Not sure how this is news. Learning anything, especially a new language, in middle age difficult. What am I missing here?
It is an Opinion piece, not a news article. Why did you think it was news?
It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
31–40 of 339 posts
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#32> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious…
> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” I'm French and I discovered that word today.
Me too. As there are only around 602 000 results on Google I suspected it was only used in specific areas and according to the dictionary ("Petit Robert") it originates from Lille.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#33Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens. As the author correctly notes one needs to know tens of thousands of words to have a reasonable chance of getting through a text without encountering an unknown word. To get to that number a spaced repetition system is much more useful than sticky notes, but it doesn't help…
People forget how much time they spent learning something when they were younger. I feel like a lot of adults give up and use age as an excuse for not trying new things.
I'd add another factor. Young children love communicating. They (no offense) have nothing better to do than trying to find ways, sounds and words to exchange. My theory is that this level of mind/brain engagement toward language is unmatched after 4 yo. You have other center of interests later on that would make a kid go mad if they tried to learn them.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#34Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens. As the author correctly notes one needs to know tens of thousands of words to have a reasonable chance of getting through a text without encountering an unknown word. To get to that number a spaced repetition system is much more useful than sticky notes, but it doesn't help…
[deleted]
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#35> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious…
You're being harsh for pouls / poux being singular/plural, provided it was the first time the author had encountered those words. That kind of knowledge comes with experience with the words, which the author didn't have. Bouloche has been corrected.
I still think it is weird to be that bad after 15 years in the country.
Counter point — I think it was French ambassador or someone from diplomatic corpus who impressed me in their interview on the radio. I think they have been in the country for half a year only and spoke amazingly well. And I mean it. It was not amazing in the way bear dancing is amazing (e.g. it dance terribly, but the fact itself is amazing). She spoke genuinely very well. And Lithuanian is a very very difficult language.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#36Not sure how this is news. Learning anything, especially a new language, in middle age difficult. What am I missing here?
I think it's one of those articles that gets upvoted because people like the topic. I'm getting old - what do. Same as random stuff regarding privacy, depression and google killing its projects.
So here we have generic discussion number #72, where we talk how neurogenesis stops at a certain age but not really and how stuff can improve your cognition but only if you're a mouse.
Also a good place to recommend The Brain That Changes Itself[1].
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/570172.The_Brain_That_Ch...
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#37> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious…
You could say the same about English: 'pulse'? Do you mean an unconscious person needs to eat more legume?
This is as contrived as the example of the article's author.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#38> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious…
It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender.
A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa.
French is a difficult language to learn:
- many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
- conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory.
- rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
- we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural.
- verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
- similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
- way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#39It's just a matter on how much time you spend learning the language. Even if you only consider the time you spent in school merely learning your own native language those school lessons will add up to thousands of hours. How many adults, who have already "learned" a foreign language, dedicate 6 hours per week purely on further improving their skills in that language for 12 years? If you are worried about not knowing…
What website/application would you recommend for spaced repetition of vocabulary?
I've found the changing Windows logon screens quite nice, since every other day or so there's a new beautiful picture along with a few bubbles of text in German, enabling me to learn a few new words (though I'll probably forget most of them).
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#40The main difficulty is that there are so many French words in the English language, with slightly different meanings: so called false cognates.¹
1: https://www.thoughtco.com/french-english-false-cognates-faux...