Our brains work in crazy weird ways and some of the ways it works, we still don’t understand. What I want to know is how we learn a language. I know that when you’re young it’s easier to learn a language because you don’t already have a large language barrier on your speech and communication skills, so it’s easy to adopt one or two languages at once. I also know that the larger your language barrier grows, you can’t make certain sounds or say things a certain way, but I want to know how that even happens. We didn’t have to work or study stuff to learn are native language, so how did it just happen?
It’s said that discovering a language is the best way to learn it, which is how we learned our native language. We wanted to know what something was and someone would tell us and the fact that we wanted to know made us remember and retain the information. We would retain the information exactly, or close to, how the person educating us would say it, which is why people have certain accents in certain areas because they are just copying how their parents or whoever talked. We pick up some words and then eventually some phrases and then start putting all those together to form sentences and full thoughts in our own language.
When we are infants, we are like sponges. We soak up all the information we are told and since our memories are the freshest and emptiest they will ever be in our lives, we can retain a lot of the information we are being told. Infants have a special language learning part of their brain that eventually goes away and gets reversed after we get the hang of our first language. This makes it hard to pick up and learn a new language easily. It could also be due to not being exposed to that language environment constantly. Another reason it’s hard to learn another language is because we are taught it, we don’t learn it; memorizing is a big part that messes a lot of people up. We all are good a memorizes things, it all just comes back to how we memorize and what we believe is important to remember.
After learning so much and thinking in a certain language for so long, it’s hard to start over and learn a new one in a classroom setting. Sitting in a room and being forced to learn something new and probably confusing like a new language after learning all day can be really boring, which is why it’s hard to teach a new language. Living the language is easier because it forces you to get to know what words for things are and then learn phrases and so on. Being in the language environment is how our brain picks up easier something new. Just trying to memorize new verbs and words is hard and most of the time, ineffective.
How some people are taught French.
So by constantly hearing something over and over again, you will eventually pick it up and understand what’s going on; that’s basically how we learn our first language. People are constantly talking to you and your little infant brain and you just have to figure what in the world is going on, and you successful do it by the time you are about two or three. You adjust to the world around you and learn from what you see.
I am currently taking an HDFS class in which we discussed a lot of these topics! I think languages are fascinating, and I am taking French right now. It always frustrates me how some people’s accents sound flawless, while it is very clear that I am an American girl attempting to speak French. In my HDFS class, we learned that we are born with the ability to speak any language, and produce any kinds of sounds or accents involved. After about six months, this fades away for the languages the child is not exposed to. However, children are still able to pick up a language and the appropriate accents with ease until around puberty. My professor often talks about her three children, which she adopted from a foreign country. The children were all different ages when they were adopted. One was beginning to go through puberty, while the other two were younger. My professor says that her oldest has an accent that he will never get rid of, while the two younger children speak perfect English with no trace of an accent. I think that this is particularly interesting, and I can use it as an excuse for why my French accent is no good!
Languages are amazing! I find them all so interesting! People who speak like 10 different languages are fascinating. My goal in life is to be able to speak at least all of the romance languages. Moreover, I agree that the most affective way to learn a language is to be engulfed in it. A big part of learning a language, is not just the language, but the culture as well. For example, when I went to Spain over the summer I went to Madrid, Salamanca, and Barcelona. In Barcelona a lot of people speak English, so speaking Spanish was a bit difficult, but in Madrid and Salamanca a lot of the people spoke Spanish, and didn’t know English. As a result, I was forced so speak Spanish in order to communicate which definitely helped me learn the language, and all of the cultural aspects of the language that you wouldn’t learn through a textbook. I even took a few classes at the University of Salamanca, they have a great program there, you should take a look!
http://www.usal.es/webusal/en
Hi Katherine,
I absolutely love languages and believe that everyone should learn another. I studied abroad my junior year of high school, and that is the only reason that I have become fluent in Spanish. I had been studying it since the eight grade, but a lot of it was due to memorization. I understood some of the basic concepts and did what I could to get by. I was in no way fully understanding it nor was I capable of having a conversation. During my year abroad in Spain, I was constantly immersed in the culture. This constant exposure allowed me to learn the language a lot faster. I was forced to start practicing the language more because it was all I would ever hear. That is why it is so easy for us to learn English when we are young. We do not know any other language so we are constantly absorbing the new information and have to use it to communicate with others. If only it was more commonplace to learn Spanish and other languages at such a young age like those in other countries do. Those in Spain, for example, already can speak English very well because they have been learning it since they were young.
I am 100% Puerto Rican and to this day it is so hard for me to learn spanish. I spend a good amount of time in Puerto Rico and even have friends there. For the life of me I cannot pick up the language. I am so discouraged and let down by it, but I know that the classroom setting wont be where I learn it. My parents barely spoke spanish to me as I was growing up. My brother who is a year older and does not study spanish, speaks it better than me. This is because he was spoken to in spanish the entire first year of his life. I always wondered why that affected him, and now I know!
I really like this post, it always confused me why I could never pick up a language well in school but going to a foreign country I was able to learn a few words pretty quickly. This makes a lot more sense to me, I never thought about the difference between learning a language and discovering one.