I was reading this article http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/msuperbaby.html, and I was curious as to something. If children learn language just by hearing it, if you exposed a child to a foreign language you didn’t necessarily know, like by letting them watch a bunch of Japanese anime, for example, would they grow up to be able to speak both English and Japanese? Would they be able to separate the languages, or would they mix them together and only be able to speak in some weird combination of languages? Finally, without having anyone to answer questions about the language as he or she got older, would the child hit a wall and be unable to get a total grasp on the language? Basically the gist of my question is could a child learn a language the parent doesn’t know just by being exposed to the language, and learn it to a fairly good extent? TIA.
Obviously. Consider kids adopted from Eastern Europe into American families. Do you think the adoption agencies verify that the families are fluent in Serbian?
Immersion learning of language, as far as I’ve heard, is not limited to early childhood, though it seems to be easier then. The Transnational College of LEX teaches anyone almost any language effectively by immersion. They also have branched out into mathematics and physics (on the view that mathematics is just another language) by immersion and their books on Fourier Analysis and Quantum Mechanics are some of the clearest expositions I’ve seen. Assuming that the language teaching is similar, it’s very easy for even an adult to get enough knowledge of a language to get by, though maybe not enough to write literature, simply through listening to enough of a foreign language.
But in that situation, they would have someone to teach them english. What I am wondering is if you could learn a language without being taught. I mean could you just listen and figure it out. Your stuff about immersion which I didn’t quote is probably kind of on the right path, but I would like to know how far a child could go in learning a language without any kind of teacher. I don’t think adults can learn a language very well just by hearing it, or at least I can’t, because if I could I should have played enough games and watched enough anime to learn Japanese by now, and that isn’t even the same deal because anime has subtitles. A little child can’t read and so they have no translation at all.
Don’t confuse “not teaching” with “watching TV”. The former still involves interaction and experimentation on part of the child. The latter does not. I don’t doubt that a child could pick up a lot of vocabulary by watching TV, but I doubt he’d be able to become fluent. He’d have no one to practice the sounds with and experiment with mistakes of grammer.
No dount the vocabularies would be separated in the kid’s brain just as any bilingually rasied child.
Already touched on above. I’m not aware of any documented cases of someone becoming fluent by just watching TV. Surely there would be, at a minimum, gaps in vocabulary and grammer that simply never were encountered.
Partly there’s the fact that you’ve had the subtitles to rely on. I dug out my copy of their Fourier Analysis book and found this section from the introduction. It’s from a woman who was learning Korean and having a Korean homestay guest.
It’s not entirely from listening; there’s an amount of interaction in it too. Still, there’s no “instruction”. The best analogy would be listening to tapes of English conversations and eventually recognizing that when one person says “gudmorning howaryutuday”, the other person says “variwelthankyu”. Then when you meet an English speaker who says “gudmorning howaryutuday” you reply “variwelthankyu”. Only later do you eventually tease out the individual words.
Yes, there will be a number of mistakes, but your proficiency (supposedly) increases relatively rapidly, and kids make mistakes like that all the time. One might say that the biggest block to adults learning like this is the fear of embarassment from making a mistake. Even that doesn’t stop people from making mistakes in pronunciation in even their own language, which propagate to mistakes in writing and so on. A great example is the loss of the English past participle, as in “mash potatoes”.
Hope this explains better the TCL method.
I believe that plasticity in the various language centers of the brain is dramatically reduced by the onset of puberty. Meaning that children can learn a foriegn language much easier than adults. Speaking from personal experience, I was enrolled in a school in Southern Mexico for third grade. I was given no formal instruction nor were any exceptions made for my innability to speak the language. Within about a month I spoke more fluently than my mother who was working on a PH.D in Latin American literature. To this day, I can pass as a light skinned Chilango.
I doubt that putting a child in front of a television would have the same effect. There would be nothing to hold the childs interest in something they did not understand. Unlike growing up in a different culture, where a child is certainly interested in learning how to request food, permission to go to the bathroom, most importantly in learning to communicate with his peers.
I’m not so sure. Eventually they may separate out, but on a community level the two languages can definitely fuse into a creole. I don’t see why they might not on an individual level as well.
As I stated above I learned Spanish at an early age. I never confused Spanish words with English words. However, when I learned Italian I often mixed Italian and Spanish. Once I became proficient in Italian, I no longer made the mistake. Now that I rarely have an opportunity to speak Italian, I find myself once again mixing in Spanish words. But I have never mixed Spanish with English or German. In other words I think “Creole” arises when adults mix on a community level, which is not the same for pre-pubescents immersed in a foreign language invironment.
It’s been demonstrated that children of deaf parents cannot be taught to speak simply by watching television or listening to the radio. They need the practice themselves. Seems pretty unlikely then that they could pick up a second language just from the TV.
Well, as the children age and mix in with society at large, there’s pressure to speak “one or the other”. Within a family where everyone is bilingual, I’m wondering if mixtures of two languages have any tendancy to arise, on the sentence-by-sentence level if not the word-by-word level. I know that some concepts are more easily rendered in French than in English, and vice versa; would a polyglot family find it convenient to switch back and forth to get the best word for each idea?
And yes, I know I’m veering dangerously close to Sapir-Whorfland.
Nearly every immigrant family I know speaks some sort of hybrid language at home, intermixing their native language with english effortlessly.
Generally, the basic structure is in their native language but specific words are replaced by english ones when there is not a satisfactory translation.
It’s interesting that you mention “at home”. In my department we have three main groups (other than native English speakers): the Russians (well, Eastern Europeans, but they all speak Russian), the Iranians, and the Chinese. The Russians and Iranians speak purely Russian or Farsi (respectively) when in homogenous groups, but English in mixed company. I’ve overheard literally hundreds if not thousands of conversations and the only “loanwords” are technical terms and names I wouldn’t expect to have a translation anyhow. I mean, who but the French are going to bother coming up with their own (significantly distinct) for “quasisubsemigroupoid”?
As for the Chinese, the same may very well hold for them, but they don’t seem to hang around the rest of the department if they can help it.
If you are interested in an anecdotal response, here is mine. I grew up in a multilingual family. Our native language was English, and we communicated in that language on a daily basis. If we were in the presence of a non-English speaker, we spoke their native language, to the extent we were able. If we were discusing say, the works of Gabriel Garcia Marques we spoke in Spanish. If we were discussing Hemmingway, we spoke in english. I do not recall ever mixing the two. Additionally, it is difficult to switch languages in mid-thought.
I’m not so sure of that. I often find myself coming up to saying “I know foo”, where foo is an English phrase, and knowing that it would be better to say “Je connais foo”, where foo is the same English phrase. In fact, among friends of mine who also speak a modicum of French, I do exactly that. The effort not to do that and to add a parenthetical to the effect that “know” isn’t the best word is one of the things that gives the impression that my thought processes are scattered.
Then again, maybe the experience of teaching (and the amateur tutoring I’ve always done, expecting to be teaching eventually) has trained me into this. I have to be able to express the same idea in myriad ways and I won’t know which way is the clearest for a given audience until I’m in front of them, so I’ve gotten used to this sort of shifting gears on-the-fly.
I grew up in a family speaking Mandarin, growing up in the US at some early age. When talking to my own parents, I’ll generally attempt to speak Chinese for the most part, but I’ll toss in English words sometimes if I need to. Like if I didn’t know a particular word, I’d just use the English word. On the other hand, it’s hard to deliberately form sentences that include significant amounts of both English and Chinese, which is what I think askeptic was referring to.
As for learning from watching random Anime and such…, well, depends on the anime I would think, but chances are the kid wouldn’t learn very well at all. There wouldn’t be any interaction and I doubt the characters would have a large amount of diverse things in diverse situations that they would say. I think interaction is the biggest part though, with no interaction, there’s no way for the child to test the language and no real reason for him to try to.
I agree with the others in this thread that exposure to a language is not enough to learn it. One must actually have the opportunity to use the language and to get feedback from others in order to learn it. One aspect of language that I could imagine being influenced in the scenario you describe, however, would be phonology (i.e., the sound system of a language). It’s been shown that infants are initially sensitive to very small differences in speech sounds, but, over time, they become less sensitive to these differences if the sounds are not separate phonemes in their native language. (For example, infants in an English-speaking environment stop discriminating between the aspirated and unaspirated [p] sounds during the first year of life as the difference in sound is not a meaningful one in English – both sounds are perceived as the phoneme /p/.) Hypothetically, an infant who was exposed to lots of Japanese anime may be able to discriminate between certain speech sounds that would be considered allophones of the same phoneme in their first language.
This is called code switching and it’s a normal feature in the speech of people who are learning a new language. As Mathochist notes, code-switching may continue once someone has become fully bilingual or may fade away depending upon the views of a given community. From The Journal of Educational Issues of Language Minority Students:
It would be hard to randomly insert code from both languages because there are rules governing the use of code-switching. From the article I linked to above:
There’s even a difference in language acquisition skills of children. Children who learn another language before age three (which is called simultaneous bilingualism) usually demonstrate typical development in both languages. Children who begin to learn another language after age three (called sequential bilingualism) have a bit of a learning curve, however. Depending on when they are first exposed to the second language, it may take them up to two years to develop age-appropriate conversation skills and it up to seven years to master the language of academics.
The only language I use without having one single lesson on is English.
I starting reading the language when I was about 8 or 9 and heard it in spoken form whenever I was in Belgium, because of the variety of English and (at least on Flemich channels) subtitled TV serials and movies.
I also did a study on a Belgian, Flemish languaged Univ. There it is a very normal thing to be able to study the grammar of a new language from books in an other non-first language.
Thus the - for me rather comical - situation was that several grammar books on Classical Arabic were actually written in English and German. The dictionary used by these students is also Arabic/German or its English translation. Besides works and sources in the target languages, most of the translations of Arabic/Turkish/Persian sources and most of the works and other material related to the study field are available in a mix of French/English/German.
The same was the case for at least one of my other languages there (= everything about grammar and the Dictionary was in English, related study material in English and other languages) but since that was for a language I had no clue about, this was not at all comical for me. (I’m still a bit green in the face when thinking about that).
So you see: It is not only possible to learn a language merely from reading and hearing. It is even possible to use that language for studying others you have no clue about when you start your study on them 
Add to this that I am -rather severely - dyslexic, and you can imagine that “normal” children/adults shall have much less difficulties with that then I ever encountered.
In my opinion it is only a matter of having access to it and eventually - as was in my case at student-age - also a matter of necessity.
Salaam. A
I can’t say about English/Chinese, since my knowledge of Chinese is very limited.
Yet if you give this a s an example counting for other languages, I have to disagree.
You can easily switch between languages in the middle of sentences and do that deliberately. The same with spoken language.
Salaam. A
Chrisn,
I can’t agree with what is said in the quotes you posted.
I learned the method of switching between between Arabic, French and Flemish (and even all 3 at the same time) since I said my first sentences. Nevertheless I’m also able since childhood to hold on to one of the languages during entire conversations while not even thinking about using one single word of an other one. The same for other languages and other conversations.
It only depends who you talk to. If you are in a company of people who all speak several languages, you automatically switch to the use of one or an other, depending who you talk to and which word/part of a sentence that person shall best understand when you use his first language to say it.
Salaam. A
I went to live in France when my son was four. He went to ‘Ecole Maternelle’, where the teacher and all his colleagues only spoke French. In the beginning he was totally lost, but after some three months he started to speak French. But he only did so at school. Never with me or my wife, although my French is quite good.
When he was speaking with us and he needed a word he did not know in Portuguese, he picked the correspondent French word and gave it a Portuguese sounding form. I am sure the reverse happened when he needed an unknown French word. So he knew perfectly what language he was speaking at a time.
When we returned to Brazil after ayear and a half he continued with the practice of Portuguesizing (is this a word?) French words. But his fellow comrades mocked him, so he made a point in forgetting French.
Later, when he was 14 and my daughter 10, we returned to France. He relearned the language and my daughter picked it very fast. Now they both speak French without accent (actually my son speaks with the accent of the Midi region). I master perfectly French, but I have an accent, so anyone can perceive that I am a foreigner that speaks well the language.
The reason why children can speak without accent is their hearing. Each language has certain sounds which are specific. A child hears it perfectly and can mimic it. An adult does not pick all the nuances, so he/she produces a sound similar but not quite the same.