Bully for you, LB (and more so for your daughter)! My mom heads a Spanish Immersion Center, where high school students (usually gringos, some second-generation native speakers) learn all major subjects (except English and electives, such as Chorus) en espaņol. She has an arsenal of statistics citing the benefits of a bilingual learning environment. I wish I had them in front of me, but studies show that kids from such environments score better on standarized tests across the board, even when controlling for other factors (e.g., household income, race, class, gender etc.). I think they also might be less at-risk for Alzheimer's and other diseases that attack your mind later in life.
OMG. I wouldn't mind if it were being done with some other language—-Latin, say, or Hungarian, or Sumerian, or Chinese. Since it's being done —- and ONLY being done —- in Spanish, it's hard to resist the conclusion that this is part of a deliberate program of Hispanicization on the part of our political and bureaucratic elites.
And Hispanicization is BAD. BAD! BAD! BAD! Chineseification or Hungarianism not so much, and those dead cultures, great but NOT THE MESSICANS!!!!
I like the whole idea that it's up to Americans, or should be, if having more than one language is an advantage. Um, John? It already is.
At the PTA meetings at Keegan's school, they get up and talk, then the Spanish teacher gets up and says everything in Spanish, because so many parents don't speak English very well. I find it charming, and it helps my high school/college Spanish from atrophying altogether. Given that only three non-island countries in this hemisphere don't speak Spanish as a first language, it strikes me as completely stupid not to teach it to everybody as a standard part of the curriculum.
Given that only three non-island countries in this hemisphere don't speak Spanish as a first language
I totally agree with your point, but I count the USA, Canada, Brazil, Surinam, Guyana, and maybe Belize. Insofar as it makes sense to speak of a country speaking a language as a first language -- of course lots of US citizens speak Spanish as a first language.
In California, billingual education was a big controversy a few years ago. Most bilingual education was teaching in Spanish to kids whose native lanquage was Spanish. Proposition 227 was passed to require structured english immersion programs. The problem with some bilingual programs is that kids didn't pick English up as well.
This pro-structured english immersion article has a funny story/sad anecdote about a Tagalog speaking kid placed in a bilingual program who after the first year could speak Spanish, but not English.
There certainly are Chinese immersion programs; my children attend one. Derbyshire is just an idiot. By his logic, we shouldn't be teaching anyone anything. "Teaching calculus? The logical endpoint is that those not knowing calculus will be at a disadvantage in the job market. Is this a thing Americans actually want?"
Oh good lord. If I have kids, I hope to put them in a billingual program because it's really cool to know another language fluently.
And the worry that it may reduce English dominance in the U.S.? Well, it damn well might, but I suspect that may have more to do with birth rates and immigration, in which case the hypothetical Calachildren damn well be conversant in both English and Spanish because when they're ruling the restored Calaphate they're going to have to interview Flunky Candidates in both languages.
Why are these people so frightened of everything all the time?
Terrorists, dark-skinned people, liberals, Mexicans, Arabs, Chinese, homosexuals, academics, trial lawyers, Democrats, French people, Iran, the list of Menaces they fear just goes on and on.
4: Is it just comity, or real agreement? That is, do you think the principles underlying your belief that what Derb said is stupid are interestingly different from the reasons that LB thinks same?
Well, it *is* pretty obvious that a certain strand of right-wingery does spring from the fact that its proponents are [insert insulting but non-gendered/non-homophobic word for cowardly-in-a-particularly-pernicious-and-pathetic-way]...
12 - That's the more sensible argument I've often heard advanced for pure English curricula.
The problem isn't neighborhoods of well-educated children who speak English in their everyday lives having immersion in Chinese or Spanish during the school day, the problem is the schools in a neighborhood of first-generation immigrants who all speak a non-English language teaching most of their classes in that same language, and essentially treating English as a second language.
I had a number of friends in high school who became fluent in English because they came to America and had to start going to school, immersing themselves in a language they didn't know. I'm not so sure, especially given my own experience in second-language classes, that a non-immersive school would be as successful at teaching English to kids who never use it in their day-to-day lives.
That is, I think, a function of poor bilingual education rather than of immersion programs like the one Derb objects to and my daughter is in. To take my daughter's school as an example: we're located in a heavily Latino (mostly Dominican) immigrant area. The program admits a 50%/50% mix of children from English dominant and Spanish dominant families (I should note that this isn't a Latino-Anglo split; for example, a friend of Sally's is from a New York Puerto Rican family, and was raised in English with no more than a smattering of family Spanish -- she's in the program as English dominant). Classes are taught in English two days a week, and Spanish three. The mix of kids means that they educate each other in idiomatic usage of their non-dominant languages; Sally's latched on to a couple of Spanish-dominant kids who she depends on to slip her words she doesn't know on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and she returns the favor on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It really does seem to work very well (rather better for teaching English than Spanish, probably because of the after-school English immersion the kids are getting from TV and street life). While there were a bunch of kids in kindergarten with Sally who couldn't speak English at all, by the end of first grade they all seem fluent -- at worst accented, but fluent. (Sally's Spanish isn't that strong; she can read, write, and follow a conversation fluently, but what she says is still pretty stilted. On the other hand, she's six -- she'll get better.)
I think there are two reasons that it works so well as English teaching; first, the integration of the Spanish and English dominant kids so that they learn the language socially; and second, the fact that the Spanish-dominant kids stay engaged and successful, rather than feeling alienated from their schooling because of their initial lack of English skills -- everyone in the class can't speak some language, so they're no worse off than anyone else.
A hard-working college student in a good school, starting from scratch, can probably attain Spanish fluency and literacy by taking Spanish courses for four years. He or she will be taking other classes too, so Spanish fluency equals one or two years of college. So someone in a good bilingual program will end up a year or so ahead of someone from a monolingual program.
This is assuming that the student takes all the other classes. It's common-sensical to assume that time studying Spanish will be subtracted from time studying other topics, but I think that this is the "lump of education" fallacy. The big differences in schooling are between kids who study a lot and those who don't. In a very intensive educational system it might be judged that Spanish is not a good allocation of time, but few kids are in that kind of system. The big allocation most kids make is between studying and screwing around.
I dunno about that J.E. It's true that I achieved a pretty high level of French competency in two years of college French, and had I taken it every semester I probably would have been comfortable calling myself fluent, but if you become bilingual early, you'll more likely be able to speak the foreign language without an accent, and early bilingualism improves your ability to learn all languages later.
My wife started learning English in her late teens, and is near native speaker level in terms of grammar and vocabulary -- in fact is rather better on both counts than a lot of native speakers I know and she's certainly able to talk *about* English in a much more sophisticated way than most native speakers. However, her accent remains noticeably 'foreign' and probably always will.
The argument in 12 is indeed the one that was put forward in favor of making bilingual education illegal. It's a good argument; I'm not sure how true it is. The result of Prop 227, in any case, is that there are very very few bilingual programs in California now, which makes it tough if you actually want your kid to learn a second language other than English; also, kids who are put in English-immersion programs without teachers who speak their language at all have a really, really, really hard time. ESL education in Cali is just a huge problem, the more so because of school funding issues that have been in place for 30 years.
22: There's also the fact that ability to learn a language decreases with age; the brain isn't as plastic and can't make the switches as easily. When I learned German as a kid I was remarkably good at it. Attempting to learn French in graduate school? Stlll a relatively fast learner, but it just doesn't stick nearly as well as it did (and eliding sounds and remember to drop the t's will never happen), and it's like my brain thinks 'Oh, foreign language? German time!' and pulls out the entire wrong dictionary.
My point was really that fluency in a foreign language has at least the value of a year of college. If it's more than that (because you learn the language better when younger) it strengthens my argument. (I do doubt that fluency with full vocabulary can be attained in less than 4 years by a student taking a normal load of nor foreign language courses.)
ESL and bilingual ed are often used by administration to tracking purposes, effectively deade-nding the foreigners. The same is done with special ed; sometimes a school gets a bonus for special ed and ESL and puts in as many students as possible.
Secondary ed, especially special ed and ESL-bilingual, is a bureaucratic nightmare and political football. we're incredibly lucky that the schools aren't worse than they are.
and it's like my brain thinks 'Oh, foreign language? German time!' and pulls out the entire wrong dictionary.
For about a year after I came back to Texas after five and a half years in China, I would try to speak Chinese to Spanish speakers. Didn't work very well.
I envision the foreign language part of the brain as resembling a trunk where the last thing you put it in is the first thing you pull out.
I pull Samoan out for Spanish all the time: my Samoan was never good, and my Spanish is the merest of smatterings, and they both appear to be stored in a box in my head marked 'Foreign'. Languages are a weak point of mine.
I have problems with French and Russian. I'm not fluent in either, but have done two very different types of immersion in each. When I went to Quebec shortly after finishing a summer of Russian I finally had to go with English all the time, since I couldn't even say the few words of French I still remembered at that time without mixing in Russian. I'm good with language classes, not so good with the continued application thing.
resembling a trunk where the last thing you put it in is the first thing you pull out
That's more accurate than you may realize. The missus coordinates an aging and memory study that focuses on Alzheimer's patients. People who speak multiple languages will lose them in the reverse order they learned them as the disease progresses. One patient, who was born in Germany, then moved to South America, then the US, lost her ability to speak English first and began speaking totally in Spanish. When the Spanish disappeared, she reverted to speaking completely in German, but none of her family members spoke it, which, as you might expect, caused some problems there at the end.
That's really interesting. My Swiss grandmother had Alzheimer's and we wondered if she might go back to German but she never did. It's possible that the disease never progressed that far.
On the other hand, in the 1930s she heard a recording of her voice and was so shocked by the thickness of her accent that she saw a voice therapist and got rid of it. That was during her 20s; she was so successful that it didn't occur to me for a long time that she'd ever had an accent. So it may be that she'd put English to the front of her brain for all time, so to speak.
I'm really great at learning about languages, and very good at mimicking sounds, but fluency in speaking comes hard for me. I think it's a performance anxiety thing. I don't like to do things in public that I'm not already pretty damn good at (which is a major reason why I don't exactly rival Fred Astaire). Those people who just throw themselves in and start speaking to everyone no matter how crap their language skills (and who therefore rather quickly acquire spoken proficiency) have always been a source of envy for me. I take slim comfort from the fact that they don't know why that verb takes the form it does.
Is it really true that it becomes harder to learn languages as you get older for physiological reasons? I mean, it seems more likely that it's just that most adults don't have nearly the same motivation to learn those languages, at least in non-immersion environments. Would the average adult in an immersion environment achieve fluency much slower than the average child? On the contrary, I imagine it would be quicker.
As for the accents, I don't deny that it's true that many adults don't pick accents up as easily as children do. I bet this is at least partially a function of how well-trained your ear is, though, and in any case, I doubt any intelligent person would be incapable of getting rid of over 99% of their accent (once fluent with vocab and grammar) with a few months of speech therapy.
I would be interested in any cites showing me I'm wrong. But I think much of the "adults can't learn foreign languages" meme is an urban language. Umm, legend.
This paper thinks that it is physiological. I think that there are other papers that come down more on the motivation side.
On the accent side, the anecdote I always remember is that henry kissinger has a sister who was a few years younger than henry when they came to the US. The sister doesn't have an noticable accent.
I knew a multi-lingual family in high school. French-speaking Swiss mom, Italian dad; the three kids spoke mostly Italian in the home and went to bilingual French-English elementary school, but all of the later education and HS social life was in English. The two youngest had just a slight, indefinably "European" accent, but the oldest brother--who was very handsome and a bit snobbish--well, everyone remarked how his Italian accent became more and more pronounced every year.
My mom and all of her brothers and sisters came to the US in their 20s or later. How well they speak English, and with what accent, seems to have depended more on their living and working environments than on their ages. Although the two who speak English best, and with the slightest accents, are the youngest, they also happen to be the ones who married English-only speakers.
She learned Russian and German before she learned English, so chronologically English is her 4th language. However, she's largely forgotten any Russian and German she learned -- to the point where my German (which isn't even fit to be called 'poor') is probably better.
I seem to be OK with languages -- in the sense that whenever I've had to learn something for 'tourist' purposes I've picked up the pronunciation and the vocabulary pretty quickly. But I'm also lazy so speak nothing, including Czech, beyond 'advanced tourist' level. The only languages I studied at University were, unfortunately, dead ones (Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse).
I do sympathize with M/tch's performance anxiety in 35, I get that too.
Bully for you, LB (and more so for your daughter)! My mom heads a Spanish Immersion Center, where high school students (usually gringos, some second-generation native speakers) learn all major subjects (except English and electives, such as Chorus) en espaņol. She has an arsenal of statistics citing the benefits of a bilingual learning environment. I wish I had them in front of me, but studies show that kids from such environments score better on standarized tests across the board, even when controlling for other factors (e.g., household income, race, class, gender etc.). I think they also might be less at-risk for Alzheimer's and other diseases that attack your mind later in life.
Bottom line: learning languages is a good idea.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:19 PM
Please don't put "my little girl" so close to "John Derbyshire".
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 4:21 PM
OMG. I wouldn't mind if it were being done with some other language—-Latin, say, or Hungarian, or Sumerian, or Chinese. Since it's being done —- and ONLY being done —- in Spanish, it's hard to resist the conclusion that this is part of a deliberate program of Hispanicization on the part of our political and bureaucratic elites.
And Hispanicization is BAD. BAD! BAD! BAD! Chineseification or Hungarianism not so much, and those dead cultures, great but NOT THE MESSICANS!!!!
I like the whole idea that it's up to Americans, or should be, if having more than one language is an advantage. Um, John? It already is.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:13 PM
We have acheived comity--left and right coming together to agree that what Derbyshire has written was monumentally stupid (and perhaps worse).
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:27 PM
At the PTA meetings at Keegan's school, they get up and talk, then the Spanish teacher gets up and says everything in Spanish, because so many parents don't speak English very well. I find it charming, and it helps my high school/college Spanish from atrophying altogether. Given that only three non-island countries in this hemisphere don't speak Spanish as a first language, it strikes me as completely stupid not to teach it to everybody as a standard part of the curriculum.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:28 PM
I'm pretty sure you can find Chinese bilingual programs. Or at least could in California a few years ago. I don't know if they're still around.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:29 PM
My Little Girl Is John Derbyshire's Worst Nightmare
Wait a few years.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:29 PM
Given that only three non-island countries in this hemisphere don't speak Spanish as a first language
I totally agree with your point, but I count the USA, Canada, Brazil, Surinam, Guyana, and maybe Belize. Insofar as it makes sense to speak of a country speaking a language as a first language -- of course lots of US citizens speak Spanish as a first language.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:36 PM
The little countries don't count, Weiner.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 5:53 PM
You could also make a serious argument that Spanish is not the first language of Paraguay.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:12 PM
Surinam, Guyana, and maybe Belize [...] Paraguay
Damn. I take it all back. Learn English, motherfuckers!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:13 PM
Derbyshire is way off-base.
In California, billingual education was a big controversy a few years ago. Most bilingual education was teaching in Spanish to kids whose native lanquage was Spanish. Proposition 227 was passed to require structured english immersion programs. The problem with some bilingual programs is that kids didn't pick English up as well.
This pro-structured english immersion article has a funny story/sad anecdote about a Tagalog speaking kid placed in a bilingual program who after the first year could speak Spanish, but not English.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:34 PM
funny/sad anecdote
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 6:35 PM
There certainly are Chinese immersion programs; my children attend one. Derbyshire is just an idiot. By his logic, we shouldn't be teaching anyone anything. "Teaching calculus? The logical endpoint is that those not knowing calculus will be at a disadvantage in the job market. Is this a thing Americans actually want?"
Posted by y | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 7:19 PM
Oh good lord. If I have kids, I hope to put them in a billingual program because it's really cool to know another language fluently.
And the worry that it may reduce English dominance in the U.S.? Well, it damn well might, but I suspect that may have more to do with birth rates and immigration, in which case the hypothetical Calachildren damn well be conversant in both English and Spanish because when they're ruling the restored Calaphate they're going to have to interview Flunky Candidates in both languages.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 8:20 PM
Why are these people so frightened of everything all the time?
Terrorists, dark-skinned people, liberals, Mexicans, Arabs, Chinese, homosexuals, academics, trial lawyers, Democrats, French people, Iran, the list of Menaces they fear just goes on and on.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 05-31-06 10:52 PM
4: Is it just comity, or real agreement? That is, do you think the principles underlying your belief that what Derb said is stupid are interestingly different from the reasons that LB thinks same?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 12:29 AM
re: 16
Well, it *is* pretty obvious that a certain strand of right-wingery does spring from the fact that its proponents are [insert insulting but non-gendered/non-homophobic word for cowardly-in-a-particularly-pernicious-and-pathetic-way]...
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 4:35 AM
12 - That's the more sensible argument I've often heard advanced for pure English curricula.
The problem isn't neighborhoods of well-educated children who speak English in their everyday lives having immersion in Chinese or Spanish during the school day, the problem is the schools in a neighborhood of first-generation immigrants who all speak a non-English language teaching most of their classes in that same language, and essentially treating English as a second language.
I had a number of friends in high school who became fluent in English because they came to America and had to start going to school, immersing themselves in a language they didn't know. I'm not so sure, especially given my own experience in second-language classes, that a non-immersive school would be as successful at teaching English to kids who never use it in their day-to-day lives.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 8:59 AM
That is, I think, a function of poor bilingual education rather than of immersion programs like the one Derb objects to and my daughter is in. To take my daughter's school as an example: we're located in a heavily Latino (mostly Dominican) immigrant area. The program admits a 50%/50% mix of children from English dominant and Spanish dominant families (I should note that this isn't a Latino-Anglo split; for example, a friend of Sally's is from a New York Puerto Rican family, and was raised in English with no more than a smattering of family Spanish -- she's in the program as English dominant). Classes are taught in English two days a week, and Spanish three. The mix of kids means that they educate each other in idiomatic usage of their non-dominant languages; Sally's latched on to a couple of Spanish-dominant kids who she depends on to slip her words she doesn't know on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and she returns the favor on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It really does seem to work very well (rather better for teaching English than Spanish, probably because of the after-school English immersion the kids are getting from TV and street life). While there were a bunch of kids in kindergarten with Sally who couldn't speak English at all, by the end of first grade they all seem fluent -- at worst accented, but fluent. (Sally's Spanish isn't that strong; she can read, write, and follow a conversation fluently, but what she says is still pretty stilted. On the other hand, she's six -- she'll get better.)
I think there are two reasons that it works so well as English teaching; first, the integration of the Spanish and English dominant kids so that they learn the language socially; and second, the fact that the Spanish-dominant kids stay engaged and successful, rather than feeling alienated from their schooling because of their initial lack of English skills -- everyone in the class can't speak some language, so they're no worse off than anyone else.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 9:24 AM
A hard-working college student in a good school, starting from scratch, can probably attain Spanish fluency and literacy by taking Spanish courses for four years. He or she will be taking other classes too, so Spanish fluency equals one or two years of college. So someone in a good bilingual program will end up a year or so ahead of someone from a monolingual program.
This is assuming that the student takes all the other classes. It's common-sensical to assume that time studying Spanish will be subtracted from time studying other topics, but I think that this is the "lump of education" fallacy. The big differences in schooling are between kids who study a lot and those who don't. In a very intensive educational system it might be judged that Spanish is not a good allocation of time, but few kids are in that kind of system. The big allocation most kids make is between studying and screwing around.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 11:22 AM
I dunno about that J.E. It's true that I achieved a pretty high level of French competency in two years of college French, and had I taken it every semester I probably would have been comfortable calling myself fluent, but if you become bilingual early, you'll more likely be able to speak the foreign language without an accent, and early bilingualism improves your ability to learn all languages later.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 11:30 AM
The accent thing is probably the key difference.
My wife started learning English in her late teens, and is near native speaker level in terms of grammar and vocabulary -- in fact is rather better on both counts than a lot of native speakers I know and she's certainly able to talk *about* English in a much more sophisticated way than most native speakers. However, her accent remains noticeably 'foreign' and probably always will.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 11:36 AM
The argument in 12 is indeed the one that was put forward in favor of making bilingual education illegal. It's a good argument; I'm not sure how true it is. The result of Prop 227, in any case, is that there are very very few bilingual programs in California now, which makes it tough if you actually want your kid to learn a second language other than English; also, kids who are put in English-immersion programs without teachers who speak their language at all have a really, really, really hard time. ESL education in Cali is just a huge problem, the more so because of school funding issues that have been in place for 30 years.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 11:45 AM
22: There's also the fact that ability to learn a language decreases with age; the brain isn't as plastic and can't make the switches as easily. When I learned German as a kid I was remarkably good at it. Attempting to learn French in graduate school? Stlll a relatively fast learner, but it just doesn't stick nearly as well as it did (and eliding sounds and remember to drop the t's will never happen), and it's like my brain thinks 'Oh, foreign language? German time!' and pulls out the entire wrong dictionary.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 5:25 PM
My point was really that fluency in a foreign language has at least the value of a year of college. If it's more than that (because you learn the language better when younger) it strengthens my argument. (I do doubt that fluency with full vocabulary can be attained in less than 4 years by a student taking a normal load of nor foreign language courses.)
ESL and bilingual ed are often used by administration to tracking purposes, effectively deade-nding the foreigners. The same is done with special ed; sometimes a school gets a bonus for special ed and ESL and puts in as many students as possible.
Secondary ed, especially special ed and ESL-bilingual, is a bureaucratic nightmare and political football. we're incredibly lucky that the schools aren't worse than they are.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 6:18 PM
23: What's her first language?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 7:01 PM
Czech, isn't it?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 7:31 PM
Check!
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 8:14 PM
and it's like my brain thinks 'Oh, foreign language? German time!' and pulls out the entire wrong dictionary.
For about a year after I came back to Texas after five and a half years in China, I would try to speak Chinese to Spanish speakers. Didn't work very well.
I envision the foreign language part of the brain as resembling a trunk where the last thing you put it in is the first thing you pull out.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 10:18 PM
I pull Samoan out for Spanish all the time: my Samoan was never good, and my Spanish is the merest of smatterings, and they both appear to be stored in a box in my head marked 'Foreign'. Languages are a weak point of mine.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 10:22 PM
You're all making me feel much better about the way I occasionally confuse French and Spanish. At least those two languages are similar.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 10:28 PM
I have problems with French and Russian. I'm not fluent in either, but have done two very different types of immersion in each. When I went to Quebec shortly after finishing a summer of Russian I finally had to go with English all the time, since I couldn't even say the few words of French I still remembered at that time without mixing in Russian. I'm good with language classes, not so good with the continued application thing.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 10:35 PM
resembling a trunk where the last thing you put it in is the first thing you pull out
That's more accurate than you may realize. The missus coordinates an aging and memory study that focuses on Alzheimer's patients. People who speak multiple languages will lose them in the reverse order they learned them as the disease progresses. One patient, who was born in Germany, then moved to South America, then the US, lost her ability to speak English first and began speaking totally in Spanish. When the Spanish disappeared, she reverted to speaking completely in German, but none of her family members spoke it, which, as you might expect, caused some problems there at the end.
Sad, but fascinating.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 10:42 PM
That's really interesting. My Swiss grandmother had Alzheimer's and we wondered if she might go back to German but she never did. It's possible that the disease never progressed that far.
On the other hand, in the 1930s she heard a recording of her voice and was so shocked by the thickness of her accent that she saw a voice therapist and got rid of it. That was during her 20s; she was so successful that it didn't occur to me for a long time that she'd ever had an accent. So it may be that she'd put English to the front of her brain for all time, so to speak.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 10:57 PM
I'm really great at learning about languages, and very good at mimicking sounds, but fluency in speaking comes hard for me. I think it's a performance anxiety thing. I don't like to do things in public that I'm not already pretty damn good at (which is a major reason why I don't exactly rival Fred Astaire). Those people who just throw themselves in and start speaking to everyone no matter how crap their language skills (and who therefore rather quickly acquire spoken proficiency) have always been a source of envy for me. I take slim comfort from the fact that they don't know why that verb takes the form it does.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06- 1-06 11:00 PM
Is it really true that it becomes harder to learn languages as you get older for physiological reasons? I mean, it seems more likely that it's just that most adults don't have nearly the same motivation to learn those languages, at least in non-immersion environments. Would the average adult in an immersion environment achieve fluency much slower than the average child? On the contrary, I imagine it would be quicker.
As for the accents, I don't deny that it's true that many adults don't pick accents up as easily as children do. I bet this is at least partially a function of how well-trained your ear is, though, and in any case, I doubt any intelligent person would be incapable of getting rid of over 99% of their accent (once fluent with vocab and grammar) with a few months of speech therapy.
I would be interested in any cites showing me I'm wrong. But I think much of the "adults can't learn foreign languages" meme is an urban language. Umm, legend.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 06- 5-06 2:50 PM
This paper thinks that it is physiological. I think that there are other papers that come down more on the motivation side.
On the accent side, the anecdote I always remember is that henry kissinger has a sister who was a few years younger than henry when they came to the US. The sister doesn't have an noticable accent.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 06- 5-06 3:09 PM
This paper
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 06- 5-06 3:11 PM
The version I've heard is that his older brother, who doesn't have an accent, explained the difference by saying "I played with the other kids."
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06- 5-06 3:14 PM
I knew a multi-lingual family in high school. French-speaking Swiss mom, Italian dad; the three kids spoke mostly Italian in the home and went to bilingual French-English elementary school, but all of the later education and HS social life was in English. The two youngest had just a slight, indefinably "European" accent, but the oldest brother--who was very handsome and a bit snobbish--well, everyone remarked how his Italian accent became more and more pronounced every year.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06- 5-06 3:29 PM
My mom and all of her brothers and sisters came to the US in their 20s or later. How well they speak English, and with what accent, seems to have depended more on their living and working environments than on their ages. Although the two who speak English best, and with the slightest accents, are the youngest, they also happen to be the ones who married English-only speakers.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06- 5-06 3:43 PM
This looks like a balanced article.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 06- 5-06 4:03 PM
re: 28 and 28. Yes.
She learned Russian and German before she learned English, so chronologically English is her 4th language. However, she's largely forgotten any Russian and German she learned -- to the point where my German (which isn't even fit to be called 'poor') is probably better.
I seem to be OK with languages -- in the sense that whenever I've had to learn something for 'tourist' purposes I've picked up the pronunciation and the vocabulary pretty quickly. But I'm also lazy so speak nothing, including Czech, beyond 'advanced tourist' level. The only languages I studied at University were, unfortunately, dead ones (Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse).
I do sympathize with M/tch's performance anxiety in 35, I get that too.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06- 5-06 5:44 PM