Asymmetrical Information

A good article, but possibly too simplified. Regarding the Southern Exposure problem, I think a better explanation is that past generations of Mexican immigrants, legal or otherwise, both appreciated the value of speaking English, and didn't have many options at all if they could not. So they learned as much English as they could, even if only a little, and strongly impressed their children with the need for fluency.

Now, however, strains of Mexican nationalism, the existence of very large Mexican sub-communities, and the emphasis on bilingual service at places of business and public agencies means that immigrants don't have to learn fluent English in order to get by. Yes, more opportunities are available if they do, but that also requires a fair bit of change. If you don't have to change in order to live at some minimum comfortable level, then you might choose not do so.

So the people with low results, and who don't speak english well, are that way because they simply don't learn things well? That seems to make sense. Their low performance is a function of their effort/talent (like one would imagine in any field) rather than immigrant/non-immigrant status.

I'm not sure I grasp your second paragraph though. Bi-lingual education is an excellent thing, assuming you are truly fluent in both. If you a fluent Spanish speaker and a poor English speaker (technically bilingual) then you will probably have a rough time in English speaking countries.

But teaching kids (immigrants or not) to be truly fluently bilingual is a great thing. It gives you great job opportunities, it molds your mind in different ways, and makes learning 3rd-4th-5th languages easier. I'm in Arkansas, and people who speak Spanish and English fluently are highly valued for service positions. Immigrants who have mastered both their birth languages and English offer a competitive advantage to companies that deal with clients/partners in those countries.

I am personally terrible with languages -- at least, those that aren't computer languages. I was taught Spanish at a relatively older age (high school) and I am far from fluent. I wish I would have been taught Spanish (or Japanese, or ...) at a younger age.

"Can't learn English?" Oh, come on. My wife and I both took German for the first time in college (about 1 year each) and after a few months over there we were regularly thrashing the Germans at "Gluecksrad," which is their hour-long version of "Wheel of Fortune." (Note to Megan fans: If you like 8-foot tall voluptuous blond Teutons, check out Sonya Kraus, their version of Vanna White!)

And that was after I learned enough Japanese (again, in college) to move through the country easily and have extended conversations about my travels with elderly Japanese ladies.

OK, I busted my ass in both classes. And I wasn't working two full time jobs at the time. And my inlaws have been here for 30 years and still speak kind of questionable English.

But "can't" learn English? Not buying it.

As a software developer, I can't give much credence to the thought that we lose the ability to learn a new language.

When learning a new programming language you must learn the changes in syntax and semantics. Ditto for a new spoken language ("black cat" vs. "gato negro"). When learning a new programming language you must learn the vocabulary changes. Ditto for a new spoken language but on a much larger scale.

I know, perhaps, a dozen programming languages and picking up new ones isn't that difficult. I knew only one under the age of 12 (BASIC on an Apple IIc).

So what makes a spoken language so drastically different from programming languages that one can learn a dozen programming languages after age 12 (I would contend even that all programming languages are created by adults) but, supposedly, cannot learn a second, new spoken language?

The difference would seem to lie almost entirely in the political, economic, and social spheres. At least I don't recall any administration lobbying to require knowledge of Java or HTML to become a citizen...

Correlating language learning ability to age reminds me of that classic book by Herrnstein & Murray: The Bell Curve. Granted, I'd give more credence to correlating with age since it's quite obvious to me that our brain changes as we age: all those that remember your mother's womb, please raise your hand.

"So what makes a spoken language so drastically different from programming languages that one can learn a dozen programming languages after age 12 (I would contend even that all programming languages are created by adults) but, supposedly, cannot learn a second, new spoken language?"

Principally, it is the difference needed to make the jump from imperative to functional to declarative langauges. It not only requires new syntax/semantics, it requires a different way to look a problem/idea. Not insurmountable, but not trivial.

(At this point, I can pick up most any new computer language in about an afternoon, and in a few days/weeks can become fluently proficient in it. But remember, the domain of 'discussions' in a programming langauge is

It is possible that the as the mind becomes more trained, retraining it to think sufficiently different to become truly fluent in a different langauge becomes very difficult. But it can still be very rewarding.

Speaking of learning to speak English: It's "Jane's and my favorite professors", not "Jane and I's favorite professors."

I think the analogy with programming languages is pretty silly. A programming language has a very finite, strictly defined set of concepts (directives, actually) to express. They also have tiny, tiny, tiny vocabularies. Once you learn how to write a loop in C it's easy enough to learn how to write one in perl or java or PL/SQL, because you only need to learn about 3 words and maybe one or two symbols, and how to arrange them. You also have the advantage of being able to translate both sets of syntax into English (or whatever your native tongue) in order to think about and understand them. This is many orders of magnitude simpler an endeavor than learning a new language-of-conversation.

On a seperate topic, I went to public schools with bilingual education for 4th through 8th grades. I can personally attest to the fact that being instructed in Spanish dramatically reduced the incentive to learn English well. (Obviously the "plural of anecdote is not data" caveat applies.)

Re: programming languages

I'm a poor programmer whose solution to execution failures is type louder and more slowly.

Victor Davis Hanson said that one of the greatest dis-services the California Higher Education community did to the Chicano commuity in his state, is to teach bi-lingual education. The belief that "Diversity" and "Self-Esteem" are more important than being forced to learn English (and speak ONLY English in the classroom) futher marginalizes the California Chicano Community.

He's probably right.

I'm in my 40's and learning Spanish. Not because I think its my duty or because I'm jumping on some band-wagon, but because its fun. Sure, I'll never be Borges but I enjoy eavesdropping on people at the other table who think they can speak confidentially around me. Ha! Anyway adults learn other languages all the time, they just have to apply themselves.

I suspect auditory discrimination is an impediment for older learners of a second language. If a Navajo spoke to you for 10 seconds could you recreate the sounds so that another Navajo could know what was spoken to you?

Thank you for the grammer correction, David. It's been updated.

I suspect auditory discrimination is an impediment

Yes, that's how I could tell that the customer-service rep I spoke with today was a native Spanish speaker: her accent. Apparently she has trouble perfectly reproducing American English sounds (and may have trouble telling some of them apart, I don't know). But her English was still just fine and we had no trouble communicating.

I know people who learned tonal Chinese dialects and Thai as adults, too. Undoubtedly they couldn't manage anything recognizable on their first try, but after study they were at least comprehensible to native speakers.

It's "grammar." And "Austan."

When I first started learning Mandarin, I didn't think I'd ever be able to get it right. But what seems impossible at first becomes trivial with practice.

I can believe that most people beyond a certain age can never achieve native-level proficiency in a language. That doesn't mean they can't achieve basic competence. Those who fail to do so fail because they live in environments that allow them to get by without learning the local language.

Two points:

Firstest, I suspect the reason that recent immigrants are resistant to learning English is because of the political voices who proclaim that remaining as they are is their Gaia-given right.

As for eavesdropping:

The US Air Force and Navy maintain a base at Keflavik, Iceland. The treaty that provides for the hosting of forces is the product of lengthy negotiations. During these negotiations, the Icelanders took advantage of the fact that none of the American negotiators had skills in Icelandic; they could have sidebars without fear of being overheard.

One of the civilians working for the civil engineering section (either Navy or AF, I don't remember) has been there for a long time. He and his wife had eight or ten children there, and after growing up, and learning to speak Icelandic with native fluency, all of them took advantage of their dual citizenship and moved to the US.

One of them became an officer in the USAF. A civil engineering officer. And he was stationed at Keflavik.

One day, during one year's negotiations, the Icelanders had one of their sidebars, and after they were done talking, this new young officer turned to the other Americans present and said, "he just told him to be patient and we'll come around."

All further internal conversations took place elsewhere.

If I'd been that guy's superior, I would have ripped him a new one. Several new ones. I mean, that's an amusing thing to do in a restaurant, but not at the negotiating table!

There are huge incentives for lots of things that some percentage of the population never bothers to do. Using birth control, showing up to work on time, etc etc.

Learning a new language gets *harder* as you age, but it never becomes impossible.

I think there's one important point missing in this discussion: the availability/affordability of language classes for working immigrants. If you take that into account, immigrant children have a double advantage- free English education and the ability to pick it up more easily from their surroundings. ESL materials are often quite expensive, and every ESL class that I've heard of has a pretty long waiting list. I know I couldn't learn Mandarin or German without some instruction.

I've been hearing that bit about learning a new language being harder for an adult and it's nonsense. If a person doesn't learn a **first language** before they're about ten, they will never learn to speak at all. But if a normal adult spent as much time learning a second language as a child does learning its first (basically total immersion for years) the adult will learn it faster and better. The accent can still be poor, depending on verbal facility, but the person's language will be fluent.

I understated it slightly - they will not only learn it faster and better, but also more easily. At least with a second language, they know what they are trying to do.

The reason most adults have trouble is they try to rush it; they don't have the patience to do it consistently over a longer time.

The European business that you allude to is probably partly because they have immigrant "communities" in some of which an effort is made to stop the girls learning the local language because it preserves their powerlessness.

Josh wrote: " ...I know I couldn't learn Mandarin or German without some instruction."

Betcha could, if you really had to. I taught myself Vietnamese at age 45, just using books and audio tapes. I'm not saying I was ever really fluent with it, and I probably had a horrendous accent, but I could muddle along OK in a conversation with a (patient) native speaker.

Changing the subject: In fairness to the Hispanics, it is *much* easier for a native English speaker to learn Spanish than for a native Spanish speaker to learn English. (I'm talking about adults, not children.)

Completely agree that bi-lingual education has proven to be a fiasco. Dressed up in the glad rags of progressiveism, it was simply a dodge to avoid having to make the kids do something they didn't want to do. In my view, immigrant kids should have a special curriculum devoted 100% to the study of English until they are fluent. Only then should they be reintegrated into the regular classroom, where they would have half a chance of learning something else.

Personally, I had a horrendous time trying to learn French in high school. Two painful years of it left me no more fluent than a toddler -- and not a very elderly toddler at that. Two weeks at the Club Med in Martinique taught me far more. The singing, dancing, copious booze -- and total immersion -- were key.

A friend spent an undergraduate year in Sweden, living with a Swedish family who either did not know or did not choose to speak a word of English. The first six weeks were agony--frustrating, awkward and oh so lonely. Then she started to get it. After three months she was reasonably fluent. By the end of the year, virtually bilingual.

There's no doubt but that learning a new language, at relatively high speed, as an adult, can be an absolute bear. It's amazing how many bears can be subdued when choice is taken out of the equation, though.

Still, I'd like to see English taught as a program of attraction rather than compulsion. Make it fun, make it free. I understand that in Germany there are branches of the Goethe Institute all over the country so that immigrants can learn fluent German at no cost to themselves. That's my idea of an appropriate public expenditure.

The flip side of expecting immigrants to master our tongue is for us to take the teaching of English just as seriously. If we think of the teaching of English as something on which the life of our culture depends--but can not rely on compulsion--I dare say we'd come up with some very creative solutions.

Actually, I believe they've done fMRI studies that show that adults use a different part of the brain to learn a second language than children do when they learn a first language. (I beleive I saw that in Pinker's "How the Mind Works".) It's completely plausible that children would pick up a first language much easier than an adult could learn a second. Our brains change as we age.

I understand that in Germany there are branches of the Goethe Institute all over the country so that immigrants can learn fluent German at no cost to themselves.

I had to pay when I went to the GI in Prien, but it was a lot of fun to hang out with the Canadian hotel owners, the French sportscaster, the goofy Swede millionare ("I thought about getting a job, but then I thought, learning German would be more fun"), and the itinerent Israeli hat salesman. My roommate enhanced international understanding (and left me with a private room) by banging some Italian girl. Plus, the beer merchants in town had learned to say "thank you" in about 30 different languages!

I think it's worth it even if you never learn a word of German.

I think it's easier to learn languages once you're older and have a grasp of lingustics. But as was mentioned earlier, tonal recognition is hard. Maybe we don't need to teach lanuages to young kids. We should concentrate on tonal recognition(since kids won't use French or Chinese for quite some time anyways) and then let them learn language when they're older.

Having actually done a major in linguistics in college, and lots of research on second language learning/bilingualism:

It is always possible to learn to speak another language, no matter how old you are (the one thing that seems very resistant to change is some degree of foreign accent). It is much easier before the age of 12 or so, but it doesn't become impossible after that. What's very difficult is having an environment that is conducive to learning English. In the majority of cases, schoolchildren on the playground will very quickly find some linguistic common ground, and work from there. At school, in most cases the teachers will try to make sure that you basically understand what's going on.

When a person gets a 60-hour-a-week job that doesn't require English proficiency, they're probably not being exposed to a huge amount of English at work. They're probably not being exposed to English at home. And there's a good chance they don't have the money/time for formal lessons of the intensity required to really gain proficiency.

On another note:
It's entirely possible that there are parts of the country where people no longer feel the need to learn English. In my part, there's a fairly large hispanic community, and when they come in to the library where I work, I don't really see that. They want to learn English and they really want their kids to learn English.

(I may be getting a skewed sample because they're the ones that come into the library, but lots of people come in just to play around on the computers).

I think it's easier to learn languages once you're older and have a grasp of lingustics.

I think you may be confusing learning the academic mechanics of a language -- which, even for a first tongue, settle more readily to a mature mind -- versus being able to think and speak in a language without engaging in continuous mental translation.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? Norwegians learn Norwegian, the Greeks are taugth their Greek....

Haven't folks been arguing about how hard it is to learn languages for years?

I think you may be confusing learning the academic mechanics of a language -- which, even for a first tongue, settle more readily to a mature mind -- versus being able to think and speak in a language without engaging in continuous mental translation.

Perhaps. I think I also have an advantage as an adult being able to control how I'm taught and making my studying conform to my study skills rather than the other way around. For example, I learn languages better through audio tapes than through reading.

This could just be my own experience. I'm good at learning, but had a lot of trouble with learning in a classroom framework.

It all boils down to what you actually mean by "learning a language". If just being able to get out a simple declarative statement or question as you travel around is all you need, then fine.

Actual fluency, on the other hand, is more along the lines of what anony-mouse says, though I'd supplement the "think and speak" with the equally important "hear and understand". And to all those who say they know a language but "probably have a horrendous accent", I'd ask--do you really think native speakers don't hear your horrendous accent and scale their language level way back when speaking to you? Of course they do (unless their purpose is to have no not understand.)

Hear and understand is much harder than think and speak.

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