Am I too old to learn a language?

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Annyeonghaseyo. Welcome to the Five Week Language Show. Today, I want to answer a question that I get from people so often and it’s, am I too old to learn a language? And I think it’s such an interesting question, and I want to talk about the research in a very simple way, and then I want to talk about what that means for people.

So there are a lot of myths out there. I want to call the myths for the most part, that it’s harder for adults to learn languages. And it just isn’t entirely untrue. But I want to start with the very basic research about how people become proficient in second languages. And that’s the work of Dr. Stephen Krashen, and he has five theories of language acquisition. And he calls it acquisition. And one of the first theories, learning acquisition.

Am I too old to learn a language? – acquisition

So language acquisition is mostly how you mastered your first language, or it’s a huge part of mastering a second, third, fourth, et cetera, language. And it’s those things that you naturally pick up because you understood them.

Imagine your parents reading to you or sitting in a classroom and being read to, watching movies, listening to songs, that natural immersion. And you’re not thinking about the grammar that’s being presented to you. You’re not thinking about patterns. You’re just understanding the content. The communication.

Am I too old to learn a language – learning

Learning are the really deliberate things that people do. And you did this also if you were educated in your first language or in any language, you’ve done this too, where you’ve learned parts of speech and grammar and patterns. You’ve done exercises, really deliberate activities, focused on overlearning patterns, et cetera.

So there are lots of theories about that children are better language learners. And I want to say there’s one study. I wish I could remember it. Between the languages, after 14, basically people can’t learn languages. And we know that that’s not true.

So I want you to think about the life of a child compared to the life of an adult. Children are often put in situations, right? They live in a certain country with a family that speaks a certain language, and they have certain activities and certain ways of being exposed to that language. It could be through their church they’re learning certain things, or their place of worship, or their not place of worship, science, perhaps. Think about all the different experiences that a person would have. Think about a family that might move from one country to another. And they’re speaking one language at home and another language at school.

Bottom line, children do learn from their environment, and it’s the environment that we put them in. And they tend to do this over a really long period of time. So it takes kids a couple of years to master what we call BICS, which is interpersonal talking to people, essentially. And then they might appear to be fluent in the language, because they are, they’re fluent speakers. But to get that same level of academic ability in a language usually takes about five to seven years. So it’s a long time.

Children also do really well with accents. And I think that that’s physiological, just being able to hear certain sounds and mimic them, and have them be natural to a person. I really believe that that has a huge part of things.

Think about your life as an adult. As an adult,