Before Covid I got my German B1 certificate. I was diligently going to German-speaking meetup twice a week.
One of the meetups had a bunch of googlers in it regularly. One of them was a loud gregarious Italian from the north. He was telling me a story about cleaning fish and chopping their heads off with a machete and how he cut the end of his finger off and had it reattached. He seemed nice but a little inept and lacking caution.
Covid was starting. In the newspapers it was reported that Zurich had its first case of Covid. They were cautious to not say who it was - no clues at all in the paper. But a friend at Google forwarded me an internal email that said no one at Google had it yet other than someone in the Zurich office who had just been in northern Italy.
I stopped going to the meetups. I really should start again but not sure what's going to happen next.
(this is not a comment on you, or anyone, rather rant, or a comment on myself)
> but not sure what's going to happen next.
You don't know that.
I'd suggest start doing it ASAP. I lost so many previous years of my 30s due to COVID and the avalanche of fear and anxiety and isolation that came with it. A breakup that happened literally days before the first lockdown didn't help. But then I put myself in a shell and kept increasing the size of that shell. Not just personally, but professionally as well. Today it feels like I just transitioned into my very late 30s from my early 30s. Everything in between - these 5-6 years - almost completely lost.
You know, what will be the worst thing? That nothing happened and you stayed closed - like I have been so far. I am myself trying struggling, often I don't see any point in all this effort, but still…
There's something that happened to some people with this virus and around this virus. It's not even the DNA/internal changes. It's how to world suddenly shifted around all of us and some people just changed in a way that later they couldn't make any sense of it. Some people's age band shifted drastically and it felt like, and yeah it sounds silly, that I should be refunded those years. I didn't spend them, they just stayed where they were but everything else and everyone else changed. I am not sure PC is going through that but it's not merely the fear of the virus (at least in my case that's zero). No wonder a lot of introverts thrived in the pandemic and a whole lot of them turned their lives around for the better :)
That's not how viruses work. You're not magically immune to flu season just because you've gotten the flu (or flu vaccines) in past years. It's ALWAYS important to keep up to date on your booster vaccines for covid. Even getting one or multiple strains at home won't necessarily help when you travel either.
It actually is how the human immune system works, and in particular, there’s a huge amount of evidence that humoral immunity is protective and long lasting for Covid. Worrying about this is roughly the same degree of reasonable as worrying about getting any of the other common coronaviruses that circulate.
I know you’re not going to accept this, but there is quite literally no good evidence that boosters for Covid do anything for otherwise healthy people who have already been infected.
Regardless, the point is, if you won’t go to a language meetup because you’re worried about this, you’re likely doing far more damage to yourself from social isolation and anxiety than the virus would ever do to you. It’s time to live your life.
> there is quite literally no good evidence that boosters for Covid do anything for otherwise healthy people who have already been infected
Before I dive back into the literature, as you claim to be stating this in good faith... is the "good" load-bearing here? Relentlessly attacking methodology is an easy way to make this kind of general claim.
Also, are you talking narrowly about a group of people that has had COVID but never had a prior COVID vaccination? (In which case is it still a "booster"?) Or is a proper steelman of your position that anyone that has had COVID, regardless of prior vaccinations exposure, does not benefit from additional vaccination in any meaningful sense?
I think vaccinations and boosters reduced duration of illness when I got covid for the first time last year. I have no way to know though.
I think it's weird to advocate skipping shots (not explicitly, but implied) because "everyone's already been infected several times". Best to just get them even if you've been infected and then you don't have to care if they help or not. As opposed to not having gotten them if it comes out that they do help in any way.
Also that was the only time I've ever gotten sick from covid. I guess that according to you, I must've been asymptomatic several more times.
This is wildly off topic, but again, since you didn’t read it: there is no good evidence that the shots help you if you’ve already been infected. Not mortality, not symptoms, not transmission, nothing.
Get the shot if it makes you feel less anxious. It’s probably not helping you, but it’s not hurting you either.
I read your entire comment. I finished my reply before you made a couple of your latest edits, but I read those too and they don't change my answers. I feel like the assumption of bad faith here makes further debate fruitless.
In fact my second paragraph was directly addressing the claim that they don't help, so it's surprising you would so confidently assert I didn't read that part at all.
A second language, almost from the start, will also open up a whole second world for you.
When I go to somewhere that speaks Spanish the whole place “jumps into 3D” for me. I can understand what people at the table next to me are complaining or laughing about, I can make small talk with people, I don’t have to follow the “avocado toast” trail that the non-native speakers sort of get jammed into because they struggle off of it. It is a much more human experience when you understand the language.
At home, I can watch Spanish movies as well, and listen to music artists I probably might never have heard about like C. Tangana and Rosalia otherwise. It has doubled my cultural landscape for me.
After reading the article, I wonder if this isn’t a key secondary benefit to learning the language itself. It gives you a larger variety of things to enjoy in your life.
You get it, friend. It's unfortunate that so few others do as well. There's many expats where I live who have, at best, a completely rudimentary level of Spanish. It is both sad and disgraceful. I prefer talking to locals.
I've been getting into Latin music in the past year and absolutely love it. Mostly "classics" though - eg Juan Gabriel en Bellas Artes is sublime - I'm not a fan of most new stuff (though I am sure there's plenty of excellent new stuff, but it's hard to come across when reggaeton and narcocorridos are so popular). Will check out c tangana and Rosalía!
Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best.
If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.
For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.
Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2.
> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.
As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
I have learned Czech for a year before moving to Czechia (self-learning) then 4 years doing classes.
When I arrived at my first class, I was a bit lost even thought I had 1 year of "experience". I did progress quite fast the two first years though because I had a bit of vocabulary under my belt, but I had to re-learn all the grammar/declinaison rules.
My advice to you would be: if you can afford, take classes for the language you want to learn, at least for the first year.
Also forget about the quick learning tools like Duolingo and such. It makes you feel like you're learning, but from my experience, not much is being retained.
I'm now switching to learning Russian and taking classes for 1 or 2 years.
There are two phases. Getting to A2, where you’ve learned all the grammar rules and have a starter vocab… and then everything else, which is basically grinding the hours and convincing your brain that this is worth changing to remember.
Getting to A2 is what Duolingo and similar are great for.
After that you need to grind the hours. When you have limited time, the best ways are swapping things you already do with something in the target language. Switch your audio track on Netflix, make a separate TikTok account where you only follow people in the target language, at some point, switch your phone so that you have to talk to Siri in your target language, and then finally, sign up with a teacher (online or in person) for speaking practice at least once a week. The social pressure of trying to communicate with a real person and not being able to will make your brain take the rest of the exposure seriously enough to start rewiring what needs to be rewired.
I technically started before 30 but I only really got serious in learning my wife's mother tongue post-30. I'm not super diligent about it, but try to speak at least some with her (and our children) every day, and have for the last few years. We attend church in the target language too, though the group of local speakers is pretty small (though not nonexistent). We also watch every other "family movie night" movie in the language.
We just got back from a trip to visit that side of the family and it was a really gratifying trip -- the first time I'd felt totally confident wandering off on my own without some trusted family or friend to interpret for me. I'm definitely not fluent, but with some patience on the other side of the conversation I can get by.
That said, I find it all fun. I think that's the key. If I were doing this all for some abstract eventual benefit like my brain health at 60-something, I would never make progress. As it is, I find the process of learning new vocabulary quite fun (grammar less so, but there is only so much to learn) and there are clear benefits to having effectively a secret family language when in the US, and being able to navigate conversations with in-laws, church friends, and so on.
Language learning is, to me, effectively a cheap hobby that is also marginally useful somewhat often.
I've learned some basics to four or so and a few writing systems post-30's and will keep going. Other two learned in school. The joy and motivation is night and day better when you're not in school IMO.
But since that's not really data, I'll offer that I'm adjacent to a workplace where people come and go from around the world. Some may stay a few years, some may stay longer. Several adults have learned this massively obscure and quite hostile language (Finnish) while staying here even though they mostly get along with their work in English. I'd say there's no hard constraints stopping most people.
And it's not like you can exactly fail a language. If you give up, you might stagnate at whatever level you've reached. Maybe you'll even forget some things. But you always have the opportunity to learn more and practice. Recall practice doesn't even require any equipment or opportunity other than a quiet moment: Just form some sentences in your mind. See if you can express an idea. Maybe check and look up some hints afterwards. I find that's a good way to start a snowball rolling and recall is the most important tool for pushing the brain.
You probably need to pair it with something you like. For example, I'm interested in food history and also home food in general, so I made a python script and made a frequency list using a few cooking ebooks in that language. After that I made sentences with most interesting/useful words. Now, before reading any book in a foreign language, I use that script, and make sentences with 10-20 words that I never used in sentences before. All the sentences are saved in Anki, where I have now around 7000 german sentences, 3000 in spanish. I also watch youtube videos with closed caption.
The only thing this not taught me was speaking with people.
It gets very hard after childhood. This kid I know has learnt russian, chinese, arabic, spanish, hindi, apart from english and his mother tongue tamil. All with dedicated native teachers and zoom classes, where he actually speaks to a bunch of people in that language conversationally. Its not like he puts a shit ton of effort, he barely takes these things seriously. It just is that easy to learn languages when you're really young.
It’s time and commitment for sure. On the mental side - 30s is still young. Most US academics and doctors are barely out of grad school at 30 and their careers (which involve continued learning) are just starting.
Approach it differently as a salaried adult. You can pay for better tuition on your own schedule.
But you can find time. I listen to Michel Thomas or other courses while I’m walking to work. Put on headphones and ignore other people, they aren’t listening to you anyway. Other things like flash cards you can do any time you’ve got 10-15 mins.
* memorizing vocabulary and practicing pronunciation with Anki
* private lessons
* grammar book with exercises
* podcasts
* news
* some books.
Worked very well. Had a good starting point when I arrived in Germany, and the immersion then helped a lot (but I stopped using Anki due to laziness). I found this page very useful: https://puroh.it/learning-german-a1-to-c2/
I learned Spanish in my 30s, but was immersed by living in a Spanish speaking country. Though, I've spent a lot of that time alone, so my level is not where it could/should be. But I can talk confidently with anyone about almost anything.
But I really don't think there's any mental hurdle to learning a language at any age. In fact, I think it is EASIER to learn a language as an adult (as opposed to child) because you understand language in general, and so many other concepts.
There are two reasons that adults have trouble learning a language:
1. time. Adults have endless responsibilities, which make it difficult to dedicate the time required to learn.
2. Lack of humility. Not being able to communicate in even the most basic of terms can be humiliating, if you lack humility - as most adults do. You need to be able to completely put aside your pride, and just be eager to make mistakes endlessly.
There's a lot of language schools here - both to learn Spanish and English - and I've met so many people who are "trying" to learn a language and refuse to practice out of fear of making a mistake. At no point have I ever felt even the slightest bit self-conscious about my Spanish, and I simply just try to communicate as fluidly as I am able, even while knowing I am making mistakes. When I learn I've been making some mistake for sometimes years, I simply laugh.
Similarly, there's plenty of locals (and people around the world) who have learned English to a reasonably high degree. So it is clearly possible. Though, even amongst them it often find that there's a genuine hesitancy to talk to me, a native English speaker. Their motivation was simply for a higher paying job, and evidently they swallow their pride for $ and pain.
And also just to focus on the basics. I recommend people don't even worry about verb conjugation when starting. Just speak in infinitive exclusively.
I eat bread. Tomorrow/yesterday he eat bread.
People will understand 99% of the time. Just focus on getting vocabulary, confidence and fluidity. Add verb tenses in due course. Again, it takes humility to speak in completely broken sentences, like a little child. But that's the only way.
the conjugation thing is really interesting and you're right you should just plow through with mistakes, even knowingly.
One thing you notice in kids in their native language is they get the trickier/irregular parts of grammar wrong all the time and repeatedly, as in they are corrected but just carry on making the mistake, I guess until one day finally the right pattern gets learned through sheer brute force of repetition. In the meantime, they're perfectly well understood by everyone anyway.
Obviously as an adult you can somewhat shortcut this because of better understanding of grammar and knowing how to learn, and being quicker to absorb and make the changes, but regardless I think the basic premise still applies - you learn the right way over time just by doing it over and over and over until you can't not remember it is the right way.
And, to be honest, if the wrong way is understood, how practically wrong really is it? (you will always always have tells you are not a native speaker no matter what, some of these can even be charming, I don't know if it should even be a goal to get this to zero at all).
Yes, you've understood me perfectly. Whether this works for anyone else, I don't know. But it made perfect sense for me to learn Spanish.
I'm sure there's specific contexts in which proficiency is important, but I think aiming for fluency - literally being able to communicate fluidly, without humming and hawing, - should be the goal for most people. You can do that with a very poor degree of grammar. Moreover, this probably gets you to proficiency faster anyway.
A friend learnt French and piano in her mid 30s and later. Then she went lazy as potato and pretty much is horrible at both. Never practised. Now she is in late 40s and rather spends time scrolling Twitter (yup!), Instagram, and Youtube or overworking. So, I seriously doubt the true brain capacity is the problem in 30s or later. She also had somewhat of a life in her 30s and then she never made an effort to keep having that life (something I am inching towards in my late 30s now; also in the geography we both are this is inherently difficult - no, it's not an excuse) and that also contributed to losing a lot of her personality, or that's how she puts it. So I think to use the brain the brain needs to be primed and well oiled et cetera.
I am thinking of picking up a musical instrument. But I am afraid that I will miserably. That I may be the oldest person in the class. It's not a country for solo old men and women, even in their late 30s.
While classes and band etc opportunities vary wildly depending on where you are, there's really nothing stopping you from picking up an instrument if you can afford one and have the time/space/health etc. Actually, there's a ton of reasons learning as an adult is much easier. And it's usually not even necessary to join any classes if you can find enough information, but some parts of some instruments will definitely be hard to "get" without a great instructor.
The failure is something that comes with the territory. It's possible to find balance and teachers and material and methods that have lots of reward and not that much failure, but learning generally means doing things badly and then figuring out how to do things better.
Thank you. Is there a framework or some methodology about finding the right instrument for one? Or let the instrument find you? How does it work? The only thing I get attracted to are the sound of it and when I name my choices everyone scares me that those are one of the toughest.
I've done that with Russian, got around level B2 so far. But I had quite a bit of experience with language learning before that (mainly easy-ish languages: Spanish, Portuguese, German, etc).
Russian is tough nut to crack, and it does require above average dedication. As a matter of fact, I'm currently in Kyrgyzstan for a few weeks to get some immersion and hopefully break out of the level I'm currently in.
You'll need loads of time, but for some languages you really do need to find grammar interesting.
I have learned all of my Spanish since I turned 30?
If you’re immersed and just use anki to build out your vocab it isn’t that hard. Tbh, it’s kind of easier than when I was learning languages as a teen.
I did with what I consider a success. Basically, duolingo and then some beginner podcasts and then netflix with language reactor. I do understand pretty well, did not do much to speak - I dod not cared.
The key in our age is to NOT listen to pointifications about how you need to spend hours a day, are lazy if you dont grind flashcards or grammar.
My rule was "doing something every day 5 min counts" and focusing on what I actually liked. That way, it was not a burden. Maybe took longer, but I dont care.
Learning over Zoom with a real person using a service like Fiverr or something was a great way for my wife and I to start learning Indonesian.
Learning sign language was lots of fun in VRC with actual people. I'm actually going to visit a friend I made doing this, in his country, this weekend.
you need serious motivation to learn a new language. First ask yourself if you have a really good reason otherwise you will give up. I, for example learned english because I needed for work. But I wouldn't dive into learning another language unless I'm going to engage with it in some form every day
I'd kind of argue against that. Jump right in! Just don't set yourself up for expensive or humiliating failures by putting stakes on your learning. Learn you some basics and see where that goes. If you like the language, you can keep digging.
If you have a genuine need for a language, you'll need to worry about success. If you just want to learn, there's nothing stopping you other than time and effort and saying no.
in order to become really proficient in a language you have to spend 1000s of hours. if you're doing it just as a hobby that's fine but if you don't have a clear goal you're likely not going to advance much. For a hobby that might be fine but I think most people want to get to at least B2 in another language since they're spending so much time in it. I do agree learning should be fun watching content you like in your language for example but you also have to take it seriously to persevere
All studies point that there is no easier to learn a language in your 30s than in your teens. Probably easier since you have better mental tools for study.
Of course time constraints can be worse (or better)
1. I learned enough vocabulary in a very short time to be able to more or less be able to read with the assistance of a dictionary on an e-book where you can click on a word. I spent ~2 weekends of Duolingo 8 hours a day, but I'd use flashcards in the future instead of that. It sounds a bit crazy in hindsight, but I feel like it was easier to stay strongly motivated for a short period of time than drizzling the words over a period of time. All other attempts where I did not do this, failed.
The limit of learning words for me is ~50-200 words per hour if using flashcards. It depends a lot on the language and how similar it is to the languages one already knows. 200, if it is similar to my native language, ~50, if I don't know anything similar at all. I'm also almost guaranteed to forget 80% of the words, if I don't use them in the next day or two, but its possible to cram a lot of them very fast and then move on to stage 2 to use them.
Important catch (for me at least), is that I can remember nouns far more easily than verbs or other more abstract/structural words. Those absolutely need to be in a sentence when learning. There's pretty much no point for me in trying to cram them on their own. I just cannot remember them in isolation at all and also which words they are used with differ per language anyway. Eg "to put" won't necessarily be used for all nouns in a different language even though a dictionary might say that's what it means. The good side is that knowing the nouns helps a lot in deciphering.
2. After the initial cramming I read a couple of short/simple books over some months in the evenings before sleep. I tried to listen to videos & to talk to some people a bit now and then, but it was extremely hard and boring as I understood too little. In hindsight I should have listened more to videos, but the good ones are surprisingly hard to find, if you don't live in the country that already speaks the language one is learning.
3. I tried several options for getting conversational after that. First a private teacher who knew the language well, but was not experienced enough (a university student) to teach somebody who tends to use weird methods for learning. She kept getting confused about why I understand complex words that were basically the same in English, Spanish and other European languages, but why I struggled with the basics when talking at the same time.
I also tried some learning groups. They were fine, but it's very difficult to find people at the same level after starting to learn a language and not following a preset path. I was felt either far ahead and far behind at the same time.
Eventually I found a native speaking private teacher who had years of experience. He could make the classes interesting and after ~1.5-2 years of talking with him 1-2 times per week for an hour about pretty much anything, I can hold a conversation and handle things in general. I still kept learning vocabulary in parallel and I'm not quite fluent as I don't use the language daily, but I'm not too far off either. Overall it took maybe 2-3 years, because I wasn't very consistent at the beginning.
If I were to change anything, it's getting the private teacher way sooner, skipping the learning groups entirely and using flash cards + asking for verbs/structural words as parts of sentences from either the private teacher or finding some other resource for it to start with. Using AI is possible too I guess for that purpose, but only with more common languages. Most AIs completely mess up my native language and invent words that don't exist, so I wouldn't trust them much when learning.
Yeah, and this suggests to me that the link isn't causal... If you succeed at learning a language late in life, you clearly have an unusually healthy brain and your act together.
The biggest obstacle to learning a foreign language is that it's so much slower and more frustrating than using your native language, right? Compared to your native-language typing speed, even English typing speed is only half...
So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?
The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less.
As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is).
But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc..
The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media.
It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning.
It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know.
English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.
It’s exceedingly frustrating, and you either get an awful lot of exposure ( say you stop reading in English , only read in Norwegian and read 10k pages a year ) or you grind and learn word lists.
The good news is that word lists are now much easier to learn thanks to SRS systems.
My speaking only got better after speaking a lot with native speakers, just, a lot. And focusing hard on vowel sounds. In Norwegian specifically those kill a lot of understanding. If you can't immerse by living there, I really liked 1:1 online interactions. I paid for an italki instructor my first year here.
My writing is still my weakest point. I'm fine with spell check and predictive text on my phone, but my spelling is atrocious without it. That could be improved with spelling practice like we did as kids in our native language, but I just haven't put in the time, due to how common spell check is.
Basically just time and effort! Sorry, I know it's not a nice answer. It's just a really hard thing to do, and you have to keep doing it, and a lot of people minimize the effort. Maybe it's easier for some but not most of us.
I think ultimately the highest barrier is looking stupid. I try not to care, like how kids do not and simply try. People underestimate you all the time when you do not speak a language, or do it badly.
You put yourself in a situation where nobody understands you in your native language, nothing helpful for your daily life is written in your native language, and you must constantly try to comprehend and produce the target language if you want to accomplish even basic tasks.
If you can't up and move, then studying a language with a lot of cultural export helps a bit, if you can get into the habit of switching all of your media consumption to the target language. It's not the same, though.
Yes. And with the effort in learning. Schools kind of do try to teach that by making people face confusion and failed recall and repeated effort. What they often fail to do is demonstrate how confusion is exactly the mechanism that leads to learning and how to make that not be frustrating or overly exhausting or depressing.
The work involved in learning so often doesn't feel rewarding. Only success and familiarity feel like progress when they, funnily enough, generally indicate non-engagement and no learning.
I watch and read different things. I like different things in foreign language - stuff that is simple or kind of cringy in my own. So I rarely ends up comparing it.
Second, I rewatch things I liked a lot. Watching them dubbed with more need to rewind makes me notice different stuff about series - how they are composed. So it is a bonus.
I am trilingual. All of my languages belong to different language groups; I regularly read and write in both directions. I use all of the three languages every day. I can also bulldoze my way through a text in a fourth language given a dictionary and a reference for its grammar. I can read the alphabet of a fifth language (mostly w/o understanding the sounds that I make, but I am told that I get it right).
I got there 15 years ago. I seem to be unable to learn anything new since.
Good point about the different language groups. I wonder if there has been any research on measuring the scale of the effect by including some sort of distance metric between the languages. Let's imagine your primary language is Spanish: What's the gain if you learn Italian (Romance language) vs German (non-Romance Indo-European) vs Hungarian (non-Indo European same alphabet) vs Japanese (non-Indo European different alphabet)?
I find that I am having a different personality in each (3) languages I speak, especially in context in a different country. When I switch back to my original language to speak to someone in said country my habits I do in my original country come back for the part and then I revert back. Feels a bit schizophrenic, but I think it is normal for most people. My child is showing similar patterns.
To me this is proof that learning a language touches a lot of parts in our brain, not just affect the parts about learning
I don't think it's just language. I remember having this happen just by having separate groups of friends. You end up in a situation where the two friend groups meet and suddenly realise that you are two different personalities and that you don't know how to act.
There are a lot of things you can do to make yourself healthier (both physically and mentally) if you have an organized life and you allot time for enriching activity, whether that be recreation or learning a language or learning a new instrument. The key is to be stable enough in your life where you can comfortably alott that time.
For me personally, this kind of stability is always out of reach as I'm always frantically trying to reach the next rung in the career ladder.
Note that languages can alternatively also be conlangs (constructed languages). They are in fact a lot more interesting and systematic than traditional human languages. Granted, you'll find no real-life people who verbally speak the conlang outside of arranged group calls within online communities.
Yeah, if your goal is brain health, you're better off spending the time exercising, by a mile. But learning another language may be more enjoyable and certainly has social benefits, so I can understand people choosing it.
You also get to learn another culture which to some extent prevents you from becoming an a.hole. Lack of foreign language instruction in k-12 education in the USA might be a little correlated with this...
I don't think it's really possible to learn a new language unless you have to. Sure, you can learn some words and grammar from books and games like Duolingo, but you'll never really learn the language if you don't use it, and you'll only use it if you have to. This is why it's hard for English natives to learn another language: too many people speak our language already. And now people won't be learning computer languages any more either.
English is my native language too. Eventually they stop assuming haha.
You can pay for an online tutor which I found got me rather far. After like A2 they wont speak English with you anymore (if you ask em too).
You do not need to speak to progress, you can get really, really, really far without speaking much, if at all. You'll need to eventually speak of course to get through things like proper pronunciation and just general confidence, but most of my progress came from watching tv, anime, listening to audio books and reading books in the target language (German). I found Audio books by far got me the furthest just due to being able to listen to them on my commute or during sport rather easily but they were limiting in German due to their funny Präteritum case.
It's slow and frustrating but things like kindle and lang reactor help a lot. I am only at a point where I feel good about my languages skills after 4 years (2 of which I spent mucking about, and the 3rd was where I got serious).
And if it's low stakes, you can lie and say "no english" which works. But I've only done this a few times and felt kinda icky about doing it.
All of the the research I have seen on this topic have been observational retrospective studies, which are worthless and should be ignored. The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language (let alone a third or more) are so large that they cannot be overcome without a randomized control. This stuff is churnalism, right up there with "does coffee make you live longer?" [1].
But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy.
I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring.
[1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.
I am an actual linguist, in a subfield that requires me to continually learn new languages, and there are no social benefits. I definitely don't get out there. Once one is a man over the age of 40 or so, local people are rarely willing to talk to you at any length, you are not interesting any more (in fact, in some cultures, local people will have heightened suspicion of you). Language learning becomes more a passive endeavour with few opportunities for real-world speaking.
This is either a problem with you, or a problem with the specific place you live in.
I talk to people every day in my 2nd language. They are generally delighted to do so.
Yes, some people are suspicious of me, depending on the context. But even then I can generally disarm it with body language etc, because I'm a skilled and empathetic human.
Your post history suggests your sole personal experience is Spanish. Congratulations, you lucked out learning the language of speakers more likely to be friendly and sociable than not (though there are corners of Latin America colder than others). But that experience will not be representative of many other languages spoken by other peoples.
You made a blanket statement about being a man over 40 makes it impossible to converse with people. I refuted that. Would you like to revise it to say "I happen to be in a place(s) where people are just generally anti-social, so that makes it difficult to practice a language"?
Since my late teens, I have spent ~6 months a year traveling the world, and language learning has been a big part of that. And now I am in my 40s having seen how, in most regions, interest from locals in intensive conversation steadily diminished as I approached middle age. So, my experience has been comprehensive enough to make such a blanket statement.
What? Come on. I’m on that demographic and have zero issues talking to people out in the world. If you believe this then certainly it’s true. Otherwise, just go meet and interact with people normally.
And it is only getting easier to learn a language now too. What FINALLY got me over the hump with Spanish was YouTube and discovering resources like Dreaming Spanish (leveled content for comprehensive input that probably exist in most major languages). Content that was fun and at my level.
Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.
I logged in just to second your recommendation. If you want to learn Spanish (or or French) 'Dreaming Spanish' is just excellent.
In addition it seems to be a good way to get rid of short video addiction. I don't use instagram or tiktok myself, but have a friend who did. Now she watches Dreaming Spanish instead. She is eight month in. Her husband just told me the whole family was flabbergasted when they where in Spain this summer and she answered in Spanish to a waiter in a restaurant.
My 10 year old daughter uses it, too. She likes to watch the Let's play videos and has watched the Stardew Valley series twice. So thats 66 hours x 2 = 130 hours watching Spanish videos. Her vocabulary is now a bit strange for a beginner, though. We recently walked through a garden and she was pointing out la regadera, la semilla, plantar algo.
I just logged in just to recommend Dreaming Spanish (and now Dreaming French apparently). It's absolutely the right way to learn a language IMO. If anyone reading this is lost on what resource to look for to learn Spanish or French, I urge you to try it. (Of course I have no interest here except see them succeed on this brilliant idea).
There are so many tools now that didn't exist even when I started. I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example. Or in the case of Japanese, being able to take a picture of text, and select the kanji for lookup. Life. Changing.
I'm also old enough to remember when getting listening materials required going to the library for cassette tapes. Today, you can talk with a wide selection of native speakers, listen to essentially infinite audio and video content, and immerse yourself in a culture halfway around the world for the price of an internet connection.
> I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example.
I learned English with no Internet or smartphones, just school teachers, coursebooks and physical dictionaries. I wrote down new words from the dictionary into my lined notebook with a pen, solved the exercises from the book, translated texts by looking up words in the dictionary, searching for the page and the entry alphabetically. The coursebook came with an audio cassette. It was very much possible, but of course there are much more tools today. Spaced repetition software like Anki for vocabulary learning is a huge improvement I think.
Learning another language is difficult, but never occured to me to think it would be somehow impossible to anyone. It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position as it is the default international language. World is getting smaller and people coming from smaller languages usually also learn the local international language as well. If you are born to family speaking estonian today you probably pick up also english or otherwise you spend your life surfing only estonian websites. It requires no special talent (although some people are fast at picking up new languages)
I don’t know where you’re from, but if you’re European (it sounds like it?), you probably take for granted the head start you get by knowing multiple languages from childhood. Every European I meet has a comfort with language learning that I can only approximate with great effort.
I agree with you about the disadvantage of being a native English speaker, but mostly I think the real disadvantage is being an American, and never having a reason to learn another language (though that has changed in my lifetime with Spanish, and possibly Mandarin).
In any case, a lot of academic researchers claim that it’s impossible to learn a language to a native level as an adult, which may be true, but that claim has been twisted into “impossible to learn a second language” by a lot of others.
This is phrased ambiguously, but most Europeans only start learning foreign languages in school, so around age 6 or later. By that time you're past the "critical window" and you'll almost surely have a very recognizable accent and learning the language is very effortful and takes many years. It's still probably easier to learn when you're 7 than when you're 40, but it's not even close to language acquisition as a toddler.
You're also forgetting that school-based language instruction is not so great at all. Imagine a class of 30 students having a 45 minute English class twice a week, by a non-native teacher with a heavy accent. It's not a lot of learning, very little speaking, and most kids unsurprisingly don't learn to speak well from that. It's mostly about memorizing grammar tables and vocabulary for tests.
You need much more intensive paid courses or private instruction if you really want to be good at it, even as a teenager. Not strictly necessary but learning purely from public school is usually not as effective as you seem to think. Or you have to be an outlier in diligence and do a LOT of homework practice on your own, translating, reading, writing, listening to media etc. Video games can be a great motivator but it also gives a very lopsided skillset and won't easily get you to pass a B2 or C1 exam.
And yes, it's true. For Americans learning a foreign language is an exotic hobby or a requirement of some very rare foreign-associated jobs. For people whose native language isn't English, learning English is just part of the basics for professional work. It's around the same level in basicness as getting an undergrad degree. Certainly not something that every single person does, and there are jobs you can do without it, but white collar, professional knowledge work will require it.
In most European countries you also have to learn a second foreign language at school at some point, though not as many years as the first foreign language. This one is usually the language of a big nearby European country, so German, French, Italian or Spanish are popular. But just as it is for Americans, learning this second, non-English foreign language is much less motivating once you know English. Though economic motivations do exist, for example to learn German, especially when you live close to the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) countries and there are many economic ties.
I'm not European, so all I can do is shrug. Obviously there are tons of people in Europe and they're not all identical, but my observation is that compared to me, they're more comfortable with the inherent ambiguity of not being able to understand everything in a language, and still being able to function in that language.
I think Europeans, in general, are much more comfortable with the idea of just making due with whatever language is available, at whatever level, where as for Americans, speaking a foreign language is much more of an event, with more ego tied into it. The fear of failure is amplified, and that fear is a huge reason that more people don't try to learn.
Maybe I'm just seeing a self-selected group of Europeans who are already multi-lingual, and it's not childhood exposure at all, but my theory is that the normality of language learning in Europe is a causative factor.
> Maybe I'm just seeing a self-selected group of Europeans
This. You chat much less with people who are too shy to chat in English. Believe me, many Europeans don't like to speak foreign languages because they think they will seem stupid. It's not some deep difference between Americans and Europeans. The major difference is simply that there is much more pressure and incentive involved when your native language is not English.
> It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position
Personally I suspect English has some great advantages. The main disadvantage is defaulting to superiority.
The natural disconnect between written and spoken English is tremendously helpful. Well educated English encourages copying sounds - pronouncing foreign names and places correctly. This is a huge leg up compared against some other cultures. Think sports stars having their foreign names pronounced correctly. People often know how to try and say Paris or Barcelona correctly. We naturally know that how something is spoken trumps how it is written.
English speakers often have the ability to hear sounds because there's so many wildly different English accents. Especially vowels (we natively use a wide range of vowel sounds). There are sounds English speakers struggle to hear, but I think we have an advantage over some other languages.
If you're the type of person that attempts to mimic accents, then you've often learnt how to say a huge range of vowels and consonants. And how to stretch them (Strine, some US accents) or shorten them.
Maybe if you are near the native speaking country, or potentially if there are significant numbers of immigrants.
But knowing Spanish adds nothing social within New Zealand.
I had a Spanish girlfriend when 30, which made learning Spanish rather incentivised, and I embedded overseas for many months to learn conversational Spanish.
However I rarely hang out with South American immigrants in New Zealand, and those I have met (say at the pub) often prefer to stick with English.
Knowing Spanish is fantastic when travelling - the months spent learning have led to way more enjoyment when subsequently travelling to South America or visiting friends in Spain. Spanish also helps a little in France, Italy, Portugal and Brazil.
I intend to spend a few months in South Korea so maybe I'll try and learn Korean (without a girlfriend). However I'm now older so I suspect it will be much much harder.
Confounding to learning language, on top of one's base ability to do do in general, are the teaching methods not meshing at all with the individual. For me, rote memorization of anything is nearly impossible, doubly so if the thing to be memorized has no immediate utility. "Conversational" language learning and similar that give you a bunch of vocabulary and bring in the grammar later are why I failed Spanish 1 three times. I need the grammar first, then words with etymology. It also helps to not fight with phonetic collisions between different languages using their own bastardization of Latin script, which is why I was far more easily able to meet my college language requirement by teaching myself classical Greek and translating the things I thought were interesting.
This is fascinating to me, because I am adamant that learning grammar (and especially verb conjugation) is completely counter productive when starting to learn a language. Especially with Spanish, where every tense and person has different terminations.
I literally just ignored conjugation and spoke in infinitive for a while.
Yo comer pan. Tu comer pan. Ayer/mañana el comer pan. Etc...
Likewise not worrying about gender, articles etc. If you use the wrong el/la/lo/les/whatever, it almost never matters, whatsoever.
Likewise if you put words in the wrong order.
Everyone understands it all.
So, just focus on building vocab, fluidity and confidence. The tenses come in time.
I do agree, though, that etymology - or at least noticing similarities between languages - can be very useful. Spanish and English speakers already know thousands of words in each language just with some basic rules. -al is the same (metal). -tion becomes -cion (conversation, conversación). Etc...
I suspect that your struggles was that you were being evaluated on the wrong things...
I'd be curious to hear your experience and what you think of what I've said.
I think you're probably right where most people are concerned, but none of that held for me in my various attempts. I think I should amend a couple of the points I raised, though:
I wrote etymology when I meant morphology. Etymology is certainly useful to me and helps vocabulary stick, but I find morphology to be a useful building block that I need on the front-end of learning vocabulary. No curriculum I've found includes it.
Phonetic collisions were particularly difficult for me, as my early education intrinsically bound phonetics to the English alphabet in my mind, which made it very difficult for my memory to latch onto new associations that share Latin script. I think phonics are crucial, but I wish there was a good way to better steer the sound associations to morphemes instead of individual characters, so as to better make room for more than the one language you're trying to learn.
New point: I had already done some programming by the time I tried learning another language. My thought processes had already reshaped into a sort of compiler for all my language processing. The necessary precision of code extended into how I wrote, and that overinflated the importance of grammar into something I just couldn't see past before getting to the words themselves. I wanted the words that were useful to sentence structure ahead of all others so I could do something useful with the rest.
I expect this would all be pretty incomprehensible to most people.
probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)
I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin
similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain
>probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)
I mean if it were that similarity made it not useful then it would surely be that you should only learn languages that are significantly different from ones you already know, but that does not seem to be the case from the admittedly not very detailed article.
>I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin
right, but they don't say that.
Maybe it is learning things different to you. But perhaps it is stimulating the parts of the brain that do the most relating of complicated concepts to each other. In which case it is just learning a bunch of words and what they refer to and how to structure these words together to discourse on ideas.
One common thing that is used to keep people from losing abilities in Alzheimer's diagnosis is using complicated skills like knitting, drawing. That is to say practicing complicated skills you already have prevents deterioration, so it seems reasonable to assume learning complicated skills does the same.
In which case it ends up being not very amazing information, as that is what I would naturally assume to be the case.
Before Covid I got my German B1 certificate. I was diligently going to German-speaking meetup twice a week.
One of the meetups had a bunch of googlers in it regularly. One of them was a loud gregarious Italian from the north. He was telling me a story about cleaning fish and chopping their heads off with a machete and how he cut the end of his finger off and had it reattached. He seemed nice but a little inept and lacking caution.
Covid was starting. In the newspapers it was reported that Zurich had its first case of Covid. They were cautious to not say who it was - no clues at all in the paper. But a friend at Google forwarded me an internal email that said no one at Google had it yet other than someone in the Zurich office who had just been in northern Italy.
I stopped going to the meetups. I really should start again but not sure what's going to happen next.
(this is not a comment on you, or anyone, rather rant, or a comment on myself)
> but not sure what's going to happen next.
You don't know that.
I'd suggest start doing it ASAP. I lost so many previous years of my 30s due to COVID and the avalanche of fear and anxiety and isolation that came with it. A breakup that happened literally days before the first lockdown didn't help. But then I put myself in a shell and kept increasing the size of that shell. Not just personally, but professionally as well. Today it feels like I just transitioned into my very late 30s from my early 30s. Everything in between - these 5-6 years - almost completely lost.
You know, what will be the worst thing? That nothing happened and you stayed closed - like I have been so far. I am myself trying struggling, often I don't see any point in all this effort, but still…
Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it’s probably safe to go to a language meetup.
There's something that happened to some people with this virus and around this virus. It's not even the DNA/internal changes. It's how to world suddenly shifted around all of us and some people just changed in a way that later they couldn't make any sense of it. Some people's age band shifted drastically and it felt like, and yeah it sounds silly, that I should be refunded those years. I didn't spend them, they just stayed where they were but everything else and everyone else changed. I am not sure PC is going through that but it's not merely the fear of the virus (at least in my case that's zero). No wonder a lot of introverts thrived in the pandemic and a whole lot of them turned their lives around for the better :)
Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it's probably safe to go to a language meetup.
That's not how viruses work. You're not magically immune to flu season just because you've gotten the flu (or flu vaccines) in past years. It's ALWAYS important to keep up to date on your booster vaccines for covid. Even getting one or multiple strains at home won't necessarily help when you travel either.
It actually is how the human immune system works, and in particular, there’s a huge amount of evidence that humoral immunity is protective and long lasting for Covid. Worrying about this is roughly the same degree of reasonable as worrying about getting any of the other common coronaviruses that circulate.
I know you’re not going to accept this, but there is quite literally no good evidence that boosters for Covid do anything for otherwise healthy people who have already been infected.
Regardless, the point is, if you won’t go to a language meetup because you’re worried about this, you’re likely doing far more damage to yourself from social isolation and anxiety than the virus would ever do to you. It’s time to live your life.
> there is quite literally no good evidence that boosters for Covid do anything for otherwise healthy people who have already been infected
Before I dive back into the literature, as you claim to be stating this in good faith... is the "good" load-bearing here? Relentlessly attacking methodology is an easy way to make this kind of general claim.
Also, are you talking narrowly about a group of people that has had COVID but never had a prior COVID vaccination? (In which case is it still a "booster"?) Or is a proper steelman of your position that anyone that has had COVID, regardless of prior vaccinations exposure, does not benefit from additional vaccination in any meaningful sense?
Is it load-bearing, or is it the seam?
I think vaccinations and boosters reduced duration of illness when I got covid for the first time last year. I have no way to know though.
I think it's weird to advocate skipping shots (not explicitly, but implied) because "everyone's already been infected several times". Best to just get them even if you've been infected and then you don't have to care if they help or not. As opposed to not having gotten them if it comes out that they do help in any way.
Also that was the only time I've ever gotten sick from covid. I guess that according to you, I must've been asymptomatic several more times.
This is wildly off topic, but again, since you didn’t read it: there is no good evidence that the shots help you if you’ve already been infected. Not mortality, not symptoms, not transmission, nothing.
Get the shot if it makes you feel less anxious. It’s probably not helping you, but it’s not hurting you either.
> since you didn’t read it
I read your entire comment. I finished my reply before you made a couple of your latest edits, but I read those too and they don't change my answers. I feel like the assumption of bad faith here makes further debate fruitless.
In fact my second paragraph was directly addressing the claim that they don't help, so it's surprising you would so confidently assert I didn't read that part at all.
There’s nothing in bad faith here. I’m telling you the truth as I know it, based on a wide reading of the literature.
Your second paragraph did not “directly address the claim” - you just restated an opinion that you should do something whether it helps or not.
That’s not how science works, but sure, if you feel that way, it probably doesn’t matter one way oe the other.
My original point was one about social isolation, so I’m really done talking about this now.
It's bad faith to assume someone didn't read your message.
Link your sources then, because I think you're full of shit.
A second language, almost from the start, will also open up a whole second world for you.
When I go to somewhere that speaks Spanish the whole place “jumps into 3D” for me. I can understand what people at the table next to me are complaining or laughing about, I can make small talk with people, I don’t have to follow the “avocado toast” trail that the non-native speakers sort of get jammed into because they struggle off of it. It is a much more human experience when you understand the language.
At home, I can watch Spanish movies as well, and listen to music artists I probably might never have heard about like C. Tangana and Rosalia otherwise. It has doubled my cultural landscape for me.
After reading the article, I wonder if this isn’t a key secondary benefit to learning the language itself. It gives you a larger variety of things to enjoy in your life.
You get it, friend. It's unfortunate that so few others do as well. There's many expats where I live who have, at best, a completely rudimentary level of Spanish. It is both sad and disgraceful. I prefer talking to locals.
I've been getting into Latin music in the past year and absolutely love it. Mostly "classics" though - eg Juan Gabriel en Bellas Artes is sublime - I'm not a fan of most new stuff (though I am sure there's plenty of excellent new stuff, but it's hard to come across when reggaeton and narcocorridos are so popular). Will check out c tangana and Rosalía!
Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best.
If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.
For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.
Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2.
> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.
As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
I have learned Czech for a year before moving to Czechia (self-learning) then 4 years doing classes.
When I arrived at my first class, I was a bit lost even thought I had 1 year of "experience". I did progress quite fast the two first years though because I had a bit of vocabulary under my belt, but I had to re-learn all the grammar/declinaison rules.
My advice to you would be: if you can afford, take classes for the language you want to learn, at least for the first year.
Also forget about the quick learning tools like Duolingo and such. It makes you feel like you're learning, but from my experience, not much is being retained.
I'm now switching to learning Russian and taking classes for 1 or 2 years.
Yep, I learned Spanish, then French.
The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn.
Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.
> The trick is to immerse yourself
> I spent 2 years in Latin America
That is not very accessible to most people.
Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Tons of people work remote from Mexico and Spain.
There are two phases. Getting to A2, where you’ve learned all the grammar rules and have a starter vocab… and then everything else, which is basically grinding the hours and convincing your brain that this is worth changing to remember.
Getting to A2 is what Duolingo and similar are great for.
After that you need to grind the hours. When you have limited time, the best ways are swapping things you already do with something in the target language. Switch your audio track on Netflix, make a separate TikTok account where you only follow people in the target language, at some point, switch your phone so that you have to talk to Siri in your target language, and then finally, sign up with a teacher (online or in person) for speaking practice at least once a week. The social pressure of trying to communicate with a real person and not being able to will make your brain take the rest of the exposure seriously enough to start rewiring what needs to be rewired.
I technically started before 30 but I only really got serious in learning my wife's mother tongue post-30. I'm not super diligent about it, but try to speak at least some with her (and our children) every day, and have for the last few years. We attend church in the target language too, though the group of local speakers is pretty small (though not nonexistent). We also watch every other "family movie night" movie in the language.
We just got back from a trip to visit that side of the family and it was a really gratifying trip -- the first time I'd felt totally confident wandering off on my own without some trusted family or friend to interpret for me. I'm definitely not fluent, but with some patience on the other side of the conversation I can get by.
That said, I find it all fun. I think that's the key. If I were doing this all for some abstract eventual benefit like my brain health at 60-something, I would never make progress. As it is, I find the process of learning new vocabulary quite fun (grammar less so, but there is only so much to learn) and there are clear benefits to having effectively a secret family language when in the US, and being able to navigate conversations with in-laws, church friends, and so on.
Language learning is, to me, effectively a cheap hobby that is also marginally useful somewhat often.
I've learned some basics to four or so and a few writing systems post-30's and will keep going. Other two learned in school. The joy and motivation is night and day better when you're not in school IMO.
But since that's not really data, I'll offer that I'm adjacent to a workplace where people come and go from around the world. Some may stay a few years, some may stay longer. Several adults have learned this massively obscure and quite hostile language (Finnish) while staying here even though they mostly get along with their work in English. I'd say there's no hard constraints stopping most people.
And it's not like you can exactly fail a language. If you give up, you might stagnate at whatever level you've reached. Maybe you'll even forget some things. But you always have the opportunity to learn more and practice. Recall practice doesn't even require any equipment or opportunity other than a quiet moment: Just form some sentences in your mind. See if you can express an idea. Maybe check and look up some hints afterwards. I find that's a good way to start a snowball rolling and recall is the most important tool for pushing the brain.
You probably need to pair it with something you like. For example, I'm interested in food history and also home food in general, so I made a python script and made a frequency list using a few cooking ebooks in that language. After that I made sentences with most interesting/useful words. Now, before reading any book in a foreign language, I use that script, and make sentences with 10-20 words that I never used in sentences before. All the sentences are saved in Anki, where I have now around 7000 german sentences, 3000 in spanish. I also watch youtube videos with closed caption.
The only thing this not taught me was speaking with people.
It gets very hard after childhood. This kid I know has learnt russian, chinese, arabic, spanish, hindi, apart from english and his mother tongue tamil. All with dedicated native teachers and zoom classes, where he actually speaks to a bunch of people in that language conversationally. Its not like he puts a shit ton of effort, he barely takes these things seriously. It just is that easy to learn languages when you're really young.
It’s time and commitment for sure. On the mental side - 30s is still young. Most US academics and doctors are barely out of grad school at 30 and their careers (which involve continued learning) are just starting.
Approach it differently as a salaried adult. You can pay for better tuition on your own schedule.
But you can find time. I listen to Michel Thomas or other courses while I’m walking to work. Put on headphones and ignore other people, they aren’t listening to you anyway. Other things like flash cards you can do any time you’ve got 10-15 mins.
Learned German. A little Duolingo, then
* memorizing vocabulary and practicing pronunciation with Anki
* private lessons
* grammar book with exercises
* podcasts
* news
* some books.
Worked very well. Had a good starting point when I arrived in Germany, and the immersion then helped a lot (but I stopped using Anki due to laziness). I found this page very useful: https://puroh.it/learning-german-a1-to-c2/
I learned Spanish in my 30s, but was immersed by living in a Spanish speaking country. Though, I've spent a lot of that time alone, so my level is not where it could/should be. But I can talk confidently with anyone about almost anything.
But I really don't think there's any mental hurdle to learning a language at any age. In fact, I think it is EASIER to learn a language as an adult (as opposed to child) because you understand language in general, and so many other concepts.
There are two reasons that adults have trouble learning a language:
1. time. Adults have endless responsibilities, which make it difficult to dedicate the time required to learn.
2. Lack of humility. Not being able to communicate in even the most basic of terms can be humiliating, if you lack humility - as most adults do. You need to be able to completely put aside your pride, and just be eager to make mistakes endlessly.
There's a lot of language schools here - both to learn Spanish and English - and I've met so many people who are "trying" to learn a language and refuse to practice out of fear of making a mistake. At no point have I ever felt even the slightest bit self-conscious about my Spanish, and I simply just try to communicate as fluidly as I am able, even while knowing I am making mistakes. When I learn I've been making some mistake for sometimes years, I simply laugh.
Similarly, there's plenty of locals (and people around the world) who have learned English to a reasonably high degree. So it is clearly possible. Though, even amongst them it often find that there's a genuine hesitancy to talk to me, a native English speaker. Their motivation was simply for a higher paying job, and evidently they swallow their pride for $ and pain.
I can recommend https://languagetransfer.org as an excellent resource, if your target language is covered.
And also just to focus on the basics. I recommend people don't even worry about verb conjugation when starting. Just speak in infinitive exclusively.
I eat bread. Tomorrow/yesterday he eat bread.
People will understand 99% of the time. Just focus on getting vocabulary, confidence and fluidity. Add verb tenses in due course. Again, it takes humility to speak in completely broken sentences, like a little child. But that's the only way.
the conjugation thing is really interesting and you're right you should just plow through with mistakes, even knowingly.
One thing you notice in kids in their native language is they get the trickier/irregular parts of grammar wrong all the time and repeatedly, as in they are corrected but just carry on making the mistake, I guess until one day finally the right pattern gets learned through sheer brute force of repetition. In the meantime, they're perfectly well understood by everyone anyway.
Obviously as an adult you can somewhat shortcut this because of better understanding of grammar and knowing how to learn, and being quicker to absorb and make the changes, but regardless I think the basic premise still applies - you learn the right way over time just by doing it over and over and over until you can't not remember it is the right way.
And, to be honest, if the wrong way is understood, how practically wrong really is it? (you will always always have tells you are not a native speaker no matter what, some of these can even be charming, I don't know if it should even be a goal to get this to zero at all).
Yes, you've understood me perfectly. Whether this works for anyone else, I don't know. But it made perfect sense for me to learn Spanish.
I'm sure there's specific contexts in which proficiency is important, but I think aiming for fluency - literally being able to communicate fluidly, without humming and hawing, - should be the goal for most people. You can do that with a very poor degree of grammar. Moreover, this probably gets you to proficiency faster anyway.
A friend learnt French and piano in her mid 30s and later. Then she went lazy as potato and pretty much is horrible at both. Never practised. Now she is in late 40s and rather spends time scrolling Twitter (yup!), Instagram, and Youtube or overworking. So, I seriously doubt the true brain capacity is the problem in 30s or later. She also had somewhat of a life in her 30s and then she never made an effort to keep having that life (something I am inching towards in my late 30s now; also in the geography we both are this is inherently difficult - no, it's not an excuse) and that also contributed to losing a lot of her personality, or that's how she puts it. So I think to use the brain the brain needs to be primed and well oiled et cetera.
Is she depressed? Laziness can be untreated depression sometimes
Pretty sure she is. She even suspects it. Even I do, for myself, but two psychiatrists cleared me so I stopped bothering.
I am thinking of picking up a musical instrument. But I am afraid that I will miserably. That I may be the oldest person in the class. It's not a country for solo old men and women, even in their late 30s.
While classes and band etc opportunities vary wildly depending on where you are, there's really nothing stopping you from picking up an instrument if you can afford one and have the time/space/health etc. Actually, there's a ton of reasons learning as an adult is much easier. And it's usually not even necessary to join any classes if you can find enough information, but some parts of some instruments will definitely be hard to "get" without a great instructor.
The failure is something that comes with the territory. It's possible to find balance and teachers and material and methods that have lots of reward and not that much failure, but learning generally means doing things badly and then figuring out how to do things better.
I hope you find a way. Music is a great joy.
Thank you. Is there a framework or some methodology about finding the right instrument for one? Or let the instrument find you? How does it work? The only thing I get attracted to are the sound of it and when I name my choices everyone scares me that those are one of the toughest.
You can’t play it any worse than you do right now, so there’s nowhere to go but up.
I've done that with Russian, got around level B2 so far. But I had quite a bit of experience with language learning before that (mainly easy-ish languages: Spanish, Portuguese, German, etc).
Russian is tough nut to crack, and it does require above average dedication. As a matter of fact, I'm currently in Kyrgyzstan for a few weeks to get some immersion and hopefully break out of the level I'm currently in.
You'll need loads of time, but for some languages you really do need to find grammar interesting.
I have learned all of my Spanish since I turned 30?
If you’re immersed and just use anki to build out your vocab it isn’t that hard. Tbh, it’s kind of easier than when I was learning languages as a teen.
I did with what I consider a success. Basically, duolingo and then some beginner podcasts and then netflix with language reactor. I do understand pretty well, did not do much to speak - I dod not cared.
The key in our age is to NOT listen to pointifications about how you need to spend hours a day, are lazy if you dont grind flashcards or grammar.
My rule was "doing something every day 5 min counts" and focusing on what I actually liked. That way, it was not a burden. Maybe took longer, but I dont care.
Tried and failed in my thirties, succeeding much better in my forties. I doubt you've lost neuroplasticity.
Learning over Zoom with a real person using a service like Fiverr or something was a great way for my wife and I to start learning Indonesian.
Learning sign language was lots of fun in VRC with actual people. I'm actually going to visit a friend I made doing this, in his country, this weekend.
you need serious motivation to learn a new language. First ask yourself if you have a really good reason otherwise you will give up. I, for example learned english because I needed for work. But I wouldn't dive into learning another language unless I'm going to engage with it in some form every day
I'd kind of argue against that. Jump right in! Just don't set yourself up for expensive or humiliating failures by putting stakes on your learning. Learn you some basics and see where that goes. If you like the language, you can keep digging.
If you have a genuine need for a language, you'll need to worry about success. If you just want to learn, there's nothing stopping you other than time and effort and saying no.
in order to become really proficient in a language you have to spend 1000s of hours. if you're doing it just as a hobby that's fine but if you don't have a clear goal you're likely not going to advance much. For a hobby that might be fine but I think most people want to get to at least B2 in another language since they're spending so much time in it. I do agree learning should be fun watching content you like in your language for example but you also have to take it seriously to persevere
I've done this by moving to Spain. It took literally years to get to a decent level and my partner is Spanish.
Persistent learning and repetition is key but the main way I improved was by letting go of the fear of sounding stupid and talking without shame.
All studies point that there is no easier to learn a language in your 30s than in your teens. Probably easier since you have better mental tools for study.
Of course time constraints can be worse (or better)
Yes, but in their 30s most people are:
- unwilling to move to a different country
- unmotivated to spend time chatting with people about random things in a foreign language
Neither of which has anything to do with learning a language!
Learning a language can help with both of those things, but neither is really necessary.
Immersion is key. Get a basic vocabulary going, then go to meet-ups, listen to music and watch tv shows in the language.
Yes, it's possible. For me it went like this.
1. I learned enough vocabulary in a very short time to be able to more or less be able to read with the assistance of a dictionary on an e-book where you can click on a word. I spent ~2 weekends of Duolingo 8 hours a day, but I'd use flashcards in the future instead of that. It sounds a bit crazy in hindsight, but I feel like it was easier to stay strongly motivated for a short period of time than drizzling the words over a period of time. All other attempts where I did not do this, failed.
The limit of learning words for me is ~50-200 words per hour if using flashcards. It depends a lot on the language and how similar it is to the languages one already knows. 200, if it is similar to my native language, ~50, if I don't know anything similar at all. I'm also almost guaranteed to forget 80% of the words, if I don't use them in the next day or two, but its possible to cram a lot of them very fast and then move on to stage 2 to use them.
Important catch (for me at least), is that I can remember nouns far more easily than verbs or other more abstract/structural words. Those absolutely need to be in a sentence when learning. There's pretty much no point for me in trying to cram them on their own. I just cannot remember them in isolation at all and also which words they are used with differ per language anyway. Eg "to put" won't necessarily be used for all nouns in a different language even though a dictionary might say that's what it means. The good side is that knowing the nouns helps a lot in deciphering.
2. After the initial cramming I read a couple of short/simple books over some months in the evenings before sleep. I tried to listen to videos & to talk to some people a bit now and then, but it was extremely hard and boring as I understood too little. In hindsight I should have listened more to videos, but the good ones are surprisingly hard to find, if you don't live in the country that already speaks the language one is learning.
3. I tried several options for getting conversational after that. First a private teacher who knew the language well, but was not experienced enough (a university student) to teach somebody who tends to use weird methods for learning. She kept getting confused about why I understand complex words that were basically the same in English, Spanish and other European languages, but why I struggled with the basics when talking at the same time.
I also tried some learning groups. They were fine, but it's very difficult to find people at the same level after starting to learn a language and not following a preset path. I was felt either far ahead and far behind at the same time.
Eventually I found a native speaking private teacher who had years of experience. He could make the classes interesting and after ~1.5-2 years of talking with him 1-2 times per week for an hour about pretty much anything, I can hold a conversation and handle things in general. I still kept learning vocabulary in parallel and I'm not quite fluent as I don't use the language daily, but I'm not too far off either. Overall it took maybe 2-3 years, because I wasn't very consistent at the beginning.
If I were to change anything, it's getting the private teacher way sooner, skipping the learning groups entirely and using flash cards + asking for verbs/structural words as parts of sentences from either the private teacher or finding some other resource for it to start with. Using AI is possible too I guess for that purpose, but only with more common languages. Most AIs completely mess up my native language and invent words that don't exist, so I wouldn't trust them much when learning.
Yeah, and this suggests to me that the link isn't causal... If you succeed at learning a language late in life, you clearly have an unusually healthy brain and your act together.
The biggest obstacle to learning a foreign language is that it's so much slower and more frustrating than using your native language, right? Compared to your native-language typing speed, even English typing speed is only half...
So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?
The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less.
As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is).
But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc..
The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media.
It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning.
It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know.
English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.
No that’s correct, I fully agree.
It’s exceedingly frustrating, and you either get an awful lot of exposure ( say you stop reading in English , only read in Norwegian and read 10k pages a year ) or you grind and learn word lists.
The good news is that word lists are now much easier to learn thanks to SRS systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law may be what you're looking for
Thanks for the advice.
For me, reading is fine, but writing and speaking are hard. Especially speaking. What should I do about this?
Should I change my environment first, after all?
My speaking only got better after speaking a lot with native speakers, just, a lot. And focusing hard on vowel sounds. In Norwegian specifically those kill a lot of understanding. If you can't immerse by living there, I really liked 1:1 online interactions. I paid for an italki instructor my first year here.
My writing is still my weakest point. I'm fine with spell check and predictive text on my phone, but my spelling is atrocious without it. That could be improved with spelling practice like we did as kids in our native language, but I just haven't put in the time, due to how common spell check is.
Basically just time and effort! Sorry, I know it's not a nice answer. It's just a really hard thing to do, and you have to keep doing it, and a lot of people minimize the effort. Maybe it's easier for some but not most of us.
I think ultimately the highest barrier is looking stupid. I try not to care, like how kids do not and simply try. People underestimate you all the time when you do not speak a language, or do it badly.
Immersion, unfortunately.
You put yourself in a situation where nobody understands you in your native language, nothing helpful for your daily life is written in your native language, and you must constantly try to comprehend and produce the target language if you want to accomplish even basic tasks.
If you can't up and move, then studying a language with a lot of cultural export helps a bit, if you can get into the habit of switching all of your media consumption to the target language. It's not the same, though.
I guess that's the only way. Thanks for the advice.
Instead of English, howbout L Exists ForAll N?
Anyways I have slept maybe almost quite enough, and identified that feeling of depth from your
"Problems(/strategies) humans found but overlooked"
As coming from AI and (unaugmented) humans making different tradeoffs (related to rational inattention..?)
On your side, did you lose all respect for Graeber and his recommenders, or did you gain newfound respect for your own ADHD. Lol
Go somewhere you are forced to learn and speak it.
Defaulting to your native language will get zero comprehension, which is much more frustrating than some.
Dealing with frustration is such a fundamental skill that we should all have learned it as kids.
Yes. And with the effort in learning. Schools kind of do try to teach that by making people face confusion and failed recall and repeated effort. What they often fail to do is demonstrate how confusion is exactly the mechanism that leads to learning and how to make that not be frustrating or overly exhausting or depressing.
The work involved in learning so often doesn't feel rewarding. Only success and familiarity feel like progress when they, funnily enough, generally indicate non-engagement and no learning.
I watch and read different things. I like different things in foreign language - stuff that is simple or kind of cringy in my own. So I rarely ends up comparing it.
Second, I rewatch things I liked a lot. Watching them dubbed with more need to rewind makes me notice different stuff about series - how they are composed. So it is a bonus.
I am trilingual. All of my languages belong to different language groups; I regularly read and write in both directions. I use all of the three languages every day. I can also bulldoze my way through a text in a fourth language given a dictionary and a reference for its grammar. I can read the alphabet of a fifth language (mostly w/o understanding the sounds that I make, but I am told that I get it right).
I got there 15 years ago. I seem to be unable to learn anything new since.
Good point about the different language groups. I wonder if there has been any research on measuring the scale of the effect by including some sort of distance metric between the languages. Let's imagine your primary language is Spanish: What's the gain if you learn Italian (Romance language) vs German (non-Romance Indo-European) vs Hungarian (non-Indo European same alphabet) vs Japanese (non-Indo European different alphabet)?
These researchers probably forgot to factor in the brain's disk size bottleneck. Maybe they will get there.
I find that I am having a different personality in each (3) languages I speak, especially in context in a different country. When I switch back to my original language to speak to someone in said country my habits I do in my original country come back for the part and then I revert back. Feels a bit schizophrenic, but I think it is normal for most people. My child is showing similar patterns.
To me this is proof that learning a language touches a lot of parts in our brain, not just affect the parts about learning
I don't think it's just language. I remember having this happen just by having separate groups of friends. You end up in a situation where the two friend groups meet and suddenly realise that you are two different personalities and that you don't know how to act.
I knew a German person who was a NLP practitioner who said that he didn't know how to be depressed in English
There are a lot of things you can do to make yourself healthier (both physically and mentally) if you have an organized life and you allot time for enriching activity, whether that be recreation or learning a language or learning a new instrument. The key is to be stable enough in your life where you can comfortably alott that time.
For me personally, this kind of stability is always out of reach as I'm always frantically trying to reach the next rung in the career ladder.
Note that languages can alternatively also be conlangs (constructed languages). They are in fact a lot more interesting and systematic than traditional human languages. Granted, you'll find no real-life people who verbally speak the conlang outside of arranged group calls within online communities.
The only solid thing I’ve seen for brain health is maintaining physical health
Yeah, if your goal is brain health, you're better off spending the time exercising, by a mile. But learning another language may be more enjoyable and certainly has social benefits, so I can understand people choosing it.
You also get to learn another culture which to some extent prevents you from becoming an a.hole. Lack of foreign language instruction in k-12 education in the USA might be a little correlated with this...
I don't think it's really possible to learn a new language unless you have to. Sure, you can learn some words and grammar from books and games like Duolingo, but you'll never really learn the language if you don't use it, and you'll only use it if you have to. This is why it's hard for English natives to learn another language: too many people speak our language already. And now people won't be learning computer languages any more either.
You can absolutely learn a language even if you don't need to. But it's just a lot harder.
I have done it and know many people who have done so too. It's frustrating and slow, but if you figure out a system that works for you, you can do it.
How do you stop people speaking to you in your native language?
English is my native language too. Eventually they stop assuming haha.
You can pay for an online tutor which I found got me rather far. After like A2 they wont speak English with you anymore (if you ask em too).
You do not need to speak to progress, you can get really, really, really far without speaking much, if at all. You'll need to eventually speak of course to get through things like proper pronunciation and just general confidence, but most of my progress came from watching tv, anime, listening to audio books and reading books in the target language (German). I found Audio books by far got me the furthest just due to being able to listen to them on my commute or during sport rather easily but they were limiting in German due to their funny Präteritum case.
It's slow and frustrating but things like kindle and lang reactor help a lot. I am only at a point where I feel good about my languages skills after 4 years (2 of which I spent mucking about, and the 3rd was where I got serious).
And if it's low stakes, you can lie and say "no english" which works. But I've only done this a few times and felt kinda icky about doing it.
I thought it is about programming languages
I do think that practicing different programming languages should have a corresponding brain benefit as well.
All of the the research I have seen on this topic have been observational retrospective studies, which are worthless and should be ignored. The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language (let alone a third or more) are so large that they cannot be overcome without a randomized control. This stuff is churnalism, right up there with "does coffee make you live longer?" [1].
But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy.
I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring.
[1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.
I am an actual linguist, in a subfield that requires me to continually learn new languages, and there are no social benefits. I definitely don't get out there. Once one is a man over the age of 40 or so, local people are rarely willing to talk to you at any length, you are not interesting any more (in fact, in some cultures, local people will have heightened suspicion of you). Language learning becomes more a passive endeavour with few opportunities for real-world speaking.
This is either a problem with you, or a problem with the specific place you live in.
I talk to people every day in my 2nd language. They are generally delighted to do so.
Yes, some people are suspicious of me, depending on the context. But even then I can generally disarm it with body language etc, because I'm a skilled and empathetic human.
Your post history suggests your sole personal experience is Spanish. Congratulations, you lucked out learning the language of speakers more likely to be friendly and sociable than not (though there are corners of Latin America colder than others). But that experience will not be representative of many other languages spoken by other peoples.
You made a blanket statement about being a man over 40 makes it impossible to converse with people. I refuted that. Would you like to revise it to say "I happen to be in a place(s) where people are just generally anti-social, so that makes it difficult to practice a language"?
Since my late teens, I have spent ~6 months a year traveling the world, and language learning has been a big part of that. And now I am in my 40s having seen how, in most regions, interest from locals in intensive conversation steadily diminished as I approached middle age. So, my experience has been comprehensive enough to make such a blanket statement.
When you are "home", do you have the same problem? I wonder if people are becoming less social overall?
I also wonder if it is something that happens for women as well, or just men.
In my experience you are quite right. Don’t let the shaming replies here get you down.
What? Come on. I’m on that demographic and have zero issues talking to people out in the world. If you believe this then certainly it’s true. Otherwise, just go meet and interact with people normally.
And it is only getting easier to learn a language now too. What FINALLY got me over the hump with Spanish was YouTube and discovering resources like Dreaming Spanish (leveled content for comprehensive input that probably exist in most major languages). Content that was fun and at my level.
Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.
I logged in just to second your recommendation. If you want to learn Spanish (or or French) 'Dreaming Spanish' is just excellent.
In addition it seems to be a good way to get rid of short video addiction. I don't use instagram or tiktok myself, but have a friend who did. Now she watches Dreaming Spanish instead. She is eight month in. Her husband just told me the whole family was flabbergasted when they where in Spain this summer and she answered in Spanish to a waiter in a restaurant.
My 10 year old daughter uses it, too. She likes to watch the Let's play videos and has watched the Stardew Valley series twice. So thats 66 hours x 2 = 130 hours watching Spanish videos. Her vocabulary is now a bit strange for a beginner, though. We recently walked through a garden and she was pointing out la regadera, la semilla, plantar algo.
I just logged in just to recommend Dreaming Spanish (and now Dreaming French apparently). It's absolutely the right way to learn a language IMO. If anyone reading this is lost on what resource to look for to learn Spanish or French, I urge you to try it. (Of course I have no interest here except see them succeed on this brilliant idea).
There are so many tools now that didn't exist even when I started. I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example. Or in the case of Japanese, being able to take a picture of text, and select the kanji for lookup. Life. Changing.
I'm also old enough to remember when getting listening materials required going to the library for cassette tapes. Today, you can talk with a wide selection of native speakers, listen to essentially infinite audio and video content, and immerse yourself in a culture halfway around the world for the price of an internet connection.
> I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example.
I learned English with no Internet or smartphones, just school teachers, coursebooks and physical dictionaries. I wrote down new words from the dictionary into my lined notebook with a pen, solved the exercises from the book, translated texts by looking up words in the dictionary, searching for the page and the entry alphabetically. The coursebook came with an audio cassette. It was very much possible, but of course there are much more tools today. Spaced repetition software like Anki for vocabulary learning is a huge improvement I think.
Learning another language is difficult, but never occured to me to think it would be somehow impossible to anyone. It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position as it is the default international language. World is getting smaller and people coming from smaller languages usually also learn the local international language as well. If you are born to family speaking estonian today you probably pick up also english or otherwise you spend your life surfing only estonian websites. It requires no special talent (although some people are fast at picking up new languages)
I don’t know where you’re from, but if you’re European (it sounds like it?), you probably take for granted the head start you get by knowing multiple languages from childhood. Every European I meet has a comfort with language learning that I can only approximate with great effort.
I agree with you about the disadvantage of being a native English speaker, but mostly I think the real disadvantage is being an American, and never having a reason to learn another language (though that has changed in my lifetime with Spanish, and possibly Mandarin).
In any case, a lot of academic researchers claim that it’s impossible to learn a language to a native level as an adult, which may be true, but that claim has been twisted into “impossible to learn a second language” by a lot of others.
> knowing multiple languages from childhood
This is phrased ambiguously, but most Europeans only start learning foreign languages in school, so around age 6 or later. By that time you're past the "critical window" and you'll almost surely have a very recognizable accent and learning the language is very effortful and takes many years. It's still probably easier to learn when you're 7 than when you're 40, but it's not even close to language acquisition as a toddler.
You're also forgetting that school-based language instruction is not so great at all. Imagine a class of 30 students having a 45 minute English class twice a week, by a non-native teacher with a heavy accent. It's not a lot of learning, very little speaking, and most kids unsurprisingly don't learn to speak well from that. It's mostly about memorizing grammar tables and vocabulary for tests.
You need much more intensive paid courses or private instruction if you really want to be good at it, even as a teenager. Not strictly necessary but learning purely from public school is usually not as effective as you seem to think. Or you have to be an outlier in diligence and do a LOT of homework practice on your own, translating, reading, writing, listening to media etc. Video games can be a great motivator but it also gives a very lopsided skillset and won't easily get you to pass a B2 or C1 exam.
And yes, it's true. For Americans learning a foreign language is an exotic hobby or a requirement of some very rare foreign-associated jobs. For people whose native language isn't English, learning English is just part of the basics for professional work. It's around the same level in basicness as getting an undergrad degree. Certainly not something that every single person does, and there are jobs you can do without it, but white collar, professional knowledge work will require it.
In most European countries you also have to learn a second foreign language at school at some point, though not as many years as the first foreign language. This one is usually the language of a big nearby European country, so German, French, Italian or Spanish are popular. But just as it is for Americans, learning this second, non-English foreign language is much less motivating once you know English. Though economic motivations do exist, for example to learn German, especially when you live close to the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) countries and there are many economic ties.
I'm not European, so all I can do is shrug. Obviously there are tons of people in Europe and they're not all identical, but my observation is that compared to me, they're more comfortable with the inherent ambiguity of not being able to understand everything in a language, and still being able to function in that language.
I think Europeans, in general, are much more comfortable with the idea of just making due with whatever language is available, at whatever level, where as for Americans, speaking a foreign language is much more of an event, with more ego tied into it. The fear of failure is amplified, and that fear is a huge reason that more people don't try to learn.
Maybe I'm just seeing a self-selected group of Europeans who are already multi-lingual, and it's not childhood exposure at all, but my theory is that the normality of language learning in Europe is a causative factor.
> Maybe I'm just seeing a self-selected group of Europeans
This. You chat much less with people who are too shy to chat in English. Believe me, many Europeans don't like to speak foreign languages because they think they will seem stupid. It's not some deep difference between Americans and Europeans. The major difference is simply that there is much more pressure and incentive involved when your native language is not English.
> It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position
Personally I suspect English has some great advantages. The main disadvantage is defaulting to superiority.
The natural disconnect between written and spoken English is tremendously helpful. Well educated English encourages copying sounds - pronouncing foreign names and places correctly. This is a huge leg up compared against some other cultures. Think sports stars having their foreign names pronounced correctly. People often know how to try and say Paris or Barcelona correctly. We naturally know that how something is spoken trumps how it is written.
English speakers often have the ability to hear sounds because there's so many wildly different English accents. Especially vowels (we natively use a wide range of vowel sounds). There are sounds English speakers struggle to hear, but I think we have an advantage over some other languages.
If you're the type of person that attempts to mimic accents, then you've often learnt how to say a huge range of vowels and consonants. And how to stretch them (Strine, some US accents) or shorten them.
> social aspects of learning another language
Maybe if you are near the native speaking country, or potentially if there are significant numbers of immigrants.
But knowing Spanish adds nothing social within New Zealand.
I had a Spanish girlfriend when 30, which made learning Spanish rather incentivised, and I embedded overseas for many months to learn conversational Spanish.
However I rarely hang out with South American immigrants in New Zealand, and those I have met (say at the pub) often prefer to stick with English.
Knowing Spanish is fantastic when travelling - the months spent learning have led to way more enjoyment when subsequently travelling to South America or visiting friends in Spain. Spanish also helps a little in France, Italy, Portugal and Brazil.
I intend to spend a few months in South Korea so maybe I'll try and learn Korean (without a girlfriend). However I'm now older so I suspect it will be much much harder.
> The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language
Unless you have large learning disorder, you can learn second language. It is not some kind of rare talent
Confounding to learning language, on top of one's base ability to do do in general, are the teaching methods not meshing at all with the individual. For me, rote memorization of anything is nearly impossible, doubly so if the thing to be memorized has no immediate utility. "Conversational" language learning and similar that give you a bunch of vocabulary and bring in the grammar later are why I failed Spanish 1 three times. I need the grammar first, then words with etymology. It also helps to not fight with phonetic collisions between different languages using their own bastardization of Latin script, which is why I was far more easily able to meet my college language requirement by teaching myself classical Greek and translating the things I thought were interesting.
This is fascinating to me, because I am adamant that learning grammar (and especially verb conjugation) is completely counter productive when starting to learn a language. Especially with Spanish, where every tense and person has different terminations.
I literally just ignored conjugation and spoke in infinitive for a while.
Yo comer pan. Tu comer pan. Ayer/mañana el comer pan. Etc...
Likewise not worrying about gender, articles etc. If you use the wrong el/la/lo/les/whatever, it almost never matters, whatsoever.
Likewise if you put words in the wrong order.
Everyone understands it all.
So, just focus on building vocab, fluidity and confidence. The tenses come in time.
I do agree, though, that etymology - or at least noticing similarities between languages - can be very useful. Spanish and English speakers already know thousands of words in each language just with some basic rules. -al is the same (metal). -tion becomes -cion (conversation, conversación). Etc...
I suspect that your struggles was that you were being evaluated on the wrong things...
I'd be curious to hear your experience and what you think of what I've said.
I think you're probably right where most people are concerned, but none of that held for me in my various attempts. I think I should amend a couple of the points I raised, though:
I wrote etymology when I meant morphology. Etymology is certainly useful to me and helps vocabulary stick, but I find morphology to be a useful building block that I need on the front-end of learning vocabulary. No curriculum I've found includes it.
Phonetic collisions were particularly difficult for me, as my early education intrinsically bound phonetics to the English alphabet in my mind, which made it very difficult for my memory to latch onto new associations that share Latin script. I think phonics are crucial, but I wish there was a good way to better steer the sound associations to morphemes instead of individual characters, so as to better make room for more than the one language you're trying to learn.
New point: I had already done some programming by the time I tried learning another language. My thought processes had already reshaped into a sort of compiler for all my language processing. The necessary precision of code extended into how I wrote, and that overinflated the importance of grammar into something I just couldn't see past before getting to the words themselves. I wanted the words that were useful to sentence structure ahead of all others so I could do something useful with the rest.
I expect this would all be pretty incomprehensible to most people.
I had a massive stroke. I should be in a wheelchair. I'm mostly fine now.
It's postulated that my multilingual abilities helped, among other things.
Learning Lean 4 and trying to prove something using it is extremely mentally stimulating.
does this include programming languages which after all are a system of meaning?
Also wondering about instruments and learning to read sheet music.
probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)
I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin
similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain
>probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)
I mean if it were that similarity made it not useful then it would surely be that you should only learn languages that are significantly different from ones you already know, but that does not seem to be the case from the admittedly not very detailed article.
>I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin
right, but they don't say that.
Maybe it is learning things different to you. But perhaps it is stimulating the parts of the brain that do the most relating of complicated concepts to each other. In which case it is just learning a bunch of words and what they refer to and how to structure these words together to discourse on ideas.
One common thing that is used to keep people from losing abilities in Alzheimer's diagnosis is using complicated skills like knitting, drawing. That is to say practicing complicated skills you already have prevents deterioration, so it seems reasonable to assume learning complicated skills does the same.
In which case it ends up being not very amazing information, as that is what I would naturally assume to be the case.
Use it or lose it.
Do programming languages count?
Is a programming language a language?
I think it probably exercises some of the same cognitive skills, but the vocabulary of a typical programming language is tiny.