Seriously, where did the last two weeks go? It was here a minute ago, and now it’s gone. I don’t know what to tell you.
Anyway, things have been busy here in the Shanghai headquarters of Global Maverick (aka, a circle four meters in radius, centered on my desk, and including a bed and a space heater that’s on full blast 24-7), and I’ve been slowly implementing a number of changes to the way I learn (like in software development, these changes are done as part of small experiments, evaluated, and then merged back into main study method trunk if deemed worthwhile) that should make good posts in 2010.
What I want to comment on today, though, is Khatzumoto’s post about learning more than one language simultaneously, and specifically the comment that prompted it, which is as follows:
Surely, if a child can be raised natively in three languages, it would be just as possible and in fact easier as an adult to do the same thing? Surely one could simultaneously learn, say, Japanese, Chinese and…I dunno, French? Why just one at a time?
Now that I have a a test subject toddler of my own, I’m convinced that everyone who talks about “learning a language effortlessly, just like a baby,” either doesn’t have children or has the observational skills of a salted slug. There is absolutely nothing effortless about the way a child learns a language. It just seems effortless because the kid, unlike an adult put in a similar situation, doesn’t bitch about how hard it all is, probably because he/she doesn’t have any concept of what life is like as a fully communicating adult.
My son being raised English/Mandarin bilingual. His Mandarin is clearly outpacing his English at this point (he’s 18 months old today, and three of his four primary caregivers speak to him in Mandarin, so that’s to be expected). I would estimate that something is said to him every 20 seconds (give or take) during the day, and it all is directly related to his current environment. He’s been trying — and mostly failing, with some exceptions — to speak for the last six months, and he still hasn’t managed to string much more than a couple of syllables together. After four or five years of this effort, day in and day out, he’ll be able to speak… as well as a four or five year old child.
Also, even for a baby, learning multiple languages at once is not without penalty. Several of the little boys and girls that he plays with regularly that are monolingual (Mandarin or Shanghainese) can vocalize much more than he can, though he can follow instructions in both languages whereas I have to speak to the other little ones in Mandarin to get any response at all. I know that he’ll catch up with all of those monolingual brats by the time he’s 3 or 4, but still — even for the infinitely moldable baby brain — there’s a price to be paid for learning multiple languages at once.
Of course, adults have advantages over children — we’re not having to learn all of the concepts behind the physical world while at the same time learning how to express those concepts, for one thing, and we already have the success of learning at least one language behind us. What most of us (myself most definitely included) don’t have, though, is the patience that a little baby — perhaps simply because they don’t know any better — to suck for years on end without any knowledge of what success. As Khatzumoto said:
[Learning more than one language simultaneously] is totally doable. It’s not really a matter of the raw capability of the human hardware, more one of PPL: patience, priorities and logistics: the patience to continue priority-investing in the time and infrastructure necessary to acquire a language, all for no immediately visible return over an indeterminate timescale, against any and all significantly deleterious objections and interruptions from other people, because it’s going to take as long as it’s freaking going to take, and if you stop, you lose.
I’ve covered this ground before, and I don’t have anything particularly substantive to add to my previous posts. It just irks me when I hear people talk about language learning and and infants as if they just sit there playing with the toys all day and magically learn how to speak. As soon as I find an adult that has put in the sort of effort a baby does, maybe I’ll listen to them (that is, perhaps, why I listen to Khatzumoto — he seems to be the closest example of what I’m talking about I’ve found).
P.S.: One of the reasons I’ve been so quiet on this blog has been released in the App Store: Beijing Air, an interface to the US Embassy in Beijing’s air quality monitoring info. If you’re in Beijing, or plan on traveling there, check it out — it’s free!
Related posts:
- Heisig, SRS, and my experience with learning Chinese characters
- Maintaining one language while learning another
- Sustainability vs. resilience in learning
- Taking your learning out into the wild
- What’s grammar got to do with it?
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Everything you wrote squares with what I know. It takes longer for children learning multiple languages to get on track but once on track they learn at about the same rate (in multiple languages) as mono-lingual kids.
Nice response to his post. I haven’t had any kids, so I haven’t gotten to watch the language learning process up close with them, but what little I’ve seen leads me the same direction. They spend a lot of time on it and make a lot of mistakes and have constant hand-holding. In addition, they are filling an active and very immediate need.
If, as an adult, I had that much time, help, and motivation for learning a language, I could learn a LOT faster.
As for learning multiple languages, it’s just a matter of ‘PPL’, as Khatz says. As I posted on his blog, I’m learning 2 languages right now and so far I haven’t had any problems. It probably helps that the third language is very much like my first (English) and that the second (Japanese) isn’t. (Technically, Spanish should be my ’second’ language, but since I never practiced after highschool, I never got any use of the language and I don’t count it.)
I agree with you 100% John. I have 2.5 year old who speaks Mandarin and English (and a bit of Cantonese when his grandmother is visiting us in Taiwan). He is exposed to Mandarin mostly, when speaking to his mother or his teachers at daycare, so that is his primary language. His English ability is not that far behind and we have no problems communicating. I have never seen him get frustrated trying to speak English but he does regularly “search for words” (i.e. repeat a word multiple times while he tries to think of what he wants to say).
Sorry to not comment on the rest of the post, but I’m all over Beijing Air! Cool project idea!
I understand that there are plenty of studies suggesting the brains of babies and very young children are different from adults, and one such difference involves the ability to learn languages.
I’ve no doubt Khatzumoto is correct that if you work very hard & smart at learning languages you will succeed. But I have no idea what grounds anyone has for confidently linking the way a child learns a language, with how an adult does so.
I don’t want to sound too fatuous but, short bald men quickly realise that sitting in a nappy sucking breasts won’t make them any taller, won’t make their hair grow … it works for babies, sure, but babies don’t work the same way as adults!
The point I’m making isn’t that we should do exactly what a baby does. Giving up all of the advantages we gain over babies thanks to a fully mature brain would be silly. The point I was trying to make was that 1) learning a language isn’t easy for anyone, not even a baby; and 2) unless you’re willing to put in at least a decent fraction of the work that a baby does when he or she is learning, you have no right to expect any real results.
In fact, there is a chapter, called 2.3 Maturation of the Language System, that talks about this, on this website: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/pinker.langacq.html
The “sharp knife” school vs. slightly-dull-yet multi-purpose tool debate continues….
I wish I could be of the former school, but living (mostly) in North America tends to force the more skittish approach. When in China, one really has to drill down.
In fact — although your sphere of metaphor is ample enough — you might consider, as a subsitute for the “sharp knife” metaphor, instead adopting a kind of “drill-bit” approach. That is to say, you are in effect drilling down and ever deeper into layers of a single foreign language, reaching and excavating sediment that may in fact be civilizational. Then, having drilled out a cavern, you can spelunk freely and resonate in the space created. A knife is something functional, but a language truly learned is something that can be inhabited, can be lived in.
Moreover, persistence of the “drill-bit” variety forms a contrast to the multi-language, more ADD, kind of “floating falcon” approach dipping across multiple languages. A falcon has freedom of movement and can be fiercely focused, even predatory, toward the subject at hand, but the prey is constantly changing and nothing gets _built_. Foundations vs. castles in the sky, measured achievements vs. transitory flashes.
As to your original question: How to maximize efficiency in learning more than one language simultaneously? Learn your new foreign language via your old foreign language!
In my case, this means learning French (the new iffy conquest approached adolescently) via Chinese. Fortunately a few trilingual dictionaries are popping up; in 2006 the first French-Chinese-English dictionary was published in Paris (YouFeng chubanshe) and it’s completely delightful. More to the point, it seems to connect the brain circuits more effeciently. This is the kind of thing that children have a harder time doing (yes, because the concepts also need to be learned foremost) and that adults are champs at (with apologies for my dangling preposition and excess parentheses).
I am still trying to figure out ways to process the whole French-Chinese thing, and, in so doing, share my process with others who might be on a similar journey. Probably some kind of slowly-developing online glossary could result, or a podcast, or something like that. In learning a new language, it seems that anything that is purely bilingual is wasting an opportunity to fasten things together. It’s all language, as you say. Lately on my blog I’ve been translating French articles about China into English. Maybe I should be translating those articles into Chinese, or rendering my boy MC Hotdog into French instead? That’s hard….
Maybe you could write about that sometime, the whole “backwards-forwards” thing! Like, as a native Minnesotan, why do I feel so much more comfortable translating anything into American English as opposed to into Chinese or French? Why can’t I start writing in English with my French keyboard settings? Composing, thinking, making mega-mistakes in the new tongue seems to be a vital step upon which not enough external emphasis is placed. In his 1980s mega-hit book “Learning from Chaos,” the author (some corporate guru who is really writing about automobile companies, but what the hell) argues that “we need to learn to fail more, and fail faster.” Failure is a measurement of effort, and though multiple failures we can get to success and in the meantime engage in rampant experimentation which is necessary to get anywhere worthy.
You might even argue that recording technology (the ability to constantly plug in to escape Anglophonia or whatever) gives us the opportunity to reconnect with a kind of positively infantile (e.g., absorptive) mentality. Making recordings for yourself might be the best trick of all.
And back to the main point — Although I still can’t get my head around German as my first “real” foreign language immersion, it’s now helpful to relearn it via French. (Who could resist comparison between “freischwebende Intelligenz” and “intelligence que flottant libre”; or between Hamlet Act I “The king is dead, long live the King!” and the Chinese rendering “Guowang wansui!”?)
My apologies for the lengthy comment and for not coming sooner to your blog as a participant. I very much enjoy your work; thanks for the quality post and the quality thoughts. I also appreciate your linking to your prior posts, particularly the “Creating a Massive Listening Environment” essay; for relatively newer readers such as myself, it’s good to see how your thinking continues to develop (or unravel in helpful ways) around these issues.
Thanks for the link, rm. I agree it’s important to maintain a rational perspective, regardless of the advantages that come with zeal.
This was very interesting and I totally agree with you. I think you are right that a baby has to put an enormous amount of effort into learning a language; it is not easy for them. I think it ’sort of’ is easier for a baby to learn a language because they have nothing else to do, no responsibilities etc. But then as you point out, we adults also have our perks like a fully mature brain and concept of the world. As you say, if an adult puts in anywhere near the amount of effort into learning that a baby does, they will get results. It does seem rare for adult learners to aquire a native accent in their chosen foreign language. However, I don’t think even this is impossible with enough effort and motivation.
Good post.
I know an Indian woman that learned English as a second language. They learn British English there, so she had a very strong British accent. When she moved to the US, she specifically worked on an American accent. When I first met her, I thought English was her first language, and that she had always lived in the US… Her accent is absolutely indistinguishable from a generic US accent. She can switch back to British and Indian at will.
So yes, it’s absolutely possible to pick up a native accent if you try.