Inte en sådan gammal hund!

[muckefuck]

Someone asked me at the release party Thursday night if it's true that "it gets harder to learn a language as you get older". And I gave her my usual weasel answer: It depends. I don't really buy the "critical period" hypothesis. I haven't known too many people in my life who could pass for native in a language they only learned in adulthood, but you only need to meet one, right? It really comes down to how much damn effort are you going to put into "perfect" rather than "more than good enough for government work" and--with few exceptions--the answer is going to be "not much".

The hardest part is that language learning chiefly consists of rote memorisation, and as we all know the memory is the second thing to go. It annoys the hell out of me to find myself looking up a word that I know I've looked up a half dozen times before--maybe even earlier the same day! Perhaps I'm fooling myself when I muse that it would've taken me at most two glances to cement it back when I was twenty. Actually, I know I am, but it sure seems that was the case.

On the plus side, as I explained that evening, languages show more similarities than differences, and the more you see the firmer your sense of what the range of variation really is. Sure, you can find some crazy features out there, but unless you're studying Pirahã or Guugu Yimithirr, most everything will work the way it does in some language you already know. It's just a question of figuring out which of the handful of common alternatives is the one that counts.

Take, for instance, demonstratives (e.g. "this", "that"). The Eskimo-Aleut languages are notorious for making a plethora of distinctions--how close the item is, how much space it occupies, whether or not it is visible--over twenty combinations in all. But that's an outlier; most languages have only two degrees of what is called deixis. Some add a third, either distinguishing "by me", "by you", "by neither of us" (e.g. Spanish) or "by me", "away from me", and "way far away from me". When it comes to expressing deixis with nouns, some languages use distinct determiners while others use only one (usually identical to the definite article, if there is one) in combination with an adverb, cf. dialectal English "this here". Many languages allow demonstratives to double as pronouns third-person pronouns.

So when I took up Swedish, learning the grammar was chiefly a matter of going through a mostly-unconscious mental checklist: Okay, demonstratives. Two degrees or three? Two. Distinct stems? No. Double as pronouns? Yes. If anything it was even easier than that. Because if you know German, you'll readily recognise that those answers are all the same[*]. So more often than not, the question I was really asking was, "Same as German here, or different?"

Which is, in the end, why I decided to tackle Swedish in the first place. It's always bugged me that I can read most West Germanic languages easily, but put a North Germanic one in front of me and I just stare dumbly at the page. I knew it was mostly a question of knowing a relatively small stock of non-cognate (or at least not recognisably cognate) function words. Once you can map, say, någon to einig and ingen to kein, vast swathes of incomprehensible verbiage suddenly open up. (And, of course, studying one Scandinavian language is basically getting the others for free.)



[*] With minor qualifications. E.g. a distal demonstrative--jener--does exist in German, but it's literally, use of demonstratives as pronouns is colloquial, etc.

Comments

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

The answer, of course, is... "It depends."

An adult can learn to read and write the Arabic alphabet in about two weeks. (Shorter if they practice every day.) A child may take a year to learn their first alphabet.

Lots of things become very easy for adults, when they recognize similarities to something they already know.

On the other hand, I have a terrible time remembering vocabulary.

[paulintoronto.livejournal.com]

I started studying German about five years ago, when I was in my mid-forties. I was serious, but also working full-time at my job as a teacher, and living my domestic life. As a teenager, I'd studied Latin for four years. As a Canadian, I started studying French when I was about ten and continued to study it into adulthood. I took Italian for two years at university in my late teens. Then I had two years of Old English in my early twenties.

Based on my experiences, I conclude that it is harder to learn a language now. Certain things are easier, as you point out -- pattern recognition, abilitiy to understand concepts that are different from one's mother tongue, for example. But, like you, I find it much harder to remember words, or to keep track of things like which prepositions require a dative and which an accusative. I think my memory just isn't as strong as it was thirty years ago. (Certainly, my motivation to learn German is much greater than my motivation was to learn Italian.)

I greatly admire people who can master languages. Despite all my dabbling in European tongues, English and French are the only languages that I would claim the ability to speak, and my French embarrasses me because it is so full of errors unless I have been immersed in it for a couple of weeks.

[anicca-anicca.livejournal.com]

It's very common for adults to thinks learning a language (or an instrument, for that matter) is more difficult for adults. But imo that's just ignoring how much work or just time children have to spend in school or practising an instrument. My English class in school took place 5 times a week for 9 years and left me with something really mediocre. A couple of years later I put my mind on learning Italian while working full time, and got to the same result in about one year.
(And don't get me started on daily piano for a dozen years that went nowhere. Do that as an adult and you're more focussed and bound to be more successful.)

I'm not as analytical about foreign languages as you are, not by far, but I agree that it gets easier with every new one. It's hardest for people who never learnt a single one.

[pne.livejournal.com]

(And, of course, studying one Scandinavian language is basically getting the others for free.)

I wonder which Scandinavian language would be most suitable for this—which one is the most “average”, or lets you comprehend the maximum of the others without having learned them explicitly, or some such metric.

Though perhaps the answer is Svorsk.

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

I think Norwegian is the most "average" - i.e. more mutually intelligible with Danish and Swedish than the latter two are with each other. Somewhere I saw some actual data on this.

Or you could try for whatever language it is that the staff of SAS Scandinavian Airlines uses in their passenger announcements. They seem to take a lowest common denominator approach - avoiding slang, avoiding vocabulary that doesn't have a similar word in all three languages, averaging out the pronunciation and speaking slowly. They get by with making their announcements in English and Skandinaviska or whatever it is.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Interesting about the airline announcements!

I once read some printed matter in such a "Common Scandinavian" - I don't remember whether it was instructions for using or assembling something or a warning label, but something along those lines. Occasionally, they would put a synonym in parentheses where one or more of the three main languages used non-cognates, but for the most part, they just used one text and trusted that it would be understood by everyone.

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

I found an old article about SAS in the 1950's that referred to this phenomenon as "sasperanto."