Why do kids learn a new language faster?
Okay, I just went to a Korean church in southern Chicago today.
Most people in the church were ethnically Korean.
The older people speak Korean better than English even though they have lived in the US for more than 20 years.
Plus, they speak English with a Korean accent.
However, the kids speak English far much better than Korean and their accent is totally native-like.
When a family moves to the US, kids generally master English within a year and their accent becomes perfectly American while their parents still have a hard time to speak English.
What makes kids learn a new language faster than adults?
Can adults never learn a foreign language like kids do?
I'm so frustrated that my English is still bad.
Тhat article is misleading. It makes it think wrong things.
I think it's not really the case that children learn languages faster -- or at least as much faster as it may seem. They definitely learn with much less effort, though!
That effort is where the difference comes into play. A child doesn't need to make any effort at all to speak a language fluently. They may make some occasional mistakes and have to be corrected, but they handle the process with ease. Adults have to struggle to learn until they reach a near-native level.
People tend to put up a lot of resistance to learning a language completely unless they have a deep desire to learn the language. Somebody who learns a language because they have to will never learn it as well as they would if they want to. If you want to master English, you must have a burning desire to master English. If you only aspire to learn enough English to get by, well, that's what you'll end up learning.
And mastering a language is a TON of hard work! Native-level mastery might not be worth the effort unless you either have a really pressing need to master the language or a deep love for it. But, of course, there's nothing wrong with having a deep love for a language!
- Kef
I wonder if interference from one's native language is also an obstacle in acquiring a foreign language. If adult learners didn't have preconceived ideas from their native language about how to express certain concepts, they wouldn't make the kind of mistakes that result from trying to fit one language's rules to another's.
furrykef,
"I think it's not really the case that children learn languages faster -- or at least as much faster as it may seem. They definitely learn with much less effort, though!"
You also have to wonder about the amount of input adults who move to another country receive. The assumption seems to often be that if someone is in a country, they are receiving 24/7 input in that country's language as a practical matter, but it seems to be wrong. There is a tendency to ghettoize among adults (and even some children) who go to another country.
This article has some info about that:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/top-10-reasons-why-expats-who-live-in-japan-dont-know-japanese
I met a woman who said she had been living in Japan for 15 years and didn't speak more than a few survival phrases. She said she was an English teacher and said that her employers keep screwing her repeatedly and she said she was planning to take a Japanese class to finally start learning, but she is so tired in the evening that she feels she doesn't have any time. I'm not willing to buy that she hasn't learned Japanese because she's an adult and she should be given tolerance and understanding for not knowing. It's her own damn fault, and I suspect the same is true for many adults who don't learn the language of the country they're in well.
Also, receiving an amount of input (say, 20,000 hours total) over a 20 year period is not nearly as good as receiving that same amount over a 4 year period, for example. As Khatzumoto says, the water never gets to _boil_. Now, to go out an get more input, goodbye.
You treat the guy who writes that website like he's some kind of god or prophet. All you do is parrot what he says.
Guest (the last one to post),
It's not quite that. It's that he makes explicit a lot of what I already sort of deep-down believed to be true, but couldn't quite put it to words. I never was that good at putting things to words.
I'll also parrot Antimoon's pages, but the authors of that page haven't updated in a while, it seems.
Actually, I could write just as well an article in the opposite conviction, and you would take it as gospel, though I refuse to force on you my ideals. You see, nothing is fixed, all is relative. What works for one man is bane of another. Why do people always follow blindly others' words, and not make their own theories just for themselves, CUSTOM MADE, not trying to force on robes which do not fit.
Guest,
Oh, I see. You wanna continue that gospel thing. That's fine. Have a good day.
Guest,
Looking more closely at your post, it actually appears that you are making a different point than I had originally thought, though why you are wanting to make this point you are making now, I have no clue, because it shows a complete ignorance of all that I posted on this forum. Especially this part right here made me realize you were speaking of something completely different than I had orignally thought, what I had originally thought was fine and I thought would have required better defense on my part, but now it looks like you're just an idiot for making this actual point, all encompassed in this first sentence:
"Actually, I could write just as well an article in the opposite conviction, and you would take it as gospel, though I refuse to force on you my ideals."
Wrong wrong wrong. You make it seem like he was the one who instilled in me this belief, when I had posted just before yours:
"It's that he makes explicit a lot of what I already sort of deep-down believed to be true, but couldn't quite put it to words."
So, even if you worded an opposite view very well and convincingly, I probably would not be convinced. I had discovered alljapaneseallthetime.com from this forum, and the guy there largely agrees with antimoon.com already, as I did (and I was coming in that direction before I had even heard of antimoon.com), so wrong wrong wrong and kudos for completely missing a good valid point, acting what I believe in the first place and why I did, and instead making an idiotic post suggesting that I just blow with the wind.
Man, what an idiot. Be glad that you're posting behind that "Guest" moniker, because I wouldn't be able to spot you in another thread.
*acting up there should be "asking."
>>A child doesn't need to make any effort at all to speak a language fluently. They may make some occasional mistakes and have to be corrected, but they handle the process with ease. Adults have to struggle to learn until they reach a near-native level.
People tend to put up a lot of resistance to learning a language completely unless they have a deep desire to learn the language. [...]
For me, it's entirely a political thing. Certain pragmatic stuff is keeping adults in every corner of the world from learning "foreign" languages. It's to be learnt consciously, thus the possibility of becoming analytic, and often people have to pay to learn, and no one wants to *pay*. I said I wouldn't bash all kinds of commercial initiatives, but here it is: in university or in language X institutes or in class or whatever, with all the limitations the antimoon webmasters or other language guys on the net have named in great detail, apparently language learning has often become some sort of hairshirt work for many, esp. the unmotivated. And even if you are determined, you have to struggle with those commercial initiatives and pragmatic stuff (when you say you learn language X, people often assume you must know a lot, and you might feel embarrassed, or whatnot).
So, if you compare the contemporary learning trends with *the ways* of the *dead white men*, i.e. the classical ways and aims of language learning for literary people/figures/university students of past centuries (no racism intended; it's simply history), you might be disappointed. While modern technology and int'l trade have actually attributed to factors that favour language learning (in the past, people had to go abroad to learn), the general de-motivating factors would be cultural prejudices or "practical" concerns or disappointment or whatnot. It's just quite important to try to think out of the box...