What Does It Take To Successfully Learn A New Language In Adulthood?

In today's hyper-connected world, being proficient in multiple languages is fast becoming more of a requirement than an asset — most especially if English isn't your native language. Despite the high value placed on multilingualism, many people. schoolchildren and adults alike, struggle to acquire new tongues. Why is that? Is learning a new language really that hard? If so, is it neurologically harder for some than for others? If not, what are we doing wrong?

Research has recently offered us some interesting tidbits that give some insights into the reasons some people fail at learning new languages. Besides gleaning wisdom from scientific studies, however, there's also a lot to learn from fluent multilinguals. 

Brain Waves Predict Your Ability To Learn A New Language?

Researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle invited 19 participants aged between 18 and 31 without previous experience with this language to try and learn some French with the help of an advanced immersive virtual reality computer system. Their language-learning sessions took place twice a week for half an hour at a time.

However, prior to beginning on their new quests, the participants were asked to simply sit with their eyes closed for a full five minutes, while wearing a electroencephalogram (EEG) set that measured their brain activity. The EEG recorded the learners' alpha, beta, delta, gamma, and theta brain waves and researchers tried to figure out whether the data gathered could in any way predict how far their subjects would advance during the program. The participants were also assessed on their progress throughout the eight-week French program, as well as upon completion of the study period. 

Interestingly, the research team discovered that, though participants completed their lessons at widely varying speeds, this had no impact on their success. What did impact their ability to progress within the program, the study found, was their brain waves — higher levels of beta and gamma brain waves and lower levels of theta and delta waves were a winning combination. 

Chantel Prat, associate professor of psychology and the lead author of the study, which was published in Brain and Language, said: "We've found that a characteristic of a person's brain at rest predicted 60 percent of the variability in their ability to learn a second language in adulthood."

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The authors go on to note that brain-wave tests shouldn't be used to predict who should and shouldn't try to learn a second language in adulthood, but the data may predict just how much time and effort you need to put in to become a proficient conversationalist in a new tongue. Though their data is sure fascinating, it essentially confirms something many of us have believed in strongly — people have natural strengths and weaknesses, and it's possible to be particularly talented at learning languages, just as it is possible to naturally be good at math or sport. 

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. 

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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?