While linguists continue to argue about the exact mechanisms by which human infants acquire language, babies all over the world continue to do what they've been doing for a very long time now — they utter their first words, begin stringing them together into simple sentences, and play with language until they are capable of creating complex structures able to express anything they have the vocabulary for.
Anyone who has seen this process in action is bound to think of it as something that happens almost by magic, seemingly without effort, but an infant's brain is hard at work making sense of that exciting world of speech around them. Those first words are a huge leap, but the process of acquiring language never stops — when that baby reaches college age, they'll still be acquiring words, and it's not too late even when they're in their eighties. Some words have to be looked up in the dictionary to be understood properly, but most of the time, context gives us a good idea of meaning, to the point that we'll find ourselves putting our new gems to the test without ever seeking a formal definition. Much of the time, we don't even realize we're doing it!
From internet-powered language learning software like Rosetta Stone to immersion academies, many pros in the field answer that question with a resounding "yes". Is that the whole story, though? Let's take a closer look by examining the methods three successful adult language learners used.
Little Mouse, Where Is Your House? The Long Road Towards Fluent English
Elena Bulakhtina, medical doctor, SteadyHealth author, and Russian, was enrolled in English lessons at age five after being taught how to say "My name is..." by a family friend, despite disapproving Soviet neighbors. She hated the lessons and did her best to sabotage the process, she says, adding:
During this short study period, I learned the English alphabet and 'little mouse, little mouse, where is your house'. I swear, that’s all I remember from then, and I don’t even know where this verse comes from. Soon, everything got back to normal. I resumed playing with the older kids at the construction sites where we melted lead parts of the discarded radiators in order to make cool toys. Again, the neighbours disapproved.
That "little mouse" was the reason she was selected to be in the English, rather than German, learning group at school from fifth grade onwards though, and Elena's describes those lessons are "very dull", mostly consisting of memorizing short texts she didn't find incredibly relevant. During these lessons, she learned enough to be considered better than average when she entered premed, but being in the wild throws of adolescence led her to reject the individual tutoring offered to her, once again rendering her English almost non-existent. (But something must have stuck in her brain?)
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Despite the wasted opportunity ("I was an idiot", Elena now says), she got into a postgraduate medical residency program in the US some years later — and acceptance, of course, depended on being proficient enough in English. Elena shares:
Reading wasn’t that bad, and I picked it up relatively quickly, thanks to the internet. Thanks to movies and English channels on TV, the comprehension problem was also solved. I loved 'ER', 'X-files', and 'Vets in Practice' the best. At the same time, through multiple chain of events, I got acquainted with two Americans. One helped me with writing via emails, and the other ended up hanging out with our gang in Moscow. In a year, most of us had no problem conversing in American English.
After five years in the States, Elena moved to Canada, where she still lives today. How is her English doing? Judge for yourself:
I still mispronounce many words, omit articles, and make other speaking mistakes. 'shit' — 'sheet', 'bitch' — 'beach', 'ship' — 'sheep' got me into trouble initially. Now I use 'shit' and 'bitch' for pretty much everything, and substitute the rest with a 'boat' or 'shore'. I’m understood, and my English is good enough to testify in court. There are occasional problems with comprehension of Scots and Irish, but a couple of pints facilitate mutual understanding.
Language Learning Through Rote Memorization: The Goal Of Learning Is To Learn, Not To Have Fun
"The Korean", of the popular "Ask a Korean" blog, moved to the US from South Korea when he was 16 years old, and mastered the English language very well, very quickly, and a lot more systematically than our previous "test subject". How did he do it? He says, on his blog:
"The myth of 'fun, immersive language learning' usually takes on this narrative: 'Children learn their first language nearly effortlessly. They do this by being constantly surrounded by the new language. So when learning a second language, you must surround yourself with that second language, with emphasis on a lot of listening and speaking. (Because children do not pick up their first language from books.) Once you are immersed the second language, you will pick up that language as if through osmosis.'"
Why does The Korean reject the "learning is fun!" immersion model in favor of what he describes as rote memorization and repetition? He firmly believes, turning to an experiment described by linguist Steven Pinker, that adults simply don't learn in the same way as infants do. "Astonishingly, the 6-month-old infants reacted to the changes in sound that adults could not detect. English-learning infants could distinguish the finer sounds used in Czech, Hindi and Inslekampx (a Native American language) that English-speaking adults could not," The Korean says, adding:
"But when the same experiment was performed on 10-month-old infants, the infants lost their ability to distinguish those sounds that do not exist in English. In other words, the ability to learn which sound belongs to a language and which sound is a random white noise happens between the ages of 6 months and 10 months."
This, of course, is Elena's "shit/sheet" problem in action! Elena's English skills are good enough to make her a witty writer, but Russian simply doesn't include the "short i" vowel sound English has, and by the time she had her first English lesson at age five, it was too late for her to master it, something that might forever cause her grief.
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The Korean, in short, has a point: adult language learners don't come to the table with the same abilities infants have.
How does he go about learning a new language, then? His tips, in condensed form, are:
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Read and write simple sentences, later moving on to more complex ones.
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Study grammar in order to be able to create more complex sentences from simple ones you learned.
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Memorize every word you encounter. The Korean used flash cards to help him during this process.
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Listen to, and speak, your target language every day.
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Rinse and repeat until you achieve the desired results.
SteadyHealth spoke to The Korean to find out more about how he developed his personal language-learning system. "My appreciation of rote memorization has entirely to do with the Korean educational system. I certainly did not appreciate it while I was going through it, but its advantage was clear when I was standing next to people who did not go through it," he said when we enquired into the origins of his language-learning plan. Asked what others could learn from the Korean educational system, The Korean shared:
"The 'learning is fun' people can learn from Korea that no, a lot of learning is not fun at all, nor should fun ever be a goal in learning. The goal of learning is to learn. I do believe that when fun is emphasized over learning, it does learners a disservice."
Language Learning Through Immersion, The Dyslexic way
Anna Schaap, another SteadyHealth author as well as non-traditional learner, grew up in a world very different from the one she finds herself in today — a world without audio books, without spell check, without Google. A struggling reader as a small child, her mother dutifully read with her every night, a process she hated every minute of because no matter how much exposure she got, it didn't get any easier for her.
One thing her world did contain was a (black and white!) television. One small problem: Anna is Dutch, and the most exciting programs were in German. Bored by what the local networks had on offer, she watched that anyway. Now, German and Dutch have a fair bit in common, so perhaps it isn't that strange that gibberish gradually turned to sense, but it happened. Solely thanks to hours upon hours upon hours of watching German television, Anna — who couldn't memorize declension lists when she was later "subjected" to formal German lessons in school — later had no trouble communicating with actual Germans in Germany.
She also took English lessons in school, but didn't get much from them:
"I was unable to read and write well in my native tongue, and the textbook model of learning certainly never worked for me at all! I left school with nothing but a very basic understanding of English, grades made worse by a consistent inability to make any sense of the English phonetic system."
After she left school, however, with a diploma from a non-university tertiary school for agriculture, she set off backpacking, with the hope to eventually get into development work in third-world countries. On her adventures, she met countless English speakers, both native and non-native, and soon acquired very good English. Once she learned to speak English — much like she had German, except through face-to-face interactions rather than TV — she was ready to give books a try as well.
"I'd read thrillers and crime novels. Only the most exciting books, ones that kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time, were worth reading. I can indeed read, it's just difficult for me, so of course I pick and choose carefully. Whenever I came across a word I didn't know, I did look it up in the dictionary. The goal was reading the novel, though, not learning English. I firmly believe that nobody is ever done 'mastering' a language, including their native tongue. There's always more to add, and reading was one way in which I did that, but being a dyslexic, not a primary way."
Anna strongly disagrees with the notion that dyslexics are not as good as others at learning languages. "Take the written word out of the process, and you take the problem out," she says. "My linguistic abilities are fine. It's the reading that's the challenge."
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Anna is now able to write articles in a language that isn't her native tongue by making abundant use of the spell check function on her computer. The language was never the problem however; the dyslexia was.
Language Learning: Is There Such A Thing As 'Immersion vs Rote Memorization'?
Our language learners mastered their target languages in three radically different ways, ways that can ultimately perhaps best be summed up as long-haul learning, learning primarily through rote memorization, and learning primarily through immersion.
They each have strong views on the process of language learning, but if you are hoping to learn a new language to the point of fluency, it's going to be much more productive to look at what they have in common:
- All used television to solidify their comprehension (The Korean mentions block-watching programs including the Simpsons)
- All used the written word to build their vocabulary
- All improved their abilities by practicing their language skills on people who already spoke their target languages fluently
- For all, memorization was part of the learning process — whether formally or informally
- All had a strong commitment to learning their target languages
An interesting picture emerges: no matter what views they have and what methods work for them, these successful language learners actually helped themselves to very similar underlying techniques. If you're hoping to replicate their achievements, there's a lot to learn from them.
Sources & Links
- Photo courtesy of Pedro Simoes: www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosimoes7/6179133644/
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