I started learning french at 50 to be an example to my teenage son, encouraging him to learn a second language rather than playing fortnite. It is harder when you are not in french speaking area/country. Everything around us is english. I listen ici.radio-canada during commute and after 6 month in, I can understand 60-70%. But if I would be in Quebec listening french all day, I think learning would be much faster even at middle age.
It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
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Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#62Learning 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.
You are all absolutely correct, that it comes down to effort and practice, for the typical adult. If you treat language learning like a serious hobby, and practice it several hours a week, consistently, of course you can learn to speak a language. Practice with an ear to eliminating your accent, and you can minimize that, too.
Most people don't, or they look at how "easy" it is for kids (it's easier, but kids are also more fearless for just saying stuff and making noise), and they give up and say it's hard.
Allowing for some broad exceptions for people whose brains aren't wired to pick up a language, like people who struggle to learn math or music or painting...
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#63I think the subtle thing missed here is the effort required to speak a second language well is not worth the effort. Just scraping by is good enough especially if you still have access to your first language. Why speak French well when for a fraction of the effort speaking poorly gets you 90% of the return.
Looking back at my years of failure at French in school I get the impression that French does not lend itself particularly well to scraping by. Any form of rudimentary word-uuuhm-by-hrmmm-word rendering of French is so far removed from actual French (and noticeably so even to the uninitiated, which might be the key difference), that it's hard to find your "scrapping by voice". Objectively harder than in many other languages I think.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#64> If required, I can read French books. Not reading books will limit your vocabulary. If you read when required, you don't read.
It's not like it's actually possible to comfortably read french books when you learn the language, with their specific grammatical tenses only used in literature. I speak French fluently and at home but I'd be incapable to read a complicated book in that language (while I'm absolutely able to read English books and do that all the time, and speak English way less often).
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#65> 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. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche That says a lot about the quality of peer review at the NYT.
Peer review? I'd think the NYT has professional copy editors.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#66The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes. If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that. If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
I think you just need to find better French people to practice with.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#67The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes. If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that. If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
> If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjout/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
These are two very different things. In my years of experience, the most likely outcome of speaking imperfect French is just that the French person switches to speaking perfect English.
Not saying hello+good morning is a social sanitation faux pas viewed akin to not washing your hands after using the toilet.
I'm not going to defend the latter, because it's all very formulaic, but I lived in France for years without proficiency and never had a poor encounter because of my unskilled French.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#68The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes. If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that. If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
I think in part it's due to very few native English speakers being multi-lingual. Rudely correcting someone on their second-language is a faux-pas for most people in the UK. From my experience, people will try to be helpful and constructive with their criticism - because lets be honest, how many native English speakers could say much more than Hello, Please and Thank You in anything but English?
Conversely, I can see why some Europeans might be more passionate about correct grammar and pronunciation. As youth begin to speak in a hybrid of English and their native language, it begins to erodes their cultural identity. It makes sense if they're passionate about their countries heritage, which many French people are, to try and resist the Anglicising of a part of that.
Americans butchered the English language anyway so you couldn't do much worse ;)
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#69I've found that one of the the reasons why learning a second language at middle age is less effective, is because we already have a language we can express ourselves in with great mastery.
For children and teenagers, learning the intricacies and irregularities of a language is simply the only way they can learn to describe and apprehend the world --- and themselves in new ways and ideas, and not get shamed for saying something weird. Their quality of life is very highly correlated with how well they learn a language, whereas the same cannot be said for those who have already mastered one, or those who live in an environment that does not actively use a language they are learning (hence why learning French in school helps you so little, and why so few Japanese speakers are confident in their English).
Barring immersion, one way to force yourself to learn another language more effectively is to spend some time muting yourself in the languages you already know and allow yourself only to express your thoughts in the language you are learning.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#70The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes. If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that. If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
> If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjout/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!) These are two very different things. In my years of experience, the most likely outcome of speaking imperfect French is just that the French person switches to speaking perfect English. Not saying hello+good morning is a social sanitation faux pas viewed…
I've only met French speakers who could switch to perfect English in Quebec province.
French speakers from France make mistakes all the time and their pronunciation is very far from perfect. (As long as I can understand them, I don't care.) That being said, someone from France's English is more than likely many times better than my French.