Good at Languages

8 thoughts on “Good at Languages”

1. I agree with you for the most part, but don’t you think there are some traits that help with language acquisition? For instance, people with an ear for music seem to pick you languages more easily, on average, and seem to have an easier time losing the nonnative accent than those who have a “tin ear”.

   Otherwise, what you say agrees with common knowledge that depending on what your native language is you have a harder time acquiring some languages than others, not only in terms of pronouncing the sounds but mastering grammar and syntax (where the mindset about how information is conveyed is important) . Thus for someone of European descent it’s easier to pick up another language spoken in Europe or the Middle East than for someone from the Far East because the phonetic structure and grammar are so different. For instance, there are no tenses in Chinese, so it’s hard to translate to a language that does have them, like English or German.

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   1. My mother is an unconscious mimic. I will hear her on the phone and I can tell exactly who she is speaking to by the way her accent shifts and what languages she goes to. When I go visit my uncles and aunts in India, I slow my speech down and bring my consonants out. When I’m in a country store, “y’alls” make an appearance, and when I’m in my hometown I reminisce about losing my gum band at the crick. :p

      English is not similar to Kannada; and Kannada is not similar to Hindi. My mother had what people call total immersion classes in English since kindergarten. My French is the result of study of varying intensities since middle school (every so often the year will come back to me in French).

      A language is not simply a collection of signs and sounds. It’s a universe of its own, and you will only learn a language if you are comfortable in its universe.

      Is this in the intro to your syllabuses? This is so poetic.

      I think you can learn a language without internalizing it, but what you say is 100% true for mastery. (Think State Department Language Levels 4 &5). You know you’ve internalized it when you switch languages in your dreams. But weirdly, when I come across a baby, it feels more natural to me to switch to Kannada; not French.

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      1. “Is this in the intro to your syllabuses? This is so poetic.”

         • Actually, that’s a great idea. 🙂

         “You know you’ve internalized it when you switch languages in your dreams.”

         • Absolutely. Another sign for me is word creation. I create between 5 and 10 words a day in Russian. The more comfortable I am with a language, the more easily I create words in it.

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2. Meh… material reality is also important. Even if I have never felt quite comfortable using one language that I learned and use pretty well, I had to learn it.

   But then I discovered the literatures of that language, and yes, I think that I began to internalize the universe of that language when I discovered its literatures.

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   1. “Meh… material reality is also important. ”

      • Yes. If the people of Quebec weren’t so actively making fun of the way I pronounce “bleuets”, maybe I’d still be speaking French. 🙂 🙂

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      1. I heard you pronounce the word. They probably made fun of you because they thought you were from Jonquière or a similar place.

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3. I knew a man once who spoke hundreds of languages, from Korean to Cherokee, from several versions of Chinese to Polish and Ukranian. I think it would be accurate to say that he was good at learning languages. It would also be accurate to say that he was one in a billion. I once asked him how many languages he spoke. He said he did not know.

   You can read a bit about him here:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Kondratiev

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4. Science is getting there on language acquisition:

   Learning a new language changes your brain network both structurally and functionally, according to Penn State researchers. “Learning and practicing something, for instance a second language, strengthens the brain,” said Ping Li, professor of psychology, linguistics and information sciences and technology. “Like physical exercise, the more you use specific areas of your brain, the more it grows and gets stronger.”

   Li and colleagues studied 39 native English speakers’ brains over a six-week period as half of the participants learned Chinese vocabulary. Of the subjects learning the new vocabulary, those who were more successful in attaining the information showed a more connected brain network than both the less successful participants and those who did not learn the new vocabulary.

   The researchers also found that the participants who were successful learners had a more connected network than the other participants even before learning took place. A better-integrated brain network is more flexible and efficient, making the task of learning a new language easier. Li and colleagues report their results in a recent article published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics.

   The efficiency of brain networks was defined by the researchers in terms of the strength and direction of connections, or edges, between brain regions of interest, or nodes. The stronger the edges going from one node to the next, the faster the nodes can work together, and the more efficient the network.

   https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141112120208.htm

   In my own family, aside from the casual bilingualism of being raised in pre-Communist China, one ancestor learned Cantonese at the relatively advanced age of 30. One granduncle on a different side of my family learned Japanese at the Defense Language Institute during WWII. He worked undercover there posing as a Japanese citizen, his Chinese/English heritage gave him eyes with the epicanthal fold and a skin tone very close to that of an East Asian.

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