Language Acquisition In Adulthood And The Role of 'Rules'

Multilingualism comes with a whole bunch of myths. Just talking to friends revealed to me that some doctors and speech therapists are very strongly opposed to introducing second (let alone third and fourth) languages to children in a home setting before age 11. Where they got that idea and that age from, and whether people in other localities agree, I don't know. There are also those who believe with equal conviction that "small children are like sponges, they'll pick new languages up easily". The implied if not outright stated flip side of that statement is that adults and older children have by definition lost that brain elasticity that allows young children to naturally acquire languages. 

Professor of second-language acquisition at the University of Maryland Robert DeKeyser, speaking to Forbes, agrees, saying: “You cannot expect to just absorb language the way that a child does". He categorically adds:

"Children are good at learning the underlining system of all the language input they get because they can infer the underlying patterns without understanding the rules. Adults must be conscientious of the rules of the language. Their implicit learning doesn’t work all that well."

Is he right? Not in my experience. What does what I have to say matter? I'm no professor of second-language acquisition, after all! I am, however, a multilingual person who successfully acquired multiple languages in adulthood, after, to put it bluntly, completely failing to learn anything from the language studies at school. OK, that's not quite true. I do not speak German, French, or Spanish today, but my Latin studies still help me on a daily basis — because it's found in English on a daily basis. Professor DeKeyser is wrong, in my opinion, though he does touch on a key part of the puzzle here: rule-mindedness interferes with language learning.

How come I was able to learn two new languages from scratch, largely linguistically unrelated to the two I had already spoken before, in adulthood with fairly minimal conscious effort? Most people would say that the fact that I was already bilingual has something to do with this, and I suspect that they are partially right, but there's more to it than that alone.

The very scatter brain that was completely unable to score high grades on German tests by trying to memorize lists of declensions was able to learn new languages perfectly alright in a "sink or swim" environment, one in which the goal was to communicate important matters to people who didn't speak any language I was already familiar with.

My brain was never very rule-minded. Being mostly around males, for instance, I started off by referring myself as a grammatical male when I first moved to the country in which I live now. 

Rules. Self-consciousness. The capacity to feel embarrassed about sounding dumb. Those are all key aspects of language acquisition as an adult. That is, if you have them, you are likely to fail at learning a new language. So DeKeyser is right, because kids don't tend to possess any of those traits, but also wrong — adults can leave those attributes at the door as they seek to have a new language become part of themselves. A true immersion environment, in which failing on one of the quizzes the researchers from the above study offered their participants isn't the cost of learning too slowly, but rather not being able to communicate that you'll pee your pants if you don't find a bathroom right now, is probably the answer. 

READ Health Benefits Of Learning Languages

Does this mean that undertaking to learn a new language if you can't attain a total immersion environment is futile? Of course not, but there's still an awful lot to learn from children and rule-defying individuals alike. There's a reason why grammar isn't formally studied in schools until after kids have already learned to speak, read, and write. Why not focus on absorbing the soul of the language first, and only worry about grammar after?