Complex Numbers

Learning the Language

I want to believe that this is true, so I'm going to accept it uncritically.

https://theconversation.com/youre-never-too-old-to-become-fluent-in-a-foreign-la...

You’re Never Too Old to Become Fluent in a Foreign Language

Oh, wait, no, accepting things uncritically is something I strive to avoid.

A range of headlines – from the BBC to the Daily Mail and The Guardian – all trumpeted the depressing message that it’s impossible to become fluent in a foreign language after around age ten.

If the Daily Mail said that there's a beer shortage, I would instantly doubt the existence of shortages. And of beer.

All of these reports dramatically misrepresented the findings from the study, and the message they sent is flat-out wrong.

On the other hand, I trust the BBC -- and yet, few outlets get science right.

So to sum up so far, there was a study on second language learning, and British news and tabloid headlines blared that one cannot become fluent in another language after age 10, but they all got the science wrong. News reporters getting science wrong? Quelle surprise!

For one thing, the words “fluency” or “fluent” never even appear in the original study, published in the journal Cognition.

That alone should throw the reporting into suspicion.

To be fluent in another language means that you can communicate with relative ease, that is, without it being a real strain on either the speaker or the listener.

There are dialects of English that I have trouble decoding, especially when spoken. One time, at a flea market in Florida, I just had to stop and gawk in awe at an exchange between two booth-tenders. I'm pretty sure they were both speaking English; at least, I made out a word or two here and there that was definitely English. It was just so rapid-fire, and with weird cadences, that I couldn't get the meaning. I don't know; maybe they were brothers with their own secret language, or something. More likely, they were speaking Floridian.

But to contradict the tabloids, this article goes on to say:

Learners of any age can achieve a brilliant, even nativelike, command of the vocabulary of another language, including such challenging structures as idioms or proverbs.

Whew. I hate to think my French studies are going to be entirely useless.

The puzzling thing about older learners – something the authors of the new study also found – is that they seem to have more problems mastering some, but not all, grammatical phenomena.

I certainly have problems deciphering emoji.

What is new about the Cognition study is that, by the usual standards of linguistic investigations, it uses a dataset of unprecedented size. Through an internet grammar quiz shared on social media, the authors collected almost 700,000 responses, two thirds of them from people for whom English was a second language.

Oh. Yeah, I'm not sure the large data set can overcome the biases here.

They found that the accuracy of the responses on the grammar quiz declined sharply for learners who began studying English after the age of 17, a long way off the age of ten, which is the age most of media reports focused on.

Crap. 17, 10, all that looks the same from my perspective. I thought they meant "older" as in "decrepit."

But the claim that its findings suggest that after age ten you are too old to learn a foreign language fluently is one of the worst misrepresentations of a scientific outcome that I have ever seen.

Which is why all science reporting needs to be scrutinized. Of course, most of us don't have the time to fact-check every article that comes our way. I certainly don't. But if something doesn't pass the bullshit sniff test, it's not okay to go repeating it like it's gospel.

You can become a perfectly fluent speaker of a foreign language at any age, and small imperfections of grammar or accent often just add to the charm.

I don't know about "perfectly" fluent. As for my own case, we'll see -- I haven't yet gotten to the point where I can think in French; I still have to translate back and forth to English. I'm not sure if I can ever get there. But I'm not going to let a "you can't do it at your age" stop me. In fact, I'm just contrary enough that it might be enough to make me do it out of spite.