Do adults learn languages like children?
This is a subject that comes up all the time, and I'm
going to give you my take on it.
I'm going to look at it from four different points of view.
First, I'm going to talk about how the brain works, whether
it be in adults and children.
Second of all, I'm going to talk about the
tremendous flexibility that the child has.
The third is the previous knowledge, or the accumulated knowledge and
experience, that the adult has.
And finally, I'm going to talk about the difference in attitude between
a child learning a language, and an adult learning a language.
Now, I'm not a neuroscientist.
I'm sort of distilling for you what I have read in books by Manfred Spitzer,
whom I mention quite frequently, and also an audio book that I've been
listening to called "Wie Erwachsene Denken und Lernen", which traces how adults think and learn.
And traces the evolution of our brains from a neuro-scientific mapping of the
brain perspective, and a few other sources.
The first thing to realize is that our brains do not just
exist for learning languages.
In fact, the brain is a learning machine in the sense that the brain has to acquire
the knowledge, the ability to anticipate,
in order for us to survive.
So it develops knowledge based on input.
It learns that if I touch something hot, then I've gotta withdraw my hand right
away because it's painful at some point.
Even in an animal, if it sees a predator, it's gotta know that the response is to
get out of there as quickly as possible.
So the brain develops an ability to respond.
To input with output, with an action, with speech, or with something.
And this is done, as I described in a previous video, by these inputs going
to the hippocampus where they are stored, on a short-term basis, and
then they're passed on to the cortex.
And there's different areas of the cortex where, gradually, a longer
term memory is developed longer term.
Ability, call it explicit knowledge, is stored, which enables
us to function as human beings.
We know that if we hear or see or speak a word, there is a corresponding place for
that in our brains, neurons, and that neurons that are adjacent to each other,
similar to each other because the neurons are stored in areas of like by category.
And if there is enough
stimulus and enough similar neurons nearby, they may eventually fire
and connect through synapses.
And that's how learning takes place.
So this process is the same whether we're talking about a baby or an adult.
So now let's look at the baby.
So the baby has what, again, Spitzer refers to as "unlimited
potential and very limited capability."
And if we just take the question of sounds, English has 44.
Japanese has a very small number.
Spanish has also not such a large number because those languages have fewer vowels.
Danish, which has this enormous number of vowels, has an enormous number of phonemes.
But the baby can learn to be a native speaker in any of them.
It has total potential, limited capability. And what's more, apparently
babies like new sounds, so they're very much interested in receiving
and imitating these new sounds.
So that the brain of the child is very flexible.
It can develop in any particular way, depending on the input that
it receives from its environment.
In fact, the child even starts hearing language in the
womb, and that's been proven.
So that's the baby.
Very flexible, limited impulse control, interested in new things.
Imitates and has no anxiety about anything, and that's the baby.
So the process whereby the baby learns the language is similar
to how adults learn the language.
I mentioned previously, for example, that in the past tense of verbs in
English, a young child, two years old, will first use the form of the
irregular verbs in English correctly, the very common irregular verbs.
Then as it
gets a sense of the rule that the past tense is created by -ed.
It'll then use the past tense of regular verbs correctly, and then at a later
stage, it'll learn the past tense of the less frequent irregular verbs.
And the same happens in German.
And the same happens when adults learn verbs.
So the message here is that the brain starts to create rules for itself.
If the baby were instructed in its native language, the way so
many of us are instructed in the languages we're trying to learn.
The baby would probably never learn to speak that language.
In other words, the natural process is more efficient.
The natural process of allowing the input to bombard the brain with enough
frequency, with enough similar words, the brain starts to form these rules.
There are even apparently neural locations for rules that
are developed through this process of listening and reading.
So that's common [between adults and babies].
Now let's look at what's different.
A baby has no prior knowledge of anything.
Everything is new, so the brain of the baby is a blank slate.
You can imprint anything you want on the baby's brain.
An adult has prior knowledge, so that can be good and that can be bad.
As I'm going to explain.
First of all, the less favorable situation is that the mind of the adult has already
hardened around a certain range of sounds, for example, or certain
patterns of how to express things.
It is no longer as flexible as the baby.
It's not open to any influence.
It has its own native language, which makes it more difficult now
to imprint or to introduce new ways of saying things and new sounds.
However, on the other hand, the adult has knowledge. So when the baby
sees a tree, or a house, or a car,
it doesn't know what a tree or a house or a car is, at first, but the adult does.
The adult knows things.
It knows what objects are.
The adult even knows how, at least his own language or her own language,
works. The adult knows intrinsically,
even without consulting a grammar book, what a noun is,
what a verb is. And when the adult sees or hears words in a new language, they start
to get a sense, even without the grammar explanation, of the different functions of
words in a sentence. The adult can read. The adult can read a grammar explanation.
I've said before, the grammar explanation will not by itself enable
the adult to perform according to those rules.
However, it may help the adult notice what is happening in the new language.
So that can be an assist to the adult, which is not available to the child.
And when we get to more complex concepts like emotions or abstract words,
the adult knows these words because the adult has a rich vocabulary
in his or her own language. And therefore can very quickly acquire
the same corresponding words in a new language. The adult can read.
Reading is a phenomenal way of increasing our ability in a foreign language.
We know that when we are reading, it's as if we are speaking the language,
insofar as the brain is concerned.
If we do a lot of reading, We can actually condition our brains to get
used to the patterns of the new language, to develop patterns in the brain that
help us deal with this new language.
Adults who read well in their own language typically will be able to read
well eventually in the new language.
So these are advantages that the adult has.
The adult can download a podcast and listen to it.
The baby's not going to do that.
So that the adult has learning strategies that the baby obviously doesn't have.
The baby responds to impulses and is not sort of strategic in its
approach to learning a language.
So that's the adult.
Now, one of the things that Spitzer and Herschkowitz explain in this
audio book that I'm listening to,
is that our prefrontal cortex, which controls our impulses, sort
of our developing sense of values that help us have a better sense as
adults of what's good and bad for us.
This evaluation ability to evaluate, the ability to develop a strategy,
all of these things take place in the prefrontal cortex, which
reaches its kind of fullest stage of development, in a way, at the age of 25.
So by that time, the adult is better able, A) to control its impulses,
but B), to elaborate or to develop a strategy based on its own
values. That's going to help it learn.
So those are things that are happening and actually continue to happen.
Apparently as time goes on, the evolution in the brain is such that the brain
gets better connected, the emotions and the thinking gets all better connected
in the brain, so that we end up,
as we grow older, somewhat more balanced in how we evaluate things
and in our approach to life.
So we've now covered that the brain essentially functions the same, that the
child has by dint of being a blank slate, a greater potential, although more limited
capabilities. The adult has more limited
potential perhaps, but has capabilities that can compensate for that. And also
through reading and other strategies, can acquire a vast vocabulary.
But may have more difficulty pronouncing as well as a child.
So now we come to the fourth thing, and that is the evolution of attitude.
Research has demonstrated that the child is very much attracted to new things.
New is good for the child.
"Wow!
Look at that!
Look at this!"
As the adult gets older, he or she becomes more set in their ways.
In other words, the adult may consider something new that has to
be learned as something undesirable.
I always remember when I started learning Chinese, there was another
Canadian diplomat there learning with me, and when he heard that in Mandarin
Chinese to say, "Are you going?" we actually say 你去不去？, "You go not go?"
And his response to that was, "Is that ever stupid!"
Now, if you consider the new language to be stupid or inconvenient, or you don't
like it, or any attitude that is negative towards the new, you're not going to learn.
The baby tends not to have any of these negative thoughts towards things
new, whereas often adults, perhaps because of their own languages,
tied up with their identity, or they're just reluctant to change.
And it also depends on whether you are a positive person,
whether you think you can succeed.
The child doesn't worry about "Am I going to learn this language?"
It's just... the language comes in.
Furthermore, whether the adult has already learned languages, it's pointed out in
Spitzer's book that the more we use our hippocampus, the better the hippocampus
becomes, the more efficient it becomes.
For example, a violinist who plays violin will develop parts of the brain
related to the movement of the fingers.
The London cabbie develops parts of the brain related to finding things on the map.
If we have had a lot of experience in learning languages, we are going
to be better at learning languages.
Practice makes perfect.
That includes, by the way, speaking. As much as I'm a proponent of input-based
learning, because I know how effective it is (listening and reading) in terms of
building up your sense of the language, your sense of how the language works,
your vocabulary, your comprehension.
By the same token, in order to speak well, you have to speak a lot.
Practice makes
perfect.
So the sort of evolution of the attitude is an area where the adult learner,
I think, and this is part of what we've done with LingQ, where LingQ is
primarily aimed at adult learners, learners who have a strategy, a
learning strategy, who have interests.
So we try to allow the learner to bring in content of interest as much as
possible from YouTube, from the internet.
To maintain that interest, maintain a positive attitude
towards the learning experience.
We try to provide encouragement in the statistics: "You're doing well!"
Obviously it's important to reward people in what they do.
Even with animals, if they feed the rat after it runs around the maze, if there's
reward, then there's a desire to learn.
So reward
can help people learn. But the reward needn't be an absolute reward.
Like money.
All it needs to be is an experience that was better than expected.
And I think there is another place where adult learners need to avoid unrealistic
expectations of how well they're going to do.
And,
unfortunately, the language books, they push,
you know, here's this book, Assimil.
You do this book, you're going to be at B2 in Persian, which is not the case.
We need to be realistic.
It's a long-term process.
We want to enjoy the process.
Again, when we speak, we're going to speak with mistakes.
We're going to make mistakes. We're going to forget. If we have
unrealistic expectations,
then we will be discouraged.
If on the other hand, we don't have unrealistic expectations, and then
we do well, then it's an unexpected, pleasant result and that encourages us.
So there are a number of ways in which this attitude, which probably is to
the disadvantage of the adult learner.
Just as the adult learners experience can be an advantage compared to
the child learning, the attitude is often a disadvantage where the child
is fearless, is playing, everything is fun, and the adult is reluctant
to be exposed, to make mistakes.
I think that's an area where adults can work harder on having a positive
attitude so that they're better able to focus, better able to stay with the task.
And if they do that, they will learn.
And even if the adult cannot achieve the same level of native-like
pronunciation as the child, there's all kinds of studies that show that
the adult can accumulate a much larger vocabulary in a much shorter period
of time than a child can, and in many cases, even than a native speaker has.
The function of the brain is the same.
The brain is there
throughout our lives. And it enables us to deal with the world that we live in.
It's a representation of the world that we live in, but insofar as language
learning is concerned, while the process of learning is fundamentally the same,
whether it's a baby or an adult.
There are advantages that the baby has in terms of its flexibility and its lack
of impulse control, but lack of fear.
But there are also advantages that the adult has in terms of prior knowledge,
ability to evolve a strategy, ability to use reading, and other activities
to improve in the language. Even if there will be areas where the baby,
in most cases, is going to do better when it comes to pronunciation and
natural language use than the adult.
But the adult can nevertheless achieve a very high level.