Year: 2004

A reader writes:

Hope you are well. I love the blog and enjoy especially the Language helps. I have Mounce’s Greek for the rest of Us. My wife is Puerto Rican and I want her to talk to my kids in Spanish. I would also like to learn but wonder how hard it is for an adult to learn Spanish or Latin etc.
Have you ever seen anything on this subject of adult learning of Language? Especially those that can’t travel to another country.

If you want to learn Spanish, I strongly recommend Pimsleur Spanish. This will make it far easier than typical Spanish classes. See my language resource recommendations for buying advice (i.e., how to get it the cheapest way).

As far as the ability of adults to learn langauge, it has long been noticed that adults often don’t learn them as well as children. There are two proposed explanations for this:

1. Humans have a language learning faculty that starts to degenerate once we hit puberty.

2. Adults have less time and motivation to study langauges than little children do.

When it comes to learning accents, a variant of position #1 may (or may not) be true. Adults have a terrible time learning certain sounds and accents. Fortunately for you, Spanish is not a language English-speakers have this trouble with, there are certain sounds in Eastern Arabic and Eastern Aramaic that are virtually impossible for English-speakers to pronounce (after a lot of practice, I’ve gotten to where I can do them if I pronounce them very carefully, but they aren’t natural for me).

When it comes to learning the language itself (not just how to pronounce it with a native accent), I’m convinced that position #2 is true: There is no language learning faculty that degenerates with age. Adults simply have less time and motivation compared to children.

Pimsleur was one of the things that helped convince me of this. It is modelled on the way kids learn their first language, and I was struck at how easily it was to learn using this method. After some experience with the method, I became convinced that position #1 is simply a myth. If you were to put an adult in the same position as a child, we’d do just as well–or better.

Imagine what it would be like if you were dropped into an environment in which you had no exposure to anything but your new language, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, for years. You couldn’t talk to anybody in your native language. You don’t have anything to read in it. There is no TV, movies, or radio shows in your native language. Nothing! All you can do to get your needs met is (a) cry or (b) start learning the language of the natives.

I think that if I (or anybody) were put in this situation, after six years I’d speak the language at least as well as a six-year old child. Probably better, since as an adult I’d have a leg up on babies learning a language for the first time–i.e., I already know a lot about how languages work and how to experiment to find out the new language maps onto concepts I’ve already acquired (e.g., I already know what a dog, a God, love, death, and justice are, and it’ll be a lot easier for me to figure out the local words for these concepts than it will be for a baby who has to acquire the concepts at the same time he’s learning the words). The same would go for you.

So take heart! Your ability to learn languages hasn’t degenerated with age–in fact, in some ways you’re better off learning a new language than a baby is. You may not be able to have the total immersion environment a baby has, but if you apply yourself you can achieve your language goals, and it will be easier than you think if you use the best methods (like Pimsleur).