Recently I read an interesting book by Barbara Sher called Refuse to Choose!, which suggests ways in which people with many interests, who the author calls scanners, can find time to persue all those interests. I thought some of the suggestions might be relevant to people interested like learning many languages, like me.

One idea is thinking about what you want to achieve, then working backwards thinking about all the steps you need to take to achieve your goal. If you did this for language, you might start picturing the level of competence you want to reach in a language, then work out all the steps needed to reach that level, working backwards.

Have you tried anything like this?

The other day a friend of a friend asked me whether I’d found a language and/or culture in which I felt ‘at home’. She told me about someone she knows who has studied many languages and is always looking for a language community (other than his native one) where he fits in and feels comfortable – he has yet to find one. I hadn’t really thought about language learning in this way before. Have you?

I suppose that whenever I visit other countries and communities I kind of try them on for size and imagine what it would be like to live in them in the medium to long term. Each one has aspects that appeal to me, and others that I’m not so keen on – things like language, food, climate, scenery, music, etc. I’ve felt reasonably at home in various parts of British Isles and Ireland, in Taipei and Hong Kong, and in Australia and New Zealand.

Today we have a guest post by Jade Henriques, a young language learner who is planning to pursue a degree in linguistics. Here is her website languageninjas.com. You can also keep up with Facebook.

From the first time I started learning languages, I see this question pop up from time to time. I too considered if I was just too old to learn another language. The thing is that people believe that you have to be at a certain age to learn a language, once you pass this age learning a language is next to impossible.

On the contrary scientist may disagree; I’ve actually stumbled across many researches that say; not learning a language because of your age is a myth. When it comes to learning a language, adults actually have the capability of learning faster than little children. One perspective I have is that as adults we already learned the basics of communication and the meaning of objects around us. For example, a seven year old may learn that a tree is a plant, a tree has leaves, and a tree grows from the soil. As adults we know this already, in our second language all we need to know is what a tree is in that language, we don’t need to go into details of what it is or a description of it.

It’s still, however, an ongoing battle of whether children learn better or adults do.

Our Brains can actually do it
The human brain is still a mystery to many scholars and scientists out there. The complexity of it is baffling. Something I see so very often is that if we see a word 160 times over, it is permanently lodged into our permanent memory. That doesn’t mean you should sit and say a word 160 times over. It means that if over a period of time, on different occasions, if you see a word at least 160 times, it’s going to be hard to forget that word. This research was carried out by a group of Cambridge neuroscientists. This is why reading is so important when learning a language. The first time you see a word and you don’t understand it, don’t beat yourself up. If you were to see this word again, and again and again, our brains will begin to make sense of it and remember it for us.

It’s about inputting
There is no way on God’s earth you can speak a language with very little input. It is in the same essence if you see a word for the first time and you don’t understand it right of the back, then that simple means you hardly see this word or you’ve never seen this word before. So, before you open your mouth, start inputting data into your brain.

I’ve find that it is actually easier to remember words when we are not fighting ourselves to remember them. For instance, making vocabulary list and spending your day studying this list is not the way to go.

But naturally just reading and listening (to things you actually enjoy) will help you to remember words faster and pain free.

Long term, Medium term and short term memory
Long term memory is words that we will never forget. Long term memory is very hard to destroy and it would take a brain disorder such as Alzheimer’s to do so. This is what the above study suggests that if a word is seen 160 times, then it’s a part of your long term memory. With words in your medium term memory, it suggests that you have seen these words numerous times but not enough. If you neglect these words over a period of time, chances are you will forget them. Words in your short term memory are the easiest to forget, maybe you just seen these words a handful of times, overtime, try to make words in your short term memory apart of your long term memory.

In conclusion, you are not too old to learn a language; it’s just a matter of practice and a passion for the language.

According to an article I came across today, it is the process of learning a new language that encourages people to learn more languages, and becoming bilingual makes learning further languages easier.

The article talks about at study of native English speakers who were either monolingual, or bilingual in English and Spanish or English and Mandarin, and who were presented with words made up by the researchers. It found that the bilingual participants could learn the made up words much more easily than the monolingual ones, and the researchers think that the process of learning a foreign language improves your language learning skills.

Another study found that bilinguals are also better at learning words in their native language and generally have faster brain activity, especially older adults (60-68 years old) who have been bilingual from an early age. Apparently “these results suggest that lifelong bilingualism may exert its strongest benefits on the functioning of frontal brain regions in aging.”

I came across an interesting-looking site today called Linguisticator, via the Economist.

It says that it provides “an advanced online language training program designed to teach adults how to learn languages quickly and effectively. It is unique in providing a single course that can be used to learn any language on the planet. The program was designed with military and business professionals in mind, but is available to anyone serious about learning a language.”

Apparently, “With the training Linguisticator provides, it’s possible to learn languages faster and more accurately than children do, such that you can gain conversational competence in only a few weeks and fluency in a few months.”

It’s basically a video-based course that you subscribe to and watch online. It doesn’t teach a particular language, but teaches you how to learn languages systematically. You can also book individual language lessons via the website and work out a language learning plan.

There’s a free trial version that gives you a taster of the course.

Have any of you tried it?

I’ve been exploring SoundCloud recently after uploading a new song that I wrote last Sunday, and have discovered that there’s some useful material there for linguaphiles and language learners.

For example, there’s a group called United Sounds that is collecting recordings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in many languages. You can also find recordings of conversations and songs in many different languages – I found quite a few in Breton, for example.

It might also a good place to upload recordings of you practising your languages and to get feedback, as there is a comments facility. Have you used it in this way at all?