7 ms·

Regardless of his technical achievements, learning a second language ( and such disconnected one ) is super impressive. Great job.

sampo 12y ago
> learning a second language [...] is super impressive. Perhaps as an adult. But if you do it as a kid in school, then almost everyone can pick up a language or two.
- therealdrag0 12y ago
  Per hour, adults are more efficient at learning languages. But kids forced into another language typically get more hours of exposure than adults attempting to force themselves to learn a language.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    I was watching a reality TV show last week (flip this old beach house or somesuch) where a father and his toddler daughter had approximately this dialog. Dad: "Who's my favorite?" Daughter: "Me!" Dad: "Are you my favorite?" Daughter: "Yes!" Dad: "Whose favorite are you?" Daughter: "Yours!"
  - sytelus 12y ago
    Do you have anything cite for this claim? All the research I'm aware of strongly suggests (1) It's extremely hard for adults to learn new languages - usually requiring many more hours compared to kids learning second language (2) Brain circuitry to hear, distinguish and pronounce new sounds effectively gets shutdown in older age.
    - eitally 12y ago
      I only have this anecdote. My wife, two kids (3 & 5 years old) and I have been taking Mandarin classes for the past six months. My wife & I pick up the concepts, grammar/patterns and vocabulary about three times faster than our kids (we are also forced to work harder at it because we're constantly reinforcing the lessons to them, so that inherently biases this analysis). That said, their pronunciation is muuuuuuuch better than ours.
      - tomerico 12y ago
        Kids learn by observing and interacting in the language. Adults usually learn the grammar and vocabulary directly, which is a slower mechanism for the brain.
    - jaredklewis 12y ago
      I too often read about research that suggests children are better at learning languages than adults, which may or not be true, but I am rarely convinced by these reports. Finding a correlation between the age a person started learning a language and their fluency, the reports then conclude that children are superior learners, without considering other factors like that bi-lingual children are exposed to their languages constantly and must learn them to communicate with others, while adult learners find 2 hours of study onerous and suffer few if any consequences from not learning. Other studies are more scientifically rigorous, testing the aptitude of various language learning abilities with quizzes and games, but I think we can infer very little about the efficiency of long term studying from these narrow tests. Just anecdotally, I live in Japan, and most foreigners I know who come as adults and work in a Japanese environment are conversational in a year, fluent in 3 or 4.
    - therealdrag0 12y ago
      Unfortunately I can't remember where I heard that recently. Knowing my own habits, it wasn't merely hearsay, and may have been from a podcast or other such non-fiction program, and still may have been a rogue opinion. I wish I could think of it. I'll Google around this evening.
  - Pxtl 12y ago
    Except for accents. Picking up a language as a child is virtually the only way to really nail the accent.
    - kyllo 12y ago
      For most people this is probably true, but I started learning Mandarin in college and now have a native-sounding accent, and I know others who have pulled it off too. I think the key was that in the first few months of studying Mandarin, I listened to recordings of short phrases and repeated them back over and over again until I sounded exactly like the recording. I spent hours in my university's language lab with headphones on, doing this. But you have to be able to imitate sounds that you hear, and I guess not everyone is naturally good at this. I'd imagine that people who are good at doing impressions, as well as perhaps people with musical talent, have an advantage at learning accents.
      - sampo 12y ago
        Some people can also pick up accents without knowing the languages: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw
    - r00fus 12y ago
      What I've gathered is that accents depend on your ability to distinguish phonemes - the classic example is that in western languages there is p vs. b sound - whereas in Tagalog there is also a pb intermediate sound. If you have an ear for knowing that some languages use that phoneme, you will be more likely to be able to both hear and articulate these sounds (i.e., your aptitude for learning language accents is higher)
- Dewie 12y ago
  I'm unconvinced that a school-setting can teach children languages vastly more effectively than an adult (or an adult can self-teach). Maybe for very young children, but even that I'm sceptical of.
philsnow 12y ago
Chinese is actually much more similar to English (structurally) than a lot of people realize: It doesn't mark case or gender like English (and it doesn't even really inflect verbs). The word order is for the most part the same or similar (German has this verb-at-the-end construction that you not only have to learn, but you have to train somewhat to remember enough context to bind the verbs to the clauses they apply to; Japanese is SOV rather than SVO like English/Chinese). The writing system takes a really long time and a lot of memorization, but if you're learning only to speak and listen, you don't really have to deal with it.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Chinese is basically English grammar with different words...Japanese on the other hand is much more weird. Getting tones right is key, but they are easy to practice. Writing is quite hard; I'm conversational but basically illiterate.
- gurkendoktor 12y ago
  But if you only speak and listen, you still have to deal with tones :)
S4M 12y ago
Hmm dude, everybody here who is not a native English speaker knows at least a second language on top of his mother tongue. I'm French, fluent in English and conversational in Spanish and German and I don't think it's so impressive. Chinese on the other hand is a bit tougher because the writing is so different.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  3 languages for a french person? I'd say that's unbelievable.
  - stangeek 12y ago
    This is such a ridiculous comment...
- unethical_ban 12y ago
  It's impressive in America, where it's not needed, and moreso because Chinese is "exotic" and superficially less "practical" than learning Spanish, which is a useful thing to know south of New York.
- shin_lao 12y ago
  You're speaking four related western European languages. For example, when you learned English, notwithstanding the fact that you are surrounded by English since you're a child, you had from day one several thousands words of vocabulary and knew a superset of the English grammar (FYI, 45% of English words are of French origin). I'm fluent in three European languages as well. I can feel that I could pick up Italian or Dutch very easily (I'm > 35 y.o.). When trying Russian with my gf, I don't have the same feeling.
LunaSea 12y ago
No it's not.
- thoughtpalette 12y ago
  Oh ok.

sampo 12y ago

> learning a second language [...] is super impressive. Perhaps as an adult. But if you do it as a kid in school, then almost everyone can pick up a language or two.

therealdrag0 12y ago
Per hour, adults are more efficient at learning languages. But kids forced into another language typically get more hours of exposure than adults attempting to force themselves to learn a language.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  I was watching a reality TV show last week (flip this old beach house or somesuch) where a father and his toddler daughter had approximately this dialog. Dad: "Who's my favorite?" Daughter: "Me!" Dad: "Are you my favorite?" Daughter: "Yes!" Dad: "Whose favorite are you?" Daughter: "Yours!"
- sytelus 12y ago
  Do you have anything cite for this claim? All the research I'm aware of strongly suggests (1) It's extremely hard for adults to learn new languages - usually requiring many more hours compared to kids learning second language (2) Brain circuitry to hear, distinguish and pronounce new sounds effectively gets shutdown in older age.
  - eitally 12y ago
    I only have this anecdote. My wife, two kids (3 & 5 years old) and I have been taking Mandarin classes for the past six months. My wife & I pick up the concepts, grammar/patterns and vocabulary about three times faster than our kids (we are also forced to work harder at it because we're constantly reinforcing the lessons to them, so that inherently biases this analysis). That said, their pronunciation is muuuuuuuch better than ours.
    - tomerico 12y ago
      Kids learn by observing and interacting in the language. Adults usually learn the grammar and vocabulary directly, which is a slower mechanism for the brain.
  - jaredklewis 12y ago
    I too often read about research that suggests children are better at learning languages than adults, which may or not be true, but I am rarely convinced by these reports. Finding a correlation between the age a person started learning a language and their fluency, the reports then conclude that children are superior learners, without considering other factors like that bi-lingual children are exposed to their languages constantly and must learn them to communicate with others, while adult learners find 2 hours of study onerous and suffer few if any consequences from not learning. Other studies are more scientifically rigorous, testing the aptitude of various language learning abilities with quizzes and games, but I think we can infer very little about the efficiency of long term studying from these narrow tests. Just anecdotally, I live in Japan, and most foreigners I know who come as adults and work in a Japanese environment are conversational in a year, fluent in 3 or 4.
  - therealdrag0 12y ago
    Unfortunately I can't remember where I heard that recently. Knowing my own habits, it wasn't merely hearsay, and may have been from a podcast or other such non-fiction program, and still may have been a rogue opinion. I wish I could think of it. I'll Google around this evening.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  Except for accents. Picking up a language as a child is virtually the only way to really nail the accent.
  - kyllo 12y ago
    For most people this is probably true, but I started learning Mandarin in college and now have a native-sounding accent, and I know others who have pulled it off too. I think the key was that in the first few months of studying Mandarin, I listened to recordings of short phrases and repeated them back over and over again until I sounded exactly like the recording. I spent hours in my university's language lab with headphones on, doing this. But you have to be able to imitate sounds that you hear, and I guess not everyone is naturally good at this. I'd imagine that people who are good at doing impressions, as well as perhaps people with musical talent, have an advantage at learning accents.
    - sampo 12y ago
      Some people can also pick up accents without knowing the languages: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw
  - r00fus 12y ago
    What I've gathered is that accents depend on your ability to distinguish phonemes - the classic example is that in western languages there is p vs. b sound - whereas in Tagalog there is also a pb intermediate sound. If you have an ear for knowing that some languages use that phoneme, you will be more likely to be able to both hear and articulate these sounds (i.e., your aptitude for learning language accents is higher)
Dewie 12y ago
I'm unconvinced that a school-setting can teach children languages vastly more effectively than an adult (or an adult can self-teach). Maybe for very young children, but even that I'm sceptical of.

philsnow 12y ago

Chinese is actually much more similar to English (structurally) than a lot of people realize: It doesn't mark case or gender like English (and it doesn't even really inflect verbs). The word order is for the most part the same or similar (German has this verb-at-the-end construction that you not only have to learn, but you have to train somewhat to remember enough context to bind the verbs to the clauses they apply to; Japanese is SOV rather than SVO like English/Chinese). The writing system takes a really long time and a lot of memorization, but if you're learning only to speak and listen, you don't really have to deal with it.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Chinese is basically English grammar with different words...Japanese on the other hand is much more weird. Getting tones right is key, but they are easy to practice. Writing is quite hard; I'm conversational but basically illiterate.
gurkendoktor 12y ago
But if you only speak and listen, you still have to deal with tones :)

S4M 12y ago

Hmm dude, everybody here who is not a native English speaker knows at least a second language on top of his mother tongue. I'm French, fluent in English and conversational in Spanish and German and I don't think it's so impressive. Chinese on the other hand is a bit tougher because the writing is so different.

wodenokoto 12y ago
3 languages for a french person? I'd say that's unbelievable.
- stangeek 12y ago
  This is such a ridiculous comment...
unethical_ban 12y ago
It's impressive in America, where it's not needed, and moreso because Chinese is "exotic" and superficially less "practical" than learning Spanish, which is a useful thing to know south of New York.
shin_lao 12y ago
You're speaking four related western European languages. For example, when you learned English, notwithstanding the fact that you are surrounded by English since you're a child, you had from day one several thousands words of vocabulary and knew a superset of the English grammar (FYI, 45% of English words are of French origin). I'm fluent in three European languages as well. I can feel that I could pick up Italian or Dutch very easily (I'm > 35 y.o.). When trying Russian with my gf, I don't have the same feeling.

LunaSea 12y ago

No it's not.

thoughtpalette 12y ago
Oh ok.