5 questions for a language learner in later life #9

Sean’s originally from India, has lived in New Zealand for many years and is currently learning French. Here’s his in-depth take on learning another language as an adult.

1. How do you feel about learning French?

I see all languages as a skill. Hence, if you learn how to cut an onion, it's a low-level skill, but it's part of a bigger "cooking" skill. Hence, I approached French in the same manner. It's just a skill but with far greater complexity. You have to deal with vocabulary, grammar etc.

2. What’s the hardest thing about learning French?

For me at least, French has been more difficult because of the pronunciation. When I learned Spanish, the pronunciation is quite even. The French can mangle a lot of words together. You literally have to figure out what's being said because they are all smooshed together.

The bigger problem, however, was psychological. I had learnt French in school. And I had spent five years with it. I was also a good student and scored high marks in French. Imagine my frustration when I started to learn French and found out that I could not speak a single sentence. I also could not understand what was being said. It feels like five years of wasted work.

But it was just five years of a lost opportunity.

3. How do you overcome this?

I overcome most of these issues by understanding what it takes to improve my skill. In the past, I had tried to use things like Duolingo or learn single words of vocabulary. That doesn't work because it's not natural. When you think of how children learn languages, they do so in a completely different way. A parent speaks to a child in full sentences. A parent may say something like, "It looks like a windy day today."

The second line could be something like, "Do you want to go to the park?" And the third line could be "Where is daddy sitting?" Once I understood that language learning is about sentences, it changed my perspective on how I learnt languages.

The second and probably just as important factor was that the sentences were not connected.

Most language learning is about situations like going to a café and ordering. But that's not how children learn. They are exposed to hundreds of random sentences. And what they are doing is building up a database.

Once I understood that, it was easier to navigate learning any kind of language.

4. What are your goals?

I am going to France in October, but I have no goal in general. I would be happy if I could understand some of the conversations and probably participate in a few. But I know that what I have learned so far has been very limited. I have been studying for an hour every day for the last 60 days.

The good thing about the app that I'm using is that it gives you an understanding of the journey. Hence, in 60 days I have reached just 50% of beginner level. In 120 days I should get to the end of the beginner level.

This means that I am at least 700 days away from becoming reasonably fluent at dealing with different kinds of sentences and situations.

But I do have a goal. And that is with my limited learning to be able to express myself in at least two or three different ways. When we speak in English we may say the same phrase in two or three different ways. Learning how to say the same thing in a different manner gives you flexibility when you are stuck for words.

5. What’s your advice for older people who want to learn a language?

My main advice would be based on what I mentioned above. Make sure that you speak in sentences — and random sentences.

It doesn't matter whether they connect in any way, as long as you are able to express yourself. And know the duration of the journey.

Most people think children learn languages very quickly and that is not true at all. While there is a very early learning period where you can pick up things, the acquisition rate is based solely on the volume of information that a child receives.

Some studies have even looked at how poverty determines your level of comprehension and the quality of your language. In short, kids are building a very large database. Adults who learn languages do not have that level of database construction.

This database problem is also apparently related to rich vs poor. An excerpt: When extrapolated to the words heard by a child within the first four years of their life these results reveal a 30 million word difference. That is, a child from a high-income family will experience 30 million more words within the first four years of life than a child from a low-income family.

A linear extrapolation from the averages in the observational data to a 100-hour week (given a 14-hour waking day) shows the average child in the professional families with 215,000 words of language experience, the average child in a working-class family provided with 125,000 words, and the average child in a welfare family with 62,000 words of language experience. In a 5,200-hour year, the amount would be 11.2 million words for a child in a professional family, 6.5 million words for a child in a working-class family, and 3.2 million words for a child in a welfare family. In four years of such experience, an average child in a professional family would have accumulated experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated experience with 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated experience with 13 million words. By age 4, the average child in a welfare family might have 13 million fewer words of cumulative experience than the average child in a working-class family.

You could safely say that a child from a working class family has less control, hence less skill, and is therefore less talented. But you can see where the roots are of all those problems lie. In this case, it is poverty. But in other cases, there are definite markers that cause both children as well as adults not to learn as quickly.

An adult needs to acquire enough for a database and that takes about a year and a half of study on a regular basis — in sentence format — before they will be able to maintain a very high level of fluency. This estimate is based on about an hour of work on a daily basis. I guess if you spend several hours and you were surrounded by native speakers and signage, then you would pick it up much faster.

I speak English, Spanish, Hindi, and can understand Konkani and Gujarati. And now French as well.

Thank you to Sean for sharing these insights into language learning.

And to find out how others are learning a language in later life see here, here and here.

Need a hand to set up and stick to your DIY language project? I can help.