Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "10-steps"
Murphy's Laws
HOW NOT TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
In Ten Easy Steps
Step 3. Grow as old as you can before you start to learn it
The decline in ability to pick up foreign phonology with age is well known (Oyama, 1976).
It is partly compensated for by better developed cognitive skills and potentially greater extrinsic motivation, which may explain why adults can learn faster than kids initially.
Indeed, White and Gennessee (1996) have found that adults can achieve native-like competence in a foreign language, and even I learnt pretty fluent Portuguese and Italian as an adult. However, in failing to learn much Bulgarian, I discovered that the declining capacity of my 47-year-old memory was a factor, and laid part of the blame for my trouble with words on the preponderance of long words in that language. However, just a few months later, I fared no better with the mainly monosyllabic words of Thai.
Back in the 'Seventies, the results of a psycholinguistic experiment reached even the British tabloid press when Guiora et al. (1972) showed that pronunciation of a foreign language improved after a drop of booze. The researchers attributed this to alcohol's ability to diminish inhibition and foreign language anxiety.
It is less well known that the foreign language in Guiora's experiment was Thai. In Thailand, I drank mostly with English-speakers, but I noticed that my foreign language anxiety had increased with age, even though I was much more aware of how harmful it could be to language-learning.
According to Spolsky (1989, p.114), “Up to a point, an anxious learner tries harder; beyond this level, anxiety prevents performance”. Yes, indeed: let anxiety stop you!
In Ten Easy Steps
Step 3. Grow as old as you can before you start to learn it
The decline in ability to pick up foreign phonology with age is well known (Oyama, 1976).
It is partly compensated for by better developed cognitive skills and potentially greater extrinsic motivation, which may explain why adults can learn faster than kids initially.
Indeed, White and Gennessee (1996) have found that adults can achieve native-like competence in a foreign language, and even I learnt pretty fluent Portuguese and Italian as an adult. However, in failing to learn much Bulgarian, I discovered that the declining capacity of my 47-year-old memory was a factor, and laid part of the blame for my trouble with words on the preponderance of long words in that language. However, just a few months later, I fared no better with the mainly monosyllabic words of Thai.
Back in the 'Seventies, the results of a psycholinguistic experiment reached even the British tabloid press when Guiora et al. (1972) showed that pronunciation of a foreign language improved after a drop of booze. The researchers attributed this to alcohol's ability to diminish inhibition and foreign language anxiety.
It is less well known that the foreign language in Guiora's experiment was Thai. In Thailand, I drank mostly with English-speakers, but I noticed that my foreign language anxiety had increased with age, even though I was much more aware of how harmful it could be to language-learning.
According to Spolsky (1989, p.114), “Up to a point, an anxious learner tries harder; beyond this level, anxiety prevents performance”. Yes, indeed: let anxiety stop you!
