Adult brains suck at learning languages: True or false?

Great Debates
21

As an adult who is still trying to improve my second languages… often I’m spending so much mental energy on trying to follow the conversation and construct sentences that are at least close to grammatically correct that concentrating on precise sound manufacture (i.e. “accent”) falls to the wayside. Generally, the more fluid a person’s speech the better their accent as well and I’m guessing that all of this is related.

Actors doing specific accents spend a LOT of time and effort on memorized lines where they don’t have to think about grammatical constructions, that’s already done for them, as well as word choice and the on-going dialogue. So they have more energy left to worry about precise sounds.

The truth is that most people don’t need “native” proficiency, they don’t need to be “fluent”, they need to communicate successfully and you can do that with less than perfect mastery of the language. Adult humans are by and large capable of learning other languages to that level of proficiency.

22

I think it’s possible for adults to become fluent in a different language; it just takes longer. Also, any information that’s not used will eventually fade so it’s possible that adults just don’t practice/use the language enough. Teach a kid a new language and they’ll run around the house naming stuff in that language :stuck_out_tongue:

23

If you take a Japanese child, younger than about 7 years old or so, and teach them English, they will have very little difficulty learning it, and will almost effortlessly learn to differentiate between the L and R sounds.

If you take a Japanese adult, they will have a lot of difficulty with L and R sounds.

This ability to learn new phonemes easily disappears somewhere around the age of 7 to 9 or so (or somewhere around there, I’m going from my unreliable memory here) and is the main reason that children can learn to speak a language easily and fluently where an adult learning another language will almost always have a very noticeable accent.

Also, according to brain studies, children actually activate different parts of their brains leaning a new language than adults do. So it’s not just the phonemes. The entire way language is processed and new languages are learned is different for adults.

So yes, without a doubt, adult brains suck at learning new languages, at least compared to the brains of children.

That doesn’t mean that it’s completely impossible for an adult to learn a new language to the point where they can speak it without an accent, but it takes a tremendous amount of work for an adult to do so. It also probably takes a language coach of some kind to help, because an adult actually doesn’t hear the different phonemes correctly (like the difference between L and R for a Japanese person) and won’t hear what they are doing wrong unless someone else keeps pointing it out to them.

Similarly, Qatar has been spelled Katar and other ways, and Muammar Khadaffi’s last name has been spelled Qadaffi, Gaddafi, and other ways as well because English has no equivalent for the sound that gets translated to either Q or K (or in some cases QH). To us English speakers, it sounds mostly like a K. If someone who is a native English speaker wants to speak Arabic without an accent, they have to first train their brain to actually hear what that sound is before they can even hope to pronounce it properly. Children need no such training. Hearing the different sounds just comes naturally to them.