still mixes up "he" and "she" more than occasionally (a common mistake for a native Chinese speaker). When he sends me a 4-line email, it's obvious that a non-native speaker wrote it.

I'm sure there are examples of adult immigrants that speak near-natively, but I think that cases like my dad are much more common. I don't have statistics but the success rate is much, much lower than 100%, which is the approximate success rate of a 5-year old learner.

[renzhe]

I don't have statistics but the success rate is much, much lower than 100%, which is the approximate success rate of a 5-year old learner.

The approximate success rate of migrant children is nowhere near 100%. In Germany, although all second-generation immigrant children are fluent in German, you can tell their accent apart very often.

It has a lot to do with how much you interact with native speakers, and how much with your parents, the social status, the family background, and many other things. The success rate is close to 100% ONLY if the kid socialises with native speakers close to 100% of the time. This is rarely the case.

With children, as with adults, the degree of exposure is a huge factor, as is the genuine need to use the language all the time, as opposed to once a week.