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With one exception, I've never believe the theory that kids learn better,* and I have data, though on a small n. My mum's side of the family is heavily polyglo
by gumby 3y ago
With one exception, I've never believe the theory that kids learn better,* and I have data, though on a small n. My mum's side of the family is heavily polyglot of necessessity; her parents moved to a new country (where the languages came from different language families) and my grandparents were completely fluent in at least one local language. I also married someone who was not an English speaker and her english is more complex than that of most people here in the US.
The critical factor is use. If you learn a language only in school you don't really use it. Languages I spoke daily as a kid: mostly gone, except English, my daily drive. If you're embedded in another culture you're going to need the language to get by and you'll continue learning.
* For me the exception is accent. Kids learn what phonemes matter and that does seem sticky. But in terms of grammar, vocabulary, slang and semantics, I have not observed those who learnt as kids being any better than those who learnt as adults and used it.
- tralarpa 3y agoOne of my kids learned a foreign language by watching cartoons in that language on youtube. We had NEVER spoken that language at home (but I can speak it). They didn't speak that language in kindergarten (he was 5 years old at that time and we didn't live in a country where that language was spoken). He just watched the videos and after a few months we noticed that he was laughing "at the right places". We asked him why he was laughing. He said "Because the [main character] just said [something specific about a horse]". I thought "okay, maybe he had watched that episode already in our language and he remembered what they said", so I asked him "Can you say [something in our language] in [the foreign language]?". He did. It was correct, pronunciation and grammar. Do you think an adult could do the same?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gumby 3y agoSure, I don't see why not if they were willing to put in the same amount of time your kid did. That is basically how you acquire language when you move into a culture. The value of classes, IMHO, is marginal, especially before you have some gross concept of the structure of the language.
- tralarpa 3y agoI have never seen an adult being exposed just one hour per day to a foreign language over three month, and then suddenly producing grammatically correct meaningful sentences. And note that we are talking here about passive exposition. No teacher, no corrections, no feedback, no interactions, no carefully crafted pedagogical input, not even slowed down audio. If you know such an adult, please tell them to write a blog about it. I am curious. I have met many adults in multilanguage environments and even some who, as a kind of scientific experiment, specifically tried that approach, without much success though (after some weeks, they could recognize some words and fixed expressions). I don't say that an adult cannot learn a foreign language by immersion. Actually, there are probably hundreds of millions of such people in the world (take any uneducated worker who is forced to work in a foreign country to help his family survive at home). But the conditions are very different (they get feedback and interactions) and the quality of the result, too. The speed and quality with which kids just absorb a new language like sponges is unmatched.
- sambapa 3y agoYes, there are books based on this method, for example Lingua Latina per se Illustrata