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> If we think that children learn faster than adults (which I think is not actually true, but it's a widely held belief), Anecdotally, I saw my two children lea

by mianos 10y ago

> If we think that children learn faster than adults (which I think is not actually true, but it's a widely held belief), Anecdotally, I saw my two children learn a foreign language in exactly the same place and over the same time as me. They learnt it to fluency in the same time I could barely communicate. Actually google 'scholarly articles on how children learn languages'. It's probably not just anecdotal.

jjoonathan 10y ago
Controlling for time availability and motivation seems both crucial to getting relevant results and damn near impossible to pull off. I'd be happy to CMV but it's not the kind of thing I'm willing to spend a day doing a deep-dive over.
- agibsonccc 10y ago
  1 thing that helps a lot is immersion. I couldn't justify learning a language till I lived in the country where it was spoken. I am doing this in japan now (moved here recently)
  - mianos 10y ago
    I lived in a country town where my wife was the only person I knew who spoke English. She got sick of talking to me pretty quickly. Total immersion.
    - agibsonccc 10y ago
      It forces you in to a corner :D. It's kinda frustrating in a way. I'm not quite going to that extreme though, tokyo will allow me to "ease in to it".
mikekchar 10y ago
I'm not suggesting that adults will always learn faster than children. You will no doubt notice that you did not spend your time the same way that your children did. Did you spend 24 hours a day thinking and struggling in that foreign language? There is a big difference to being exposed to language and concentrating on it. Restricting your self to thinking only the thoughts that your language enables you to think is difficult for an adult (well, impossible really). I'm not entirely unaware of the literature in the area. I spent 5 years of my life teaching English as a foreign language. A large percentage of that time was spent doing research in language acquisition. As far as I am aware, ever since Chomsky the general consensus has been that there is no different mechanism for language acquisition in children than in adults. There are still some researchers who disagree, but that happens in every field and is healthy. But, you aren't going to beat a child in learning a language unless you do some very specific things. That's because they spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week learning language. Even when they get to school, their school work is primarily surrounding language activities until they get to be about 10 or so. An adult's secret weapon is the ability to read. If you use that to direct your learning, then you can go quite quickly. Like I said, though, getting to an adult level of proficiency in less than 10 years is pretty difficult, but it's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. The same level proficiency for a 10 year old child is very, very unusual. For things like accent and getting tones correct all the time, that's a bit of a different story. Only about 2% of adult learners achieve native level proficiency in that kind of thing. But it's not something that will hold you back from normal communication. Event then, I'm aware of some specific language training you can do to help, but most people are not really interested in going that far.

by mianos 10y ago

jjoonathan 10y ago

Controlling for time availability and motivation seems both crucial to getting relevant results and damn near impossible to pull off. I'd be happy to CMV but it's not the kind of thing I'm willing to spend a day doing a deep-dive over.

agibsonccc 10y ago
1 thing that helps a lot is immersion. I couldn't justify learning a language till I lived in the country where it was spoken. I am doing this in japan now (moved here recently)
- mianos 10y ago
  I lived in a country town where my wife was the only person I knew who spoke English. She got sick of talking to me pretty quickly. Total immersion.
  - agibsonccc 10y ago
    It forces you in to a corner :D. It's kinda frustrating in a way. I'm not quite going to that extreme though, tokyo will allow me to "ease in to it".

mikekchar 10y ago

I'm not suggesting that adults will always learn faster than children. You will no doubt notice that you did not spend your time the same way that your children did. Did you spend 24 hours a day thinking and struggling in that foreign language? There is a big difference to being exposed to language and concentrating on it. Restricting your self to thinking only the thoughts that your language enables you to think is difficult for an adult (well, impossible really). I'm not entirely unaware of the literature in the area. I spent 5 years of my life teaching English as a foreign language. A large percentage of that time was spent doing research in language acquisition. As far as I am aware, ever since Chomsky the general consensus has been that there is no different mechanism for language acquisition in children than in adults. There are still some researchers who disagree, but that happens in every field and is healthy. But, you aren't going to beat a child in learning a language unless you do some very specific things. That's because they spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week learning language. Even when they get to school, their school work is primarily surrounding language activities until they get to be about 10 or so. An adult's secret weapon is the ability to read. If you use that to direct your learning, then you can go quite quickly. Like I said, though, getting to an adult level of proficiency in less than 10 years is pretty difficult, but it's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. The same level proficiency for a 10 year old child is very, very unusual. For things like accent and getting tones correct all the time, that's a bit of a different story. Only about 2% of adult learners achieve native level proficiency in that kind of thing. But it's not something that will hold you back from normal communication. Event then, I'm aware of some specific language training you can do to help, but most people are not really interested in going that far.