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> That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult. Also it takes a surprisingly long time for children to learn language. I used

by kqr 2y ago

> That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult. Also it takes a surprisingly long time for children to learn language. I used to think it sorta-kinda happened over a year or two, but having children myself revealed how wrong I was. I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue. My oldest rarely contributes individual words to this dictionary anymore, but he still improvises expressions and idioms.

nickburns 2y ago
> I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue. Ah, beautiful little displays of an attempt to understand, not merely memorize.
- doubled112 2y ago
  Sometimes those made up words were way more fun than the correct ones. I could usually see why my little ones combined them that way.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    I remember one where the kid was asked, "do you want some half-and-half?" "No, I want whole and whole!"
- coldtea 2y ago
  Understanding coming from years of exposure leading to memorizing the whole low hanging words of a language and their meaning. They don't merely understand the words as a concept, they also remember the word sounds attached to the associated concept (and later have to remember the spelling of those words as well). All the while commiting to memory all kinds of facts about the world, starting from their name and the ABC. Grammar might come closer to exposure-grasping a generalized concept -- then again nobody said understanding concepts is not hugely important, or is done by memorization alone: just that memorization goes hand in hand, and is hugely important in being effective in being able to use and think with not just the concepts but also the relevant facts related to them).
bunderbunder 2y ago
An anecdote I once heard provided in support of this point in a lecture: there are aspects of Spanish grammar that native speakers typically don't grasp until their teenage years. I suspect that, if one were to sit down and count hours of practice so that we could do a better apples-to-apples comparison, we'd find that children learn languages at a glacial pace compared to adults. And the rest is pure selection bias.
- kqr 2y ago
  The one thing children can learn that adults generally cannot is native pronounciation. If that is included in language proficiency, then adults take an infinite amount of time to learn!
  - bunderbunder 2y ago
    True, but I really dislike the amount of focus people put on that. With the right techniques, it's not particularly difficult for an adult to develop decently good pronunciation that allows them to be comfortably understood. And placing the bar for having learned a language to a high level of proficiency at "able to hide evidence of where they were born from native speakers" smacks of internalized xenophobia. I also read in a second language acquisition textbook a while back (so, decent chance of being out of date, also decent chance of my memory of what I read being less-than-perfect) that the strongest predictor of how native-like an accent someone develops isn't actually the age at which they started learning the language, it's the lag between when they started learning it and when they started socially integrating into a community of native speakers. And it happens to be the case that, for all sorts of practical reasons, there's a strong correlation between this lag period and age. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to the critical period hypothesis - there is - but when we're talking about children it's difficult-to-impossible to root out selection bias effectively enough to permit even a convincing stab at partial identification of causal effects. Which creates a risky situation for the purposes of drawing firm conclusions, because our prejudices love to helpfully answer the questions that science won't. In grad school I had a social science textbook that dubbed these kind of questions "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions" in the first chapter, and in subsequent chapters simply described them as "FUQ'd".

by kqr 2y ago

nickburns 2y ago

> I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue. Ah, beautiful little displays of an attempt to understand, not merely memorize.

doubled112 2y ago
Sometimes those made up words were way more fun than the correct ones. I could usually see why my little ones combined them that way.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I remember one where the kid was asked, "do you want some half-and-half?" "No, I want whole and whole!"
coldtea 2y ago
Understanding coming from years of exposure leading to memorizing the whole low hanging words of a language and their meaning. They don't merely understand the words as a concept, they also remember the word sounds attached to the associated concept (and later have to remember the spelling of those words as well). All the while commiting to memory all kinds of facts about the world, starting from their name and the ABC. Grammar might come closer to exposure-grasping a generalized concept -- then again nobody said understanding concepts is not hugely important, or is done by memorization alone: just that memorization goes hand in hand, and is hugely important in being effective in being able to use and think with not just the concepts but also the relevant facts related to them).

bunderbunder 2y ago

An anecdote I once heard provided in support of this point in a lecture: there are aspects of Spanish grammar that native speakers typically don't grasp until their teenage years. I suspect that, if one were to sit down and count hours of practice so that we could do a better apples-to-apples comparison, we'd find that children learn languages at a glacial pace compared to adults. And the rest is pure selection bias.

kqr 2y ago
The one thing children can learn that adults generally cannot is native pronounciation. If that is included in language proficiency, then adults take an infinite amount of time to learn!
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  True, but I really dislike the amount of focus people put on that. With the right techniques, it's not particularly difficult for an adult to develop decently good pronunciation that allows them to be comfortably understood. And placing the bar for having learned a language to a high level of proficiency at "able to hide evidence of where they were born from native speakers" smacks of internalized xenophobia. I also read in a second language acquisition textbook a while back (so, decent chance of being out of date, also decent chance of my memory of what I read being less-than-perfect) that the strongest predictor of how native-like an accent someone develops isn't actually the age at which they started learning the language, it's the lag between when they started learning it and when they started socially integrating into a community of native speakers. And it happens to be the case that, for all sorts of practical reasons, there's a strong correlation between this lag period and age. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to the critical period hypothesis - there is - but when we're talking about children it's difficult-to-impossible to root out selection bias effectively enough to permit even a convincing stab at partial identification of causal effects. Which creates a risky situation for the purposes of drawing firm conclusions, because our prejudices love to helpfully answer the questions that science won't. In grad school I had a social science textbook that dubbed these kind of questions "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions" in the first chapter, and in subsequent chapters simply described them as "FUQ'd".