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Just Like You Learned Your Native Language!!!
I was watching TV the other night, and I saw a commercial for language courses that made a promise that I've heard far too many times: you can learn [insert language here] just like you learned English! I have a particularly strong wincing reflex when I hear that phrase, because out of college I worked for a well-known language school, where I was habitually called upon to assure potential clients that with the method used by that school, they would pick up a foreign language just like they picked up their native language. I died a little inside every time I had to say that... You may already be skeptical enough not to believe such a wild claim. And if you are, you're in very good company. I can't imagine a linguist under the sun who would ever say that it's possible for adults (or even teenagers) to learn a foreign language in the same way that they learned their native language. In fact, it's kind of like an immutable law of physics. People have one shot to learn their native languages in the amazing way that people learn native languages, by exposure and by gobbling up a truly amazing number of words each day. And that's when they're very young children, starting in fact when they're babies. Linguists agree that babies are born with an innate ability to learn languages, a kind of language-learning instinct. In fact, it's been called exactly that, the Language Instinct, which incidentally is also the name of a wonderful book by the linguist Stephen Pinker. (Read this book if you're interested in how babies pick up languages, and how languages work in general.) This language instinct is designed by nature to allow babies and young kids to learn language. It's so effective that people learn an incredible amount of stuff in a relatively short period of time, and, if you think about it, despite incomplete and less-than-perfect "input." It's even good enough for more than one language; people can learn more than one native language if they're exposed at the right time. But this amazing language-learning instinct is suited to babies and young kids, not adults. This doesn't mean that older people can't learn languages. Of course older children and adults learn languages all the time. They just don't do it in the same way that babies and young kids do it. One obvious difference is that older kids and adults have a native language to compare any new languages to, while babies don't. So older minds aren't blank slates or uncarved blocks that just absorb. But that's actually good news, because it means that older language learners can rely on a whole range of learning strategies that babies have no clue about. So, don't be discouraged that you'll never learn a language just like you learned your native language! That doesn't work for you any more, and it shouldn't. You've come a long way, baby... (CHRIS)
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