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It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

nytimes.com

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Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#71

Post by mikeash »

dmayle wrote: post #51

Strictly anecdatally (nb: intentional), I moved to France at 26, spent a total of five years living in France before heading back to the US, have kept French involved in my life, and now fifteen years later will have French people ask me where in France I am from. Which is to say, that this article reads as personal experience more than anything else. However, French is probably a very unique case for study. French p…

What you describe applies to any foreign language. The details differ, but they’ll all have different spelling and pronunciation rules, different sounds, different grammar, and all that.

I also learned French as an adult, first in school and then by immersion. I also learned Mandarin, although not as well. I’m somewhat functional in it but not at all fluent. French is really easy by comparison, coming from English. You get a shitload of vocabulary for free. It uses the same alphabet with minor differences in sounds. Grammar is different but with many familiar concepts.

English is basically French mixed with Germanic languages and then baked for a thousand years. English gives you a great foundation for French.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#72

Post by zorked »

atemerev wrote: post #49

The 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!)

This is very correct. English's status as an international language does wonders - you can speak in any terrible accent, get all the vowels wrong, invert word orders, ignore plurals and be wrong about every preposition and people will make an effort to understand you.

Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as people will make a point of not understanding you! Because dropping a umlaut suddenly makes an entire sentence impossible to parse!

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#73

Post by stult »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #45
imtringued wrote: post #16

It'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…

In college Mandarin courses we were required to learn 30 words a day. That was a nearly impossible task for 20 year old me and required three hours of study a day on top of the 1:20 or 1:50 long daily class. To think a person more than twice that age can learn 30 words a day is, to my aged brain, ludicrous. Maybe it’s just me, but my learning ability is now vastly below what it was in my teens or even college.

Surely the words per day one can learn correlates with the difficulty of the language, and mandarin is amongst the hardest for English speakers to learn. So it is probably meaningless to argue about the absolute number of words per day a person can reasonably expect to learn without specifying the foreign language and the learner's native language.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#74

Post by hombre_fatal »

drchewbacca wrote: post #4

This article would have been much more convincing if the author had done some testing of their actual level in French rather than just talking about how insecure they feel. It's possible the author's language is poor, it's also possible it's very good but they see "great" as normal and so discount what they know due to imposter syndrome. I've heard a lot of people apologise for their English after speaking flawlessly…

If you ever watch little kids learning a language, you'll notice that they just try. They butcher it, they don't care. But at least they're trying and practicing the whole language generation pathways in the brain.

Meanwhile adults are often too anxious to even try no matter how proficient they might be. I myself went years without even trying to talk to anyone in Spanish despite living in Mexico. Watching children trying to learn a language was inspiring to me.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#75

Post by [deleted] »

imtringued wrote: post #16

It'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…

[deleted]

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#76

Post by salawat »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #45
imtringued wrote: post #16

It'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…

In college Mandarin courses we were required to learn 30 words a day. That was a nearly impossible task for 20 year old me and required three hours of study a day on top of the 1:20 or 1:50 long daily class. To think a person more than twice that age can learn 30 words a day is, to my aged brain, ludicrous. Maybe it’s just me, but my learning ability is now vastly below what it was in my teens or even college.

So, it isn't actually.

I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena.

What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means.

This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent Morse keyers. What you want is to map the Morse pattern->it's representative concept.

Example:

First mental impl would look like ... -> S --- -> O ... -> S Then you mentally reparse that string to get semantic meaning.

Trying to do this for more complex messages blows. Case and point.

..-. --- .-. ....... ... .- .-.. . .-.-.- ....... -... .- -... -.-- ....... -... --- --- - .. . ... .-.-.- ....... -. . ...- . .-. ....... .-- --- .-. -. .-.-.-

Imagine that coming over a line at about 13 to 25 wpm.

You don't have time to decode and reparse. You need realtime streaming and recognition of word units->meaning. No decode phase, just "oh, that's 'blah'"

Same thing applies with other languages. Language is used to nominatively stand in for forms of life. N'est ce pas? In any other language is still indicative of the same form of life/confluence of characteristics, 'is it not?'

It's seems easier when you're younger because you aren't fighting the lookup table phenomena because you're still learning your primary language.

It's why when learning a new programming language, an escalating series of higher complexity Hello World's you've implemented in other languages can be a godsend in getting up to speed.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#77

Post by renox »

atemerev wrote: post #49

The 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!)

> The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes.

Define sensitive?

When my wife (who is Czech) or my colleague (who is Venezuelan) make French errors, I correct them the same way I correct my children: not because it is annoying me (I don't speak Czech and my Spanish is terrible!) but because I want to help them.

And yes, if someone speaks bad French, I'll switch to English but that's not out of disrespect, it's because it's more efficient/easy, if you prefer that the discussion stays in French to practice your French, just say so..

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#78

Post by bpyne »

atemerev wrote: post #49

The 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!)

An anecdote from a trip to Paris, I walked into a store to look for a gift for someone back home. After making the greeting in French, I started to explain what I was looking for. The woman stopped me. With a dramatic eye roll she said, "Speak English, pleeeease."

An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."

It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.

My daughter is taking Spanish in school right now. I'm learning a little as well. We have a large population of people around us from different Spanish speaking countries. They seem to be very tolerant of mistakes. I'm very much looking forward to learning more of their language.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#79

Post by deanstag »

cageface wrote: post #27

I learned Vietnamese in my mid 40s. I think it’s just a matter of persistence and patience. As adults we’re less willing to be novices for an extended period of time.

NOTE: this comment does not add anything to the discussion

"As adults we’re less willing to be novices for an extended period of time." - I read this comment and thought to myself "Interesting" and moved on to other web pages. And then it hit me again and again that this was absolutely true in a lot of cases where me or my friends found it frustrating to learn something new. Thank you for putting it this way.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#80

Post by hombre_fatal »

danieltillett wrote: post #5

I 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.

> Why speak French well when for a fraction of the effort speaking poorly gets you 90% of the return.

Because that last 10% (which is actually more like the last 99%) is the part where you actually create friends, relationships, and connect with other people beyond "how are you?" And people actually start inviting you to social gatherings again because you can keep up in conversation even though your new-foreign-guy appeal wears off. And when you meet a cute girl, you can actually hold her attention and interest and feel fulfilled after the honeymoon stage wears off, and you don't just conjure up questions like "so how long is she gonna last with this foreign play-thing?" when you visit her friends and family. And you stop feeling like a fucking outsider all the time.

Your post is the same bullshit I told myself when I moved abroad and didn't actually want to put much effort into learning the language. It won't get you as far as you think.

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