very interesting. I agree with you that it's the phonemes that is the problem. As one ages, one's primary language phonemes sound more and more "normal", and subtlety that do not exist in one's primary language is "tossed out" by the brain.
I learned to speak English when I was 10, and I have no issue with the differences between Chinese and English. But I was exposed to French only a little bit later (12) and I am completely hopeless at it. The grammar, spelling and vocabulary are the easiest parts; I just can't seem to produce the same sounds.
There's research suggesting that phoneme patterns are not arbitrary. Have a look at Theo Vennemann (Berkeley, Munich) and his work on syllabic structure -- I recall some very interesting stuff from the latter '80's.
Re:How we can learn from a baby's brain
by tokenadult on Monday April 27, 2009 @04:39PM
(#582056)
The intended meaning here is that the phoneme patterns of English will be reliably mistaken by a speaker habituated to speaking German, or the other way around. (I have some acquaintance with both languages.) If there is some rule of universal grammar in the general case about how sounds can combine, the fact still remains that the particular case of each speaker's native language is not a reliable guide to the phonological structure of any other particular language.
The most readily noticeable part of the adult barrier to language learning, which I have run into more than a dozen times as an adult learner of a variety of languages, is acquiring sufficient phonological proficiency to speak understandably and listen with good comprehension. That's because production of the phonemes (and perception of the phonemes) of your native language(s) is based on ARBITRARY grouping of sound distinctions that are grouped differently, or entirely ignored, in other languages. Each language has its own sound system, and generally any learner who begins study of a language after puberty (especially if male) will have a noticeable foreign accent.
http://books.google.com/books?id=r2HEqsWeQTYC&pg=PA30...
But there are also more subtle problems with second-language acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. Each language groups concepts with words in a different way from any other language, and each language has grammatical rules that are wholly arbitrary from the point of view of any other language. But usually second-language speakers and writers can bluff better as to vocabulary and grammar than they can as to pronunciation.
I've often worked as a Chinese-English interpreter. I didn't speak any Chinese until age seventeen, definitely after puberty for me, but I have acquired a decent accent, not such a thick American accent that I can't occasionally pass a Chinese person over the telephone--but mostly as a southern-Chinese second-language speaker of Mandarin to other southern-Chinese second-language speakers of Mandarin. The issue of "lexicalization" (really knowing the correct word in the acquired language) really never goes away. And there are whole thick books about Chinese grammar that few Westerners have read cover to cover.
All the time and effort needed to learn a second language has given me much incentive to encourage my children to grow up as bilingual persons--but even at that it's hard to find an adequately bilingual environment to support daily use of both Mandarin and English.