Quote:
Originally Posted by lrt's friend
It is a known fact that people's abilities to learn another language decline with age and not all people have the same natural proficiency at learning other languages as an adult. Some are naturals, some are not. I remember reading that it has something to do with how people hear.
Regardless, I think a lot of people do not want to have to learn completely new skills late in their careers and this is not limited to languages.
We should not judge people to that degree.
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My degree in Linguistics comes in handy.
The ability to learn a language does not actually decline with age, but rather the facility to acquire it changes due to the more matured brain of an adult being neurologically different to that of a child. For example, studies find that children are better able to perceive a language's phonology more easily than an adult. Adults are still able to learn to speak and can achieve near-native fluency, but for them it can be a longer process to speak without much of an accent. Often, they will achieve a certain level of intelligibility and then plateau. You might be familiar with people who have thick accents despite living in a country and speaking that language for several years or longer as a result of this. Every human can produce the Spanish trilled 'r' or Arabic's pharyngeal fricatives. But as we grow into adults, we become used to exercising muscles/ organs used to produce certain speech sounds in our quotidian language. So, as an adult you may struggle with French's <u> or <eu> (as in
pûr or
feuille if [y, œ, ø] aren't in your language. But you can still learn those phonemes with practice. Having a speech language pathologist or a teacher trained in either that or linguistics would help as well. You might still have an accent, but you can learn to speak proficiently.
On a side note, those vowels are easy to produce, as it's a matter of "rounding your lips" as you do with <o> and <u> while saying "ee" or "ay".
As far as successful acquisition of the syntax and semantics, children's brains learn differently than an adult's. But adults still maintain the ability to learn languages, just as much as an adult is capable of learning anything. For monolingual speakers, they will continue to learn their own language throughout the rest of their lives. They will come into new vocabulary that they haven't previous encountered, and can successfully learn those new words. This is also the case with slang, jargon, and colloquialisms. The challenge with learning another language's syntax depends on one's ability to learn to think differently. For Indo-European languages like French and English, syntactically we're very similar, but the way we express some things differs. Learning to use
imparfait,
passé composé,
plusqueparfait might be hard for us to understand at first because English expresses past/ completed actions differently. But in this case it's a matter of understanding chronology. Otherwise, word ordering and more can be "bullshitted" and calques can be used to express oneself even without complete knowledge of the grammar. Learning a non-Indo-European language is harder for us because the syntax will be different, and therefore "bullshitting" will be less sucessful. Japanese is an agglutinative language in the Altaic family. Sentences can consist of one verb only with multiple affixes attached to express different aspects (positive/negative, present/past, polite/rude), but can be changed to indicate potential, who does which action, wondering, etc. The sentence structure is completely different than English, too, with the ordering being SOV (subject-object-verb). So for an Anglophone learning Japanese, it can be challenging. Yet successfully acquiring the grammar is achieved merely by learning to think differently (think in the way Japanese is thought instead of how you express yourself in English).
People's ability to acquire new languages is not so much about hearing as it is about the activation of the limbic system. Our limbic system consists of different "primitive" parts of the brain that are responsible for emotion and memory. Essentially, if you are not motivated to learn something, you won't be successful at learning even if you try. The part of your brain responsible for remembering and recalling what you learn wasn't being activated properly, and therefore you won't be capable of encoding that information on the brain. This lack of motivation might be an emotional response to being forced to do or learn something you don't want, or even being too tired.
For example, someone might go through our education system and not be able to speak French very well. They may claim that they just aren't able to learn languages like other people. But their attempt to learn French was forced upon them by the education system, and typically the method of instruction fails to teach it properly. But on their own they might develop an interest in another country, like Japan. They love television, food, culture, fashion, geography, history, etc. from Japan, such that they want to visit, live in and absorb anything Japanese into their being. They will try to learn Japanese and, unlike with French, they become fluent speaking it. This is because they are personally motivated to learn Japanese as a result in their interest in Japan. However, they still can't speak French, which is a result in them not having the same emotional connection to the culture and language of Francophones.
So in short, every adult is capable of becoming bilingual/ polyglots (even those with learning disabilities or speech impediments). However, their success depends on their motivation and emotional response to learning the language, just as it is with learning anything. Compared to children, adults may seem to struggle to learn other languages, but that is merely because adult brains are wired differently than children's, and thus absorb language differently. This doesn't mean adults can't learn languages or that only a few "naturals" can.
Our second language instruction in Canada is quite inefficient. Part of this has to do with method of instruction, ability to use it, but the willingness of students to learn it. Teachers are expected to excited students to learn French by teaching them more than just grammar, but especially introducing them to aspects of culture that will appeal to them.
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