One other interesting wrinkle: I know quite a few bilingual families. It turns out that kids are only amazing language learners when they have no choice. Kids will master the languages used on the playground and in school. But they don't always learn their home language to an especially high level.
So both children and adults seem to best when they don't have much choice. Or when all the cool books and TV shows are in another language.
This is one reason I think there's a relatively low level of Danish proficiency in adult immigrants: it is virtually impossible to burn your ships in that manner, because ~all Danes speak fluent English, and generally prefer to speak English to foreigners vs. attempt to understand poor Danish. If someone explicitly asks to keep the conversation in Danish, then people will typically oblige and attempt to understand the learner's Danish, but as soon as the person goes to a restaurant or even a government office, it'll be immediately English again unless they ask each time this happens (and even then the person may just honestly not understand them, because Danes are not good at understanding mispronounced Danish).
Two additional factors: 1) Language aptitude is a continuous range, not discrete and 2) unused/unpracticed skills can atrophy. This is particularly evident in very young immigrants who exhibit "receptive" skill in their mother tongue even though they may have had fluency in earlier years. Immerse them in the native language, and they'll often pick up much much faster.
Do you have any cites for this?
I suspected it might be true, and tried actually putting together a paper on this for a class in the early 90's, but pretty much ran into a dead end looking for literature to review at the time.
On a more anecdotal level, I had a funny experience when I went to Japan -- I was somewhat passable in French before I went, and after about half a year of being in Japan (before I had really become fluent in Japanese) I tried speaking some simple French with a French teacher. It was impossible -- every sentence started in French, and ended in Japanese :) After I got better at Japanese, my French started coming back too -- but I'm still hoping to spend a month or two in France to really get it up to a usable level. Interestingly, I didn't have any problems with my English while there -- probably because I was already fluent in English (my mother tongue is Norwegian).
(Many ESL teachers are simply English speakers living in another country, but many of them are also like my wife, doing what is essentially applied linguistics.)
Other than that, I completely agree. The notion that you are simply doomed to only have one language after the crucial period is exaggerated, and the key to learning another language is immersion.
Kids will eagerly engage in language acquisition activities that few adults are willing to do. For instance, a child will happily watch the same DVD many times, until he can repeat the dialogue word for word. Their urge to do these things seems to disappear with age, along with their aversion towards bitter flavors and playmates of the opposite sex.
So should we say that kids are more talented language learners? Or should we say that they are more enthusiastic about language acquisition?
There's much more to it than that, but that gives you a flavor of the debate.
For a LONG time, I didn't have a single Swedish reference text nor other book, although I recently acquired a few by chance at a second-hand bookstore.
Adjusting to some of the spelling requires some conscious effort, but otherwise, I pretty much "just know" how the words are pronounced.
So much of language acquisition is not a conscious exercise in memorization. Whether simply listening, speaking, or both, language acquisition occurs through ongoing exposure and use.
This is one more event in my own life that pits me more and more against over-reaching and, I increasingly find, counter-productive IP law. Many of these shows I cannot even purchase through "normal" channels. I am viewing them legally, but through what is something of a fluke -- chance -- of my Internet connection and associated -- along for the ride -- basic cable subscription.
(And I suppose I'd better shut up about this, as the cable provider seems bent on consciously eliminating anything and everything from that basic service that I actually enjoy.)
If this kind of exposure had been available to me "back in the day", when I was learning my first couple of foreign languages, the process would have gone a lot quicker and smoother. Instead of struggling to remember what I heard once or three times, I could simple "soak it in".
Artificial scarcity... It is a large, open question whether this is going to be allowed to dictate and constrain our capabilities to educate and learn.
Do we really want a more capable society, overall? Perhaps implying a smaller slice of a larger pie? Or do we simply want to be king of the hill, however much smaller that may be?
At least to me, a much better approach would be to test changes in your SYSTEM for teaching languages, rather than trying to select the inputs most predisposed to your system. Selecting "better" inputs might improve your success rate, but is it the most effective method of achieving the outcome you're looking for? Probably not. Most likely, the main failure is in the method of teaching languages, not the people being taught.
With the exception of Japanese (with Anime etc.) I can’t think of a single door that a foreign language opens, which we can truly expect the representative American high school student to be interested in.
[1] Old joke which goes - "What do you call people who speak two languages? Bilingual! Three languages? Trilingual! One language? American!"
Our neighbor's raised their kids tri-lingual and it was amazing to watch in action. Especially the pipeline stalls when a language concept had a word in one language but not another, (the foreign word would be injected).
To me, it seems the most important factor in learning a language is exposure (à la Gladwell’s 10k hours, and 1 hr in classroom counts far, far less than 1 hr of watching a trashy soap opera). Related and also important is motivation.
Excelling at the classroom model might provide a foundational excitement or make talking with natives less humiliating or help with grammatical minutiae (in German, irregular verb stems and modifier declension, which just take more hours to get intuitively), but has nothing directly to do with how fluent you end up.
I’d guess this test serves more to reinforce an already prevalent, toxic fatalism about learning languages (in particular as adults) than to teach us about our selves.
For example, is it better to just dive into existing code in the language and play around with it, as opposed to picking up a book on the language and first understanding the theory and the idioms behind it end-to-end?
A crucial, well understood advantage with PLs is that they are well documented (both officially and on Stack Overflow), making minor successes with little previous exposure more likely, which can provide constant reinforcement.
In fact, natural languages are far better documented than people believe. Armed with a few electronic unabridged dictionaries, translation corpora, and conjugation tools, you can make text chatting with a native speaker motivating in the same way as diving into a new programming language, even without having ever composed a sentence before.
I doubt it. Even programming languages with very large 'vocabularies' are tiny compared to natural languages and the grammatical rules of any natural language are much more complex than the syntax of any programming language.
Realistically, when you learn a new PL, how much time goes into learning syntax versus other things?
Compare this with the experience of a Spanish native speaker dropped into first grade in America, and not knowing a word of English. They have school for 6 hours a day, every weekday. = 30 hr/week total
These are not comparable, even by volume.
When you account for the burden of code-switching among languages, and the disconnection from what interests them of what little Spanish the Americans hear, it’s even more obvious why we Americans don’t end up learning Spanish, and Hispanic immigrants who go to school in the US speak English with fluency and ease, even when they first encounter it only late in life.
Then I moved to Brazil and was speaking Portuguese fluently in about 6 months. Nobody was more surprised than I was.
Then, after spending a few years teaching English as a foreign language, I realized a few things.
First of all, pretty much anybody can pick up a new language, since pretty much everyone speaks a native tongue. Learning a second language really isn't any different. I was shocked at how natural it felt, picking up Portuguese -- I just felt like I was 3 years old again.
But second, unless you move to a foreign country and spend all day in the language, very few people have the time or exposure to learn a second language this way. It's just not realistic.
So third, this is why traditional language-learning classes fail for most people, because the teaching style bears so little resemblance to the natural way our brain picks up language. (This is not a criticism, it's just the reality of what you can do with a very limited amount of time and the classroom format -- and believe me, I know!)
But fourth, a few students thrive in the classroom format and pick up the language anyway. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily that they have better innate language aptitude -- they just seem to be the lucky few who are more compatible with the classroom format.
So I wonder, is the test described in this article identifying people who are actually better at learning languages "naturally", or people who are better at learning them in the very different environment of the language-learning classroom?