Trying To Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home

sciencehabit writes "Show a native-born Chinese person a picture of the Great Wall, and suddenly they'll have trouble speaking English, even if they usually speak it fluently. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that reminders of our home country can complicate our ability to speak a new language. The findings could help explain why cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue and why immigrants who settle within an ethnic enclave acculturate more slowly than those who surround themselves with friends from their new country."

Comments

Canada

[simonbp]

As an anglophone Canadian expat, my main exposure to French is occasional trips to Quebec or France. I've picked up much more French in Quebec than France simply because I understand the context better.

Re:Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

I've picked up much more French in Quebec than France simply because I understand the context better.

Then as a fellow Canadian anglophone, let me assure you, you didn't pick up French in Quebec.

You picked up something the locals believe is French, but which people from actual French-speaking countries barely recognize or understand.

Quebecois French is, in the main, a borderline illiterate patois. Some people are a lot better, but the average person you meet speaks Frenglish.

Re:Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations. We have all observed the massive size of your anonymous linguistic e-peen.

I suggest you go find a dictionary and look up the word 'is'.

Re:Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's like English in the USA....

Re:Canada

[ebno-10db]

So it's like English in the USA....

Actually the English spoken in the US is much closer to the "original", meaning the common dialect spoken on both sides of the Atlantic in the Colonial Era. I used to think American English was a slightly bastardized version of English, but it's just the opposite. It's really fun to tell that to anyone who is English.

P.S. In terms of accents Southern accents are generally closer to the original. We Yankees have deviated a bit.

Re:Canada

[drinkypoo]

Actually the English spoken in the US is much closer to the "original", meaning the common dialect spoken on both sides of the Atlantic in the Colonial Era. I used to think American English was a slightly bastardized version of English, but it's just the opposite. It's really fun to tell that to anyone who is English.

The best part is that they drifted so that they would sound less like us. Talk about sour grapes: "Well, people sound stupid when they talk like that anyway, so now we're talking like this." Then they go on to use their new accent to tell us how to handle gun control.

Re:Canada

[TranquilVoid]

The best part is that they drifted so that they would sound less like us. Talk about sour grapes

A lot of change in pronunciation comes from this mechanism, whether it's the cool girls on the playground making up their own inflections, or the aristocracy saying "sarvant", language becomes a means of class identification and differentiation.

As to US English sounding more original, I've seen a lot of debate on this. Some say particular UK accents are closer to Old English and the US is closer to Modern English (16th century), whereas others claim the idea is simply part of American mythology.

Re:Canada

[grouchomarxist]

What is your evidence for this claim?

Re:Canada

[AK Marc]

The analysis I've seen indicated that the US English was closer to the first modern English based on examination of the written word, and puns and rhymes used. They don't work as well in British English as US English.

Middle English was very phonetic, so it's not as hard to guess pronunciation, and it does sound more Welsh/Scottish than England's English, at least to me, I've never seen a formal analysis.

Re:Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what you're saying is that you're a bunch of backwards hillbillies whose language hasn't evolved in 300 years?

Re: Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I'm French Canadian from Québec (québécois). I've been to France, Martinique and Belgium and never had any problem getting myself understood. At worst I'd get a "wow I like your québécois accent"

Re:Canada

[ozmanjusri]

Actually the English spoken in the US is much closer to the "original", meaning the common dialect spoken on both sides of the Atlantic in the Colonial Era.

This is a furphy. There was no "original" English in the colonial era, there were dozens, possily hundreds of them. How you spoke depended on which part of England (or Ireland, Scotland, Wales etc) you came from.

American English (and modern "English" English, for that matter) is a homogenised version of all the contributing dialects and accents, as most modern languages are.

Re:Canada

[Freultwah]

And the Scottish say that it has been shown that Shakespearean English sounded not unlike the Scottish variety of English today.

Re:Canada

[Sique]

Actually, the Quebequois is much closer to the French spoken in the late 18th and early 19th century than the French in France today. Probably due to the lower number of speakers, Quebequois has developed slower than french French.

Re:Canada

[Xest]

"As to US English sounding more original, I've seen a lot of debate on this. Some say particular UK accents are closer to Old English and the US is closer to Modern English (16th century), whereas others claim the idea is simply part of American mythology."

The whole argument doesn't make sense, the view is that American English never really evolved much but British English changed a lot, yet the problem with such theories is they don't explain why American English is magically the one that didn't change. What about Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, South African English and so on? They diverged in their own ways.

But there's another more fundamental reason why it's stupid, there is no such thing as "British English" by way of the spoken word and there never has been, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, but even in England itself, Liverpudlian, Bristolian, Geordie, Cockney accents are all as different from each other as most American accents are from Queen's English and it's not just accents but local words and terms too. A bread roll in Bristol is a bun in Yorkshire, but a bun in Bristol is normally something sweeter and glazed.

Ultimately the idea that American English is some pure form of English with the closest historic ties is just stupid, America is a country born of mass immigration and if anyone seriously believes that the earlier English accents were retained in the face of mass immigration from countries like Germany and Ireland then they're having a laugh. It's not like British English immigrants were anything other than a minority of the population in the face of many other immigrants all with different accents and languages ultimately distorting the English that was originally taken across.

This also explains why Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and so forth didn't retain the same supposed classic English accent either, because accents were all ultimately immigration driven - South Africa's English accent being influenced by the dutch for example.

But ultimately the country least effected by immigration forces on accent is still going to be England, yet even there it depends where. London has seen far more immigration over the centuries and seen it's accents change as such as a result than somewhere like Cornwall, or Scotland where classic accents are retained much more closely.

So yes if you compare some American accents from areas of America that retained the heaviest balance of early English immigrants against somewhere like London that's been hammered by immigration from every area of the globe you may indeed find that their accent is closer. But if you compare even those places to somewhere like Scotland or Cornwall then you'll be a lot further off any old English accents than Scotland/Cornwall are off their old British accents.

Re:Canada

[gsslay]

Wow, it is true. Some English speaking Canadians really do have a giant chip on their shoulder about the French Canadians.

I would explain where my personal experience directly contradicts your ridiculous claim, but you already know you're talking crap, don't you?

Re:Canada

[drinkypoo]

If you can otherwise satisfactorily explain why Brits don't pronounce their Rs but Americans do, when Elizabethan English had a very hard R, you will win a small prize. There are numerous other examples. The whole argument does make sense, but you're only looking at one part of it; the logical part. Groups of humans don't work on logic most of the time.

Re:Canada

[Hognoxious]

Why do you want an explanation for something that isn't true? Some Brits pronounce the R, some Americans don't.

Re:Canada

[Xest]

But that's exactly my point, which Brits exactly?

Even in Elizabethan England some areas of the country had a hard R, others didn't. The same remains true to this day, if you think the UK has no rhotic accents then you've obviously never heard someone from the South West, Ireland, or Scotland speak.

If you've only ever listened to BBC presenters or the Queen speak then you can be forgiven for thinking there are no English accents in the UK that don't pronounce there Rs but that's not representative of even close to the whole population, and that's exactly my point.

If you want an explanation then I'd offer the fact that places like Bristol harbour, a city which very much has a rhotic accent was one of (if not the) most important harbour for departure to the new world from England (It's at the Western side of the country and was the second biggest harbour after London which is in the South East at the time) and so it's not that American English is born of some generic old English accent (which doesn't exist, there was no singular generic old English accent across the country) but that it was born of the large amount of migrants that departed from the region that is associated with Britain's south western accent that was rhotic in nature and still is to this day.

Re: Canada

[Hognoxious]

I was in a hotel once in the midwest and there was a group of Quebbos in the lobby. It took five minutes for me to even work out what language it was supposed to be.

Is it possible there's an urban vs rural distinction and they were paysans?

Re:Canada

[morgauxo]

Oh, yay. Another troll blaming imigrants for everything!

Re:Canada

[morgauxo]

What is your evidence for this claim? Names and phone numbers please.

Re:Canada

[Xest]

You are being sarcastic right?

Re:Canada

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you can otherwise satisfactorily explain why Brits don't pronounce their Rs but Americans do, when Elizabethan English had a very hard R, you will win a small prize.

It's an equivalent of gene drift in living organisms. Also, the individual language features drift more or less separately. There's no reason why individual conserved features couldn't be present in different varieties of English, with no variety having an edge over the others, preservedness-wise.

Re:Canada

[K. S. Kyosuke]

American English (and modern "English" English, for that matter) is a homogenised version of all the contributing dialects and accents, as most modern languages are.

I believe that the British region is still home to the most varied English linguistic landscape, which is the indicator of age, just like the Y-haplotype diversity in Africa shows clearly where humans have evolved.

Re:Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is probably an anti-Québécois hater from Ontario. Mod him down, not up. Don't reward assholes for hating.

French-Canadian doesn't sound like french from France. In fact, Québec is so big that there's some expressions and words used in different regions that will differ so completely that we'll have to ask what the other person means. Just like in the USA, where people in California don't speak the same english as someone in "the south" or the east coast. There's no such thing as "American english" except in Hollywood.

Also, I was quite struck when I watched Le dîner de cons (the original version, not the American abomination) that people from Belgium seem to speak something closer to Québécois. Or the other way around.

Re:Canada

[SteveFoerster]

Especially MacBeth?

Re:Canada

[lvxferre]

This is a common phenomenon among former colonial languages - the metropolis has far more population and connections for far more time, the language evolves faster there. American/Canadian English, Quebecois French, Latin American Spanish, South American Portuguese, most varieties of those are more conservative than the languages spoken in England, France, Spain and Portugal.

Re:Canada

[kaatochacha]

Do you have a citation on that? I'm actually quite interested in the subject.

Re:Canada

[drinkypoo]

But that's exactly my point, which Brits exactly?

Even in Elizabethan England some areas of the country had a hard R, others didn't. The same remains true to this day, if you think the UK has no rhotic accents then you've obviously never heard someone from the South West, Ireland, or Scotland speak.

I didn't say UKdians, I said Brits. You know, the English. You're reaching.

If you've only ever listened to BBC presenters or the Queen speak then you can be forgiven for thinking there are no English accents in the UK that don't pronounce there Rs but that's not representative of even close to the whole population, and that's exactly my point.

Again, the almighty says stop changing the subject and answer the fookin' question

Re:Canada

[houghi]

Reminds me of two American girls where saying 'I love your English accent." They were nice looking and obviously flirting with the guy. He responded:
"Accent? That is how you are SUPPOSED to speak it."

Re:Canada

[dinfinity]

I said Brits. You know, the English.

You just admitted that you're clueless on this subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain

Re:Canada

[mjwx]

So it's like English in the USA....

Actually the English spoken in the US is much closer to the "original", meaning the common dialect spoken on both sides of the Atlantic in the Colonial Era. I used to think American English was a slightly bastardized version of English, but it's just the opposite. It's really fun to tell that to anyone who is English.

So what you're trying to say is that the version of English spoken in the US hasn't evolved like every other version of English spoken through out the rest of the world?

Having learned Spanish, the English language has changed a lot more than Spanish. The adaptability of English is it's strength, a semi-decent English speaker can understand all forms of English including heavily broken Indian/Asian dialects.

Also, US English is highly bastardised as you haven't included the "u" in many words like honour and favour which were always included in these words and have swapped out the "s" for "z" in the -ise prefix.

Re:Canada

[mjwx]

This also explains why Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and so forth didn't retain the same supposed classic English accent either, because accents were all ultimately immigration driven - South Africa's English accent being influenced by the dutch for example.

Canada and South Africa ended up being influenced by other cultures as you said. But Australia and New Zealand were comprised of almost entirely English, Irish and Scottish immigrants until after the second world war. AU and NZ are simply examples of how accents diverge over time when isolated from each other. I think this is the key reason En_AU and En_NZ language wise are very, very close to En_UK despite being different accent wise. The biggest difference between En_UK and En_AU is that En_AU doesn't mark Wagga Wagga as a mistake (however we do admit that forming that town in the first place was a mistake).

Re:Canada

[mjwx]

I didn't say UKdians, I said Brits. You know, the English. You're reaching.

Way to completely miss the point. Which Brits? Yorkshirmen, Londoners, South Londoners, Mancurians (from Manchester), Essex, Cornwall... All of these places have their own accents. Hell, even different parts of London have unique accents, thats multiple accents in one city.

Re:Canada

[Xest]

"I didn't say UKdians, I said Brits. You know, the English. You're reaching."

I don't think you understand the composition of the UK. When you say "Brits" you're not referring to simply just the English, you're referring to the people of Great Britain, which comprises the countries of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This is the same thing as when referring to the United Kingdom which comprises the same 4 countries. Some definitions exclude Northern Ireland from Great Britain but not the United Kingdom, but normally they're one and the same. If you want to refer to just the English, then simply refer to the English.

Don't say I'm "reaching" if you don't know what you're on about, it's arrogant and makes you look like an idiot when you then demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the composition of the country you're talking about.

"Again, the almighty says stop changing the subject and answer the fookin' question"

I did, I gave you an example of parts of England (the South West) that have strongly rhotic accents, and pointed out that these were the parts of England that most prominently colonised North America, that also has a rhotic accent, which is hence not particularly surprising. I pointed out that if you think all English or British accents are non-rhotic then your knowledge of the language must be extremely limited to perhaps the Queen's English and the BBC type accents which aren't representative of the vast range of accents which the UK is home to both rhotic (like the US) and non-rhotic.

Re:Canada

[morgauxo]

Well.. I wasn't being serious. I'm not sure sarcastic is the right word to describe it though.

Klingon Babies

[flyneye]

That makes me think of what happened in a section 8 neighborhood here a few years ago. A young couple battling to raise a family in the midst of roaches, dog shit, diapers and Coke cans, decided to home school. The children were taught and allowed to speak only Klingon....

          Welllll, you can just guess what SRS had to say about all that.
I'm gonna guess by now the kids speak English and whisper amongst themselves in Klingon, presuming they are in the same foster home.

Re:Klingon Babies

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed] so badly. Where can I confirm this story?

Re:Klingon Babies

[Anonymous Coward]

Try a textbook.
Try a professor.
Try attending class some time.

Re:Klingon Babies

[flyneye]

https://www.goofball.com/news/trek_star_Stinking_Klingons_Like_Cats_in_Kansas
Seems to be remnants of the fallout.

Re:Klingon Babies

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked online and all I could find was a guy named Speers that taught his kid Klingon. He has a doctorate in computational linguistics and attempted to teach his kid Klingon and English. The kid wound up rejecting Klingon and gravitating towards English. There's no mention of section 8 or the child being taken away. To be honest, that part sounds like propaganda. Are you talking about someone else?

Re:Klingon Babies

[flyneye]

https://www.goofball.com/news/trek_star_Stinking_Klingons_Like_Cats_in_Kansas
Echoes of the older news items.

Re:Klingon Babies

[Anonymous Coward]

Try fucking yourself to become less of a douchebag, yes?

That explains it!

[Jethro]

Well that explains why I had trouble speaking Portuguese while I was in Brazil, since I was constantly being reminded of home! I mean they had all the same things as we do: trees, people... uh... stores. Yeah, it definitely wasn't because learning it in theory wasn't the same as speaking it in practice and it certainly wasn't MY fault. Hell, I tried speaking slower and louder and even THAT didn't help!

Re:That explains it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes you just can't help dumb.

Re:That explains it!

[Jethro]

Actually that was fairly easy, wasn't it? (;

I knew I didn't speak /much/ Portuguese, and I did realise -- before I went over -- just how little it was. Still, I managed to communicate with people so it wasn't that bad.

Re:That explains it!

[ChunderDownunder]

Well as someone else suggested, do an immersion course if you have a couple of months.you'll learn heaps about culture and history than just reading lonely planet.

I was planning on doing that in Montreal next month but tales of a bastardised language on here, hmmm.

Re:That explains it!

[Jethro]

I actually looked around and there were absolutely NO Portuguese classes whatsoever around here.

Plus I was only there for a week, I didn't need to be an expert. I did the Pimsleur thing and it actually worked pretty well for me. Well, that and watching Brazilian Sesame Street.

Acculturate more slowly?

[Anonymous Coward]

My suggest is that immigrants who settle in an "ethnic enclave" are likely to acculturate not just slowly but possibly not at all. Sometimes the 2nd or even 3rd generations haven't really joined up with the society outside of their "enclave". Any why should they? Unlike the bad old days of 150 or more years ago, immigrating is no longer essentially permanent. It doesn't take a month on a boat to get here. It doesn't take a month for a letter from home to arrive. It doesn't cost most of your worldly goods to buy a ticket back home. Nobody was likely to spend all their money and months traveling just to say "hi" to the cousins.

In the bad old days there was almost no option but to acculturate and and do so quickly - there may have been a newspaper in the languare of the old homeland and a few stores selling familiar goods with familiar labels in the old language - but not outside the enclave. Now there are radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, magazines and so forth in the old language accessible everywhere. And a phone call home is essentially free and airline travel is so cheap that everyone travels abroad.

So why acculturate when there's apparently no real need to do so?

Re:Acculturate more slowly?

[ebno-10db]

You're recalling a past that never was.

Unlike the bad old days of 150 or more years ago, immigrating is no longer essentially permanent.

During the so-called great ago of immigration, about 1/3 of the immigrants permanently returned to their native countries.

In the bad old days there was almost no option but to acculturate and and do so quickly

Before WWI there were entire towns in this country where the only language spoken was German. In some cases even the local public schools were taught in German.

Re:Acculturate more slowly?

[hedwards]

Indeed, people forget about that. I'm effectively a first generation immigrant because of that. My last arriving ancestor came to the US from Germany over a hundred years ago, but it wasn't until my Dad's generation that they stopped speaking German fluently. My Grandfather's working papers were even in German.

This is both my greatest point of pride about the US and one of my biggest concerns about the country. As long as it's dealt with in a mature way, it's a great resource to power our future.

Re:Acculturate more slowly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of proves the point that settling in an "ethnic enclave" (aka "ghetto" or "barrio") discourages and possibly even prevents acculturation.

Language Confusion

[Sonny Yatsen]

FTA: "For Chinese immigrants in the United States, speaking to a Chinese (vs. Caucasian) face reduced their English fluency, but at the same time increased their social comfort, effects that did not occur for a comparison group of European Americans (study 1)."

In my experience as a native speaker of Chinese, the reduced fluency in English when speaking with another Chinese person is due to the fact that in the back of my head, I'm trying to determine whether I should use English or Chinese to express an idea and it usually expresses itself as Chinglish. If the other person is Chinese but doesn't speak the same dialect as I do and I am using purely English to communicate, I don't get the same effect.

Re:Language Confusion

[phantomfive]

Yeah, I'm not sure the conclusions in the article are justified from the experiment. In my own experience learning to speak a second language fluently, I found situations similar to yours; for example, at first while doing live interpretation, it is quite difficult to remember which language to use. However, after a while you get used to it.

As for living in a foreign country, when you live in that country, you are forced to use the language a lot. You might be practicing the language for 8 hours a day. If you spent 8 hours a day practicing a language in your home country, you'd still learn the language rather quickly.

Further effect of this can be seen in people who live in the foreign country, but avoid opportunities to practice the language. They can go 30 years without actually learning it.

Re:Language Confusion

[hedwards]

Precisely. I saw the same thing when I went to a Starbucks in Guangdong province. I could order in English and in Mandarin, but my brain wanted to do both at the same time. I was ultimately able to order, but I would have gotten my point across better by pointing and grunting.

More recently I was having trouble getting take out from the local supermarket, because the woman working behind the counter spoke Chinese to a colleague, which temporarily caused me to revert to my typical ordering pattern from when I was in China. Trying to override that and order in English just made it worse.

Re:Language Confusion

[AK Marc]

When I was in Spain, speaking Spanish only for 2 weeks, I would dream in Spanish. I had a good sized vocabulary. Then I came home and couldn't remember half what I spoke well in Spain, when in Spanish class in the US. I never thought about it. But if I go back to Spain, I'll likely pick it up in a couple weeks, it's still wired in there, somewhere, I think.

Re:Language Confusion

[hedwards]

That's certainly possible, however you want to be mindful as any language, mother tongue included, will get forgotten if you don't use it. How long you can go without using will depend upon how thoroughly you learned it in the first place and likely other factors.

But, you do want to make sure exercise it a bit from time to time, just to keep it as firmly embedded as possible. What you're describing sounds like you still have a lot of it there, but access is the issue rather than forgetting it.

Re:Language Confusion

[locofungus]

It has been said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get really good at anything.

Even at 10 hours a day this means it will take three years to really learn a language.

I'm trying to learn Turkish - and been at it for about six months now. I'm probably managing to average less than an hour a day of study and it's somewhat depressing to think that it will take 30 years to get anywhere. So I've got Turkish playing in the background most of the time (including now) and I'm pleasantly surprised that I'm now getting pretty good at hearing what is said - to the point where I can often hear words well enough to put them into google translate (not whole sentences yet) and I've even managed to learn a couple of words just from the context of what I'm listening to.

Tim.

Re:Language Confusion

[_merlin]

Oh it gets worse. When I'm in Tokyo my Japanese sucks because it's easy to find someone who understands enough English to get by. When I'm out in the country where no-one speaks English, my Japanese gets a lot better suddenly because I have no fallback option. And then if I get drunk enough, even when I'm not in Japan, I forget how to speak English, and start just speaking Japanese to everyone, and ironically that's when my Japanese vocabulary is at its best. (Yeah, the logical conclusion is that I should just stay blind drunk at all times in Japan.)

Re:Language Confusion

[jittles]

in the back of my head, I'm trying to determine whether I should use English or Chinese to express an idea and it usually expresses itself as Chinglish.

That would be my experience from watching friends of mine. They would be going on in English for forever and then throw out the occasional Chinese word. Or if they were having a completely private conversation, sometimes they would discuss things in Chinese with the occasional English word. I'm not a native Spanish speaker, but when I do converse with my friends we often choose wording based on the language we feel provides the most expression for the point that we are trying to get across.

Re:Language Confusion

[Hognoxious]

I did classes in Spanish about ten years back. I actually used it for work at the time.

Went there last year for a holiday and though I could understand most stuff, I struggled to get the words out when I tried to speak. When it did come out it was more like Italian, much to the amusement of one waitress, who asked how I knew where she was from.

Re:Language Confusion

[SteveFoerster]

That would be my experience from watching friends of mine. They would be going on in English for forever and then throw out the occasional Chinese word.

Your friends aren't named Mal, Inara, and Jayne, are they?

Re:Language Confusion

[phantomfive]

That's too much, you can easily learn a language well in two years, and attain fluency in six months or less. Learning to repeat words you don't understand is extremely helpful, so good job.

Re:Language Confusion

[cellocgw]

It has been said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get really good at anything.

Even at 10 hours a day this means it will take three years to really learn a language.

No, the alleged 10k hours is to become world-class, like the Stones or Federer. It takes a lot less time to become above average at something, plus in the case of language you get to count all the time you're talking or reading or writing it (I think).

Re:Language Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Three years - you'll be at the stage of thinking that you're good, getting by, living with spouse and kids and holding a job etc., dreaming in the 2nd language, maybe even passing some very complicated exams that try to tell you otherwise, but natives will say "no way Jose. He doesn't understand the half of it". You're still doing conscious logic puzzles at that point (contextualizing), with little direct comprehension (which is just context + great unconscious speed).

It's not exact, of course, but a good way to imagine it is that when you began learning your 2nd language, you go back to being about 5 years old. So count from there. Seven years will give a good teenage-level vocabulary in most languages. It really does take a long time. Perhaps even longer for Asian languages and Spanish. Less if you're auditory or linguistic by nature.

Having to survive only speeds up the initial language acquisition. The key to "getting good" is notional language, not functional. Speak lots; you do most language learning by speaking and hearing your own mistakes, definitely not by writing.

And find a good teacher.

- proff

Re:Language Confusion

[Hognoxious]

I once went traveling alone round the Germanies, and when I got back to England it was two days before I could speak English without thinking really hard about it.

I also used to do Italian classes at weekends while working in Paris part of the week. One morning I was in a meeting and realized everyone was looking at me funny. What I said was perfectly correct, but not in French.

It seems I have one slot for a Germanic language and one for a Latinate one, and it takes some time to swap the drives over. Should I ever get round to learning Arabic, Hindi or Chinese I'll know if I have a third bay.

I have trouble speaking French

[Anonymous Coward]

... when shown the statue of liberty. Because I suck at French.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

learnt is, IIRC, an Anglicism. And IMHO 'I also' would be more correct than 'I have also' in the context. just sayin'. :)

The *descriptive* answer in British English is:
"learned" is used in phrases such as "a learned professor", in which case it is pronounced with two syllables.
Either "learnt" or "learned" are used interchangably in phrases like "I learnt a valuable lesson today".

The *descriptive* answer in American English is:
There is no such word as "learnt". Use "learned" always.

-- http://www.urch.com/forums/english/9214-learned-vs-learnt.html - not a definitive source, but there are many others with the same thrust.

Re:And this needed research?

[iggymanz]

You should study English a little more, that is a perfectly valid past tense of "learn", that is used more commonly now in other English speaking countries than the USA. Those of us who are older sometimes use it, it seems to have fallen out of fashion in America.

We do what he have to

[uvajed_ekil]

We often do what we have to do, and nothing more. It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention, and I think if it becomes absolutely necessary for you to do something, like speak a new language, you're going to put more effort into figuring it out.

Put more simply, duh.

Re:We do what he have to

[Darkness404]

Exactly. Why are many Europeans bi and tri-lingual while being bi-lingual in the US is a rarity? Because there's a need to be able to speak multiple languages in Europe because within a small geographic area there can be many languages widely spoken, I mean, within Switzerland, German, French and Italian are all widely spoken whereas in the US, English reigns supreme in the vast majority of areas (Mexican restaurants and Chinese buffets aside)

Re:And this needed research?

[kaatochacha]

You know.....
Some people are better with languages than others.
I personally suck, while I have a friend who somehow manages to speak any language she learns with perfect pronunciation--no accent.

It may come from being around so many languages for you, but it's often an innate skill. Be glad you've got it.

Nomenclature

[ebno-10db]

Q: what do you call someone who speaks three languages?

A: trilingual

Q: what do you call someone who speaks two languages?

A: bilingual

Q: what do you call someone who speaks one language?

A: American

P.S. before anybody gets their panties in a twist, I am a monolingual American.

Re:Nomenclature

[interkin3tic]

You SPEAK a language? Like as in using your mouth with other people? You must be new here.

Re:Nomenclature

[wbr1]

Any cunnilingual Americans?

Re:Nomenclature

[AK Marc]

Heh, I lived in Dallas and could drive north, east or west for days and never hear anything but English. South would get some Spanish, but not until San Antonio or south of there. In Europe, you can drive for a few hours and pass 3 or more native language homes. It's the geography, not isolationism.

Re:Nomenclature

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew even further inland. And I found that living overseas trying to learn a foreign language is very difficult when:

* You're teaching English six days a week and all your co-worker speak excellent English.

* You're girlfriend that you spend your day off with speaks English well.

* About 1/4 of the signs are in English because the locals think it is cool.

* There are just enough other foreigners around that the stores make some provision for people who don't speak the local language (like picture menus at restaurants).

One thing I never expected was how long it would take me to stop looking at the English signs on the street. When I was riding a bus in Taiwan and when I saw 10 Chinese signs and 2 English signs, my eyes gravitated toward the English from decades of habit. Forcing my eyes to focus on the Chinese and ignore the English was really difficult.

Re:Nomenclature

[Anonymous Coward]

That's some seriously crappy grammar for an English teacher.

Re:Nomenclature

[locofungus]

It's not just the geography, it's that English is "everyone's" second language.

So, as an English speaker, unless you just happen to know their first language, your language in common will be English.

I did French at school. I was never very good but I got to the point where I could follow a conversation provided the speakers weren't speaking too fast although I couldn't join in because by the time I'd thought what to say they would be three topics on but since then I've never had a use for French. I've done work in Italy, Germany, Thailand, Dubai but in every case it's been English that has been the language of communication (and in no case did I live in the country so I didn't have a chance to learn a language on the job so to speak)

Had everyone's second language been French then I'm sure I'd be pretty fluent in the language now. Instead it's rusted over the last 20 years to the point that when I am in France I'm struggling to recognise individual words, let alone understand whole sentences.

Tim.

Re:Nomenclature

[Anonymous Coward]

For a lot of people English is third language, or they don't speak it at all.
Mine second language is German, while first is Polish. Picking up German was natural - I was born close to the border.

Two years ago I was in one part of Romania, where people spoke a lot of languages: besides Romanian, also Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, some Italian and German. Almost no one know English. In central/southern Europe, Balkans especially, German is highly useful.

Re:Nomenclature

[Anonymous Coward]

You're girlfriend that you spend your day off with speaks English well.

And you're an English teacher? Uh oh.

Re:Nomenclature

[_merlin]

One thing I never expected was how long it would take me to stop looking at the English signs on the street. When I was riding a bus in Taiwan and when I saw 10 Chinese signs and 2 English signs, my eyes gravitated toward the English from decades of habit. Forcing my eyes to focus on the Chinese and ignore the English was really difficult.

Funny, it took my sister less than a week in Japan to start looking at the Japanese signs first and only fall back to English if she couldn't read it.

Pfft, B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Southwest U.S., and I have yet to learn Spanish.

Re:Pfft, B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my partner Tony used to call his sister "Nigre" because ; dark skin, no habla Espanol.

Of course...

[Darkness404]

Of course immersion is going to be more effective because it makes it actually -necessary- and useful to learn a foreign language. There's a big difference between sitting at a computer with Rosetta Stone and learning Spanish and being dropped in Argentina and have to figure it out. There's no real motivation in learning Spanish on the computer, after all, it doesn't determine whether you eat at night, it doesn't determine whether you can interact with people or anything more than a small intrinsic reward of knowing another language.

There's a reason why people who live in areas where multiple languages are spoken are generally fluent in more than one language, but in areas where everyone pretty much speaks a single language (such as the US and Canada) you see a much lower percentage of people who are fluent in multiple languages, it simply isn't needed.

Re:Of course...

[ebno-10db]

in areas where everyone pretty much speaks a single language (such as ... Canada)

You'll shortly be receiving a visit from the Canadian Language Police. They be polite but very very firm. You may also be required to pay a fine of $10 American.

Re:Of course...

[Livius]

Vous attendez bientôt la visite de la Gendarmerie linquistique canadienne. On sera courtois mais dur. Vous pourriez être assujetti à une amende de 10 $ américains.

Re:Of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

Vous recevrez bientôt une visite de l' Office de la langue française. On sera courtois mais ferme. Vous pourriez être contraint de payer une amende de 100 $ Canadiens.

Fixed that for you.

(j'ai fait la correction pour vous.)

Re:Of course...

[AK Marc]

Yeah, I knew lots of people from Vancouver, none of which could speak French. I've driven through Whitehorse a few times, and I'd doubt an of them has even heard it spoken outside some mandatory class taught by a non-native speaker.

Works on dialects too?

[virgnarus]

I'd like to try this out on southerners. You think showing them a picture of a fridge rusting out in someone's backyard will work?

Re:Works on dialects too?

[RabidReindeer]

I'd like to try this out on southerners. You think showing them a picture of a fridge rusting out in someone's backyard will work?

No.

Because it should be rusting out on the front porch, instead.

Also, don't forget the rusting car up on blocks in the front yard.

Re:Works on dialects too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed a correlation with the consumption of alcohol that tends to bring out my rural-home hick accent the more I drink. Also, when spending an extended amount of time back home during holidays, I'll bring the accent back to the city where I work.

Re:Works on dialects too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey guys, let's take a cheap shot at Southerners while being unable to properly apply capitalization rules ourselves!

I find it takes a week or two

[WillAffleckUW]

I find that turning on a second (or third, or in my case fifth) language usually takes anywhere from 3 to 5 days in the location where the other language is used before you gain fluency, if you don't use it all the time. Accents usually only take a day.

When I was working at Century 21 in Richmond BC most of my colleagues in the office next to mine were French, so when I coded in French, I would mostly just speak French the whole day.

Even having someone with you who is not very good at the other language will slow you down, as you have to keep switching how you think to translate for them. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems to make it take longer to access those portions of your brain/memory.

Re:I find it takes a week or two

[Anonymous Coward]

Fluency in 3 to 5 days? I suppose if you have a perfect memory, but for the rest of us it is not so easy.

Re:I find it takes a week or two

[Anonymous Coward]

Fluency in 3 to 5 days? I suppose if you have a perfect memory, but for the rest of us it is not so easy.

Yes, I see that in English even short written passages baffle you.

Re:I find it takes a week or two

[Anonymous Coward]

3-5 days is pretty remarkable, meaning you're either a savant or you're perhaps confusing fluency with having a conversational grasp of a language (still impressive).

Fluency, at least from my position hiring people based on language, typically takes months of study and exposure to native speakers. 3 days, even with prior study and basic exposure, is pretty optimistic.

Re:I find it takes a week or two

[Hognoxious]

I assumed that the reference to turning on implied he already knew it, but hadn't used it for a while and hence it was rusty or dormant.

Could be that English isn't one of his five, though.

Elementary

[Anonymous Coward]

It's elementary, my dear Watson. Elementary chemicals that is. The way memory is stored is just a bunch of areas each with chemicals that react to stimulation. Memories that are stored in Chinese have the same chemical stimulations, so looking at a picture of The Great Wall stimulates the area of the brain that has memories stored with that set of chemical reminders, which includes the memories of language.

As to what element on the chemical table the brain contains, I have no idea. :S

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the research world of us universities. Rewrite the obvious in academic speak; perform a study that at best tells you about local students. Then give out a few masters or PhDs and celebrate. Oh and for extra fuck you points they make you pay to read the full article that taxpayers already paid for.

Bullocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I visited China to try to get immersion training, the locals wanted to practice their English with me. I think had I gone to more of a country area it would have been better. Immersion study in the U.S.have been marginally better, with Middlebury's summer program being the best I have experienced.

Re:Bullocks!

[EvilSS]

Easy fix: next time you are in China get arrested and thrown into a Chinese jail. Forced emersion and I bet no one will be bugging you to practice their English.

Re:Bullocks!

[QQBoss]

Easy fix: next time you are in China get arrested and thrown into a Chinese jail. Forced emersion and I bet no one will be bugging you to practice their English.

Perhaps they might be buggering you to practice their English, though...

Re:Bullocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they might be buggering you to practice their French, though...

FTFY.

Re:Bullocks!

[EvilSS]

Perhaps they might be buggering you to practice their Greek, though...

FTFY.

FTFYB

I dont think that is the problem

[Osgeld]

I think they were just taken back about blatantly racist you just were

"hey slant, check this out, now speak English!"

I would have trouble speaking English after that as well you dick

Autopilot

[mynamestolen]

1. The most fun in learning a foreign language comes on the day you realise you've been speaking the language and not realising it. You're on autopilot, in the "zone". If something interrupts the flow - yikes. 2. When I began to learn Mandarin having already learnt Italian, Itallian began to come out of my mouth. Weird. 3. I was once in a language class with a diplomat who was professionally fluent in three languages. He'd just come back from three years in a post speaking French. Now he was doing a lunch time class polishing his already excellent Mandarin. To his incredible frustration he would switch to French without even realising what he was doing (much like the woman in one of the story links). Amazing to see. 4. I conclude there is a part of the brain where all foreign languages are coded - not sure what happens to people using sign language? Anyone?

Re:Autopilot

[AK Marc]

I've talked to people about similar things. The issue is that many people "think" in language. They have "default" and "other". They can choose "other" but it's unreliable in the manner you describe. I've met the daughter of a diplomat, and she grew up with 3 languages, and is fluent in 7. She doesn't have that trouble. Every language gets its own bucket, and there's no leaking. There's also a special bucket for those trained to hear one and think the other. It takes lots of translation practice to be a real-time translator.

Re:And this needed research?

[hedwards]

This isn't obvious to people who haven't been in that situation and it's a phenomenon that deserves more attention.

What's more, you're completely full of it, if you're suggesting that this level of ease is normal. The people I've met that know 8 or more languages, all had to put in a substantial amount of time doing, time which they didn't have available for other tasks.

The first time that I personally encountered this was at Starbucks in China, where I couldn't decide whether to use English or Chinese and was barely able to blurt out comprehensible words in either language.

As for the 1st world, what does that have to do with anything? Part of the reason why the 1st world is the 1st world is the efficiencies inherent at being able to conduct business in just one language. The time it took you to learn those extra languages didn't just get spontaneously generated, you made choices to use your time in that fashion. In the 1st world, we generally use that time and energy on school and work.

Re:And this needed research?

[hedwards]

True, but American English is the predominant form of English at this point. So, learnt and spelt are technically acceptable words, but as things go increasingly in the direction of American, you'll see fewer and fewer people accepting it as the correct words.

Re:And this needed research?

[hedwards]

Sometimes it's an innate gift, most of the time though it's just a lot of work. Basically the process works differently for some people than it does for others, and if you're using the wrong methods, you could easily think that you have no talent, when really what's going on is that the method isn't compatible with your particular brain composition.

I've personally struggled a great deal with vocabulary. I wouldn't typically have too much trouble with grammars, but the spelling and vocabulary would take tons of work to learn. It turns out that I'm more of a right brained visual person, so if I want to learn a language, I have to do it backwards. Stare at the words written in multiple colors until they stick, and focus on picking up my vocabulary from written texts and TV.

Also, once one has the idea that they suck at something, it can become a self fulfilling prophesy that may or may not be true.

childhood language

[shafty]

I was raised in the US by a Japanese mother who spoke to me in English with a few Japanese words thrown in (usually profanity). Hearing her voice now usually makes me switch to the hybrid language of my upbringing. If I talk to her in my adult manner I get the sense she thinks I'm full of BS.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but American English is the predominant form of English at this point.

A billion Indians disagree.

You must THINK in the language to be truly fluent

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where I heard it, but there's a compelling theory that the best way to learn to speak a foreign language is to stop translating to your native language and just start thinking in the new language. If you don't know a word, look it up IN THAT LANGUAGE. Soon you'll be able to form complex ideas in the new language, and you will be able to use your low level thought process to translate a concept into any language you know -- without having to think about which words to use.

Reminders of home cause you to start thinking in your native language, and that ruins your ability to form words in the new language, because you have to translate the ideas.

Software analogy: Your native language is compiled, self-hosting code. As you learn a new language, you're attempting to write a bootstrap compiler using an interpreter for the new language using the native language. As long as you think in the new language, you can use its JIT compiler for any subset of the language that you know, but if you start thinking in your native language, you generate a hardware fault that forces you to fall back to the clunky interpreter that runs 10-100x slower.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

How curious. I've always assumed "learned = past" and "learnt = perfect".

Re:And this needed research?

[flyneye]

*citation needed

Assimiliation resistance has become...

[Anonymous Coward]

...a CIVIL RIGHT.

Explains it all. Sometimes the truth is bigoted. However, it does not make it untrue.

Perhaps it's time to expand Godwin's Law to cover the word "racist". Oh, wait...that would be considered speech control.

--
Another fine opinion from The Fucking Psychopath®.

Re:Assimiliation resistance has become...

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you even talking about?

Re:And this needed research?

[marcosdumay]

And this needed a study?

Yes, it does need a study. It may be obvious for you, hell it may be obvious for everybody, but unless people make actual quantitative studies we won't know the details, or if it's really true. And there are plenty of obvious things that once somebody studies them we discover that weren't true.

Face it

[Anonymous Coward]

For a native-born non-ethnic American having grown up in the Cold War, learning a foreign language is an admission of loss of national sovereignty via military conquest i.e. foreign occupation with all its consequences including but not limited to loss of liberties. Is that not what we have today?

Diversity activists may now rejoice. Soon the blue eye will be scrubbed from the gene pool.

--
Another fine opinion from The Fucking Psychopath®.

Not too surprising

[wbr1]

Happens to me quite frequently. I go order my chalupas, and am enjoying the fire sauce, when all that can come out of my mouth is "yo quiero taco bell"

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but American English is the predominant form of English at this point. So, learnt and spelt are technically acceptable words, but as things go increasingly in the direction of American, you'll see fewer and fewer people accepting it as the correct words.

Engrish is the dominant form of English. There are a lot of people in Asia who speak a poor hybrid of English with interjected words and grammar from their native language, this is the form of English spoken by the largest number of people.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

When the discussion is spelling and grammar, typical dictionaries are implicitly cited.

Look it up yourself.

Battlefield Earth theory

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a line from that movie: "Just because you know Psychlo doesn't mean you are Psychlo!"

This is a major impediment in learning languages by reason of human nature. Native speakers of $LANGUAGE fear non-native speakers of $LANGUAGE by reason of loss of privacy that another language provides. They think espionage.

> boot c0d0s0:/hispanix

Bienvenidos al HispaniX

Tengo una manera de sonreír, para decir Hága el favor de ir(se) al carájo!

--
Un otra parecer la mas fina del Psicópata Totalmente Demen
pánico: violación de la partición de la memoria, imagen de la programación escrita al disco. Reinicie el sistema por favor.

Bilingual but not an interpreter

[Kagetsuki]

I'm bilingual but having learned both languages natively I find I have difficulty doing real time interpretation. When I speak one language my brain wants to operate in that language and I suffer the effect mentioned in the article of all the sudden not being able to speak the other language well. I also get this degraded accent thing going where my tongue just doesn't want to roll correctly in either language and I sound like a foreigner in both.

It's intensely frustrating to be asked to interpret because of this. And when I am asked to interpret and do I always find myself getting stuck on expressions that are efficient to say in one language but not in the other. Not to mention the fact that having to switch back and fourth between languages as quickly as possible is mentally taxing and I quickly get frustrated.

In comparison I've seen some people do interpretation real-time flawlessly. I find that very impressive.

Re:Bilingual but not an interpreter

[mynamestolen]

Even in monolingual people it's amazing to see that particular tiny pause following their utterance of a foreign word within a sentence, particularly when they've made an effort to pronounce it as they think it should be pronounced in the foreign language. Somehow the brain has to catch up before they continue the sentence.

Re:Bilingual but not an interpreter

[AK Marc]

Real-time translators are almost always not bilingual (not natively, as you are). They are primary speakers of the language they are translating into, and secondary speakers of the language listened to. This helps. It makes it easier to "think" in the "home" language. You listen in the home language, and still recognize the second language, though only think in home language.

Re:Bilingual but not an interpreter

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm natively bilingual, as were most of my co-workers when I was still doing simultaneous interpreting. I had absolutely no problems; I could just pick up the mike after listening to someone do it a few minutes. In both directions. I also sort-of know someone who moved to a country as an adult and learnt the language well enough to interpret it (didn't hear her work myself). Some say that interpreters are born, though I've heard more recent claims that it can be taught.

My point is that interpreters are a diverse bunch. YMMV.

Re:Bilingual but not an interpreter

[spooje]

I agree with you totally. I speak English, Chinese and Japanese. If I have to go E->J or E->C I can usually go a while translating, but if it's more than an hour I get a headache. If I have to go J C I'll get a headache within fifteen minutes since neither are my native language. If I'm just speaking Japanese or Chinese the English part of my brain just shuts off and the other language takes over. I've months between times when I'd speak English without any problems.

Re:You must THINK in the language to be truly flue

[Kagetsuki]

As someone fluent in two languages I can tell you that in my experience this is absolutely the case. I learned both languages by actually being in the environment where they were spoken. In school however we were taught a different "foreign" language and I never got it because they were trying to base everything on our native language - that layer of abstraction made the language difficult to comprehend and I was never able to pick it up.

The worst part is the only things I remember from it are the stupid mnemonic devices they tried to teach us for conjugation - if you find yourself having to go through some mnemonic device to figure out how to conjugate something you're going to suck at a language forever. It's exactly like you say - it's like using an embedded interpreter to convert hashes from an external language into native structures in your host/native language.

Re:And this needed research?

[iggymanz]

You do not own an American English dictionary?

"Learn: vb Learned also Learnt" -- Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, copyright 1976 by G. & C. Merriam Co.

Re:And this needed research?

[iggymanz]

You have not been watching world events of the last two decades; things are going increasingly away from America, the United States is in decline as is American English.

Re:And this needed research?

[drainbramage]

Wrong, so wrong, dear AC.
Or should I say "Police press won two bee corrected"?

Never thought I'd say it:

[Tablizer]

Drink the water!

Re:And this needed research?

[AK Marc]

That's because learning vocabulary isn't hard, but learning grammer without native speakers to help you with the rules leads to linguistic anarchy. Especially for a language with no tenses and no changes to the word for different uses (quick - adjective, quickly - adverb), you end up with a present-tense only language all the speakers understand. It's more a transliteration of Chinese than English. Without tenses, you say "I ran" as "I run ago", so that's closer to what the non-natives will speak. When they start working hard at getting native speakers to teach, rather than non-natives who studied abroad for 5 years, then you'll see some improvement.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm aware of that, but I'm also aware that the US and Canada alone represent more than half of all English speakers in the world. So, American English is the predominant version of English, regardless of what happens, the only way that could change would be if something chased everybody out of the US, or people in large parts of the world started taking up British English again.

Memory is state dependent

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, I have a scientist friend who insists that from his research Memory is state dependent, and this would appear to support that.

Re:And this needed research?

[ScottyLad]

True, but American English is the predominant form of English in America at this point.

FTFY

Trying to read about stuff you already know?

[loufoque]

Just come to slashdot.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wiki's "English Language" article indicates there are in fact more English speakers across India, Pakistan and Nigeria that the whole of north america.

But hey don't let facts get in the way of a good story.

I have been always telling this to my friends

[Anonymous Coward]

emigrants. Talk to locals and forget about any other immigrants in your vicinity - they're generally poor as you, including in local language(s) as well.

Full cultural immersion is valuable

[raarts]

As a Dutch host family with much experience with foreign exchange students, I can attest that full cultural immersion is not only valuable in other ways, but also the best way to learn a foreign language. Internet actually hinders this process to a great extent. Foreign exchange students who stay in close contact to their home families and friends are having the most problems adapting to their new surroundings, and experience feelings of loneliness, estrangedness, and not learning a strange language.

For this reason I recommend as little contact with your home country as possible.

Re:You must THINK in the language to be truly flue

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst part is the only things I remember from it are the stupid mnemonic devices they tried to teach us for conjugation - if you find yourself having to go through some mnemonic device to figure out how to conjugate something you're going to suck at a language forever. It's exactly like you say - it's like using an embedded interpreter to convert hashes from an external language into native structures in your host/native language.

You kiss your mother with that mouth?

I speak 5 languages...

[spectrokid]

..and often end up in situations where I am using multiple at once. The big problem there is to keep track of which language to speak to whom, not the speaking itself. Switching languages can be harder that speaking them. My guess is the picture of the great wall makes these people flipflop languages in their head.

Re:I speak 5 languages...

[Anonymous Coward]

I find this interesting also based on the recent discussion about people "code switching". In other words, when homies are speakign in the 'hood, they automatically speak in one manner vs. in a more formal setting. I speak 4 languages fluently including perfect Castillian Spanish. However, when speaking with a guatemalan/Mayan, I tend to speak more slowly and even with their accent.

Basically, I am convincing myself that I am in the same language as the other speaker.

It does not explain the effect of immersion

[tgv]

What to do when science reporting fails even on Slashdot? The effect found in the study relates to performance on priming tasks. The abstract explicitly says: "has yet to investigate consequences for linguistic performance". Recognition tasks usually require the subject to hit the right button when recognizing a string of characters as a word or a non-word. A naming task requires the subject to point at or pronounce the proper name for an image, which is also influenced by preceding images or words. Performance is expressed either in error rates or in the (average) time it takes, and 100ms of difference is considered a pretty large effect. Anything larger is a bit suspect.

The classical priming task is showing people two words in a row, which are either related (bakery - bread) or unrelated (spider - bread). It turns out people recognize the second word faster when the first word is related. This effect is old, and pretty stable across studies and languages, and the same holds for naming. The effect also goes by the name of facilitation, and the opposite by interference or distraction. Now, it's pretty easy to consider showing a Chinese icon as just an example of interference. It can be considered to relate more to Chinese and therefore to "prime" Chinese language recognition and consequently interfere with English language recognition. That would explain the result in line with other priming experiments without implying anything about immersion, as immersion involves a lot more than an icon or a face, and as the interference effect decays over time. The effects of language acquisition in immersion or in your own ethnic group can be easily ascribed to the frequency of use, which has a much larger and self-sustaining effect.

Re:And this needed research?

[Hognoxious]

learning grammer

Cheers!

Re:And this needed research?

[Hognoxious]

GP's going by weight, not number.

grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

"Show a native-born Chinese person a picture of the Great Wall, and suddenly they'll have trouble speaking English". Apparently if you write about it your grasp of the English language is less too. "a native born" vs "they'll"

Re:grammar

[wonkey_monkey]

Singular they.

Re:And this needed research?

[xelah]

learnt is, IIRC, an Anglicism.

Yes.

And IMHO 'I also' would be more correct than 'I have also' in the context. just sayin'. :)

Not in UK English. Americans seem unusually allergic to the perfect tense. I find that 'I already ate' always grates, because it should be 'I have already eaten' (because it's a state of being, a state of having eaten). For some reason, 'I have learned ...' seems better than 'I learned ...' but 'I learnt' doesn't seem as bad.

Re:And this needed research?

[xaxa]

or people in large parts of the world started taking up British English again.

Like everyone in Europe?

There is not 'One (1)' American English

[ralatalo]

Please See: http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6

You do all recall that all the Romance languages are based on Roman, but they were once all dialects of Roman. Welcome to America, we we have all kinds of regional and local dialects.

Re:And this needed research?

[flyneye]

Dictionaries carry no standards between them and are about as trustworthy for a final determination as a comic book.

Re:And this needed research?

[flyneye]

Bad citations, no standards.

Re:And this needed research?

[isorox]

True, but American English is the predominant form of English at this point.

A billion Indians disagree.

Surely you mean a thousand million. A billion Indians would be 1,000,000,000,000, unless you accept the U.S. Billion is the default.

Re:And this needed research?

[gutnor]

When you are young your brain specialise in the specific subset of sound and grammar that you can hear around you. If you get raised in an environment with a good mix of language that use different sound and different grammar structure you will be better at picking up new languages. For example if you are in an environment where people speak Chinese, English, Spanish, German you are pretty much ready for anything thrown at you. Especially at conversational level where you only need a limited vocabulary and concept.

The flip side is that your maximal proficiency potential in a single language is limited. However, the vast majority of people don't even come close to it so that's a moot point. But it does affect children. In countries like Luxembourg where you are expected to speak 4 languages, less gifted youth can end up into a point where they are average in all 4 languages and do not (yet) master any single language. They also develop the same mental issues than people suffering from stuttering, being unable to fully express themselves.

There is a good part of innate ability though. Shyness, introversion are killers for learning languages.

Re:And this needed research?

[Kielistic]

Except Canada and the United States have distinct versions of English (Canada uses British spelling over American). You don't even get a homogenous concept of English across the United States let alone including Canada in that. So what exactly are we calling "American English" here?

Re:And this needed research?

[war4peace]

gram - grammer - grammest.
He's the grammest of them all :)

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Canadian spelling has features of both UK and USA spelling. They write "colour", but they also write "normalize" and "practice".

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cultural immersion being the best way of learning a language may have not needed a study, but is it really so obvious that just reminding someone of their native culture make them less fluent? That is the important fact you seemed to have missed in your attempt to ridicule this "obvious" research.

Re:And this needed research?

[Hognoxious]

Britain officially abandoned the long scale billion when Harold Wilson was P.M.

Re:And this needed research?

[Kielistic]

but they also write "normalize"

I most certainly do not. Although I am unaware if it should be "ize" in official Canadian English (tm). The Z looks off to me but the traditional convention has to do with whether or not it is Greek or Latin derived.

and "practice"

"Practice" is a noun whereas "practise" is a verb.

This all just shows more that you can't lump Canadian English with American. They are quite distinct.

Re:And this needed research?

[hedwards]

According to that page, there are more English speakers in Seattle than there are in the entire sub-continent of India.

But, why let facts get in the way of the American bashing. America itself consists of nearly 60% of all native speakers of English and just over half of all speakers globally. And that's precisely the same page that you allege claims otherwise.

Re:And this needed research?

[Stewie241]

That's not really the point of the research though. The research isn't talking about the benefits of being immersed in a culture and spending time among people speaking that language helping make it easier to learn the language. The research seems to be more around the idea of how our environment and context shapes the way that we think. If you read the summary it talks about how the wrong context can affect your ability to speak a language that you know.

If you're in the learning stages of a language, you have to think carefully about every word. But you eventually get to a point where you think and the words come naturally. What the study suggests is that if your brain picks up signals that suggest the context isn't right for the language you want to speak, then it will have trouble.

I'm sure the analogy doesn't hold, but it is sort of like if you went to play baseball on a soccer field your brain having trouble because it isn't expecting to play baseball - it thinks it should be playing soccer.

Re:And this needed research?

[hedwards]

Nope, I'm sorry, but American English is common to both America and Canada. It's really more like North American English, as the features of the two are very similar. Sure, there are regionalisms, but English itself doesn't vary that much between the two. Most of the time to somebody from elsewhere on the planet, you wouldn't know whether a person is Canadian or English based upon speaking alone.

Definition of "reminder"

[melonman]

If we take this to its logical conclusion, ex-pats should lose the ability to speak the local language whenever they look at their spouse. And Chinese staff in a Chinese restaurant outside of China wouldn't have a hope. This has not been my experience. I suspect that the experiment is not demonstrating what the experimenters think it is demonstrating.

Well, here is an anecdote

[portforward]

I am an American. The best man at my wedding is also an American who served a two year LDS mission in the UK. He told me that it was really interesting to go from one village to another even 10 miles away and they would have a totally different accent.

He said that there was even a "pirate village". He said the entire village spoke like what we Americans sound like when we want to pretend to be pirates. One day a member of our church wanted to show off her new automobile. She said, "Elders, come take a look at my new carrrrrrr."

Re:Well, here is an anecdote

[Xest]

"He said that there was even a "pirate village". He said the entire village spoke like what we Americans sound like when we want to pretend to be pirates. One day a member of our church wanted to show off her new automobile. She said, "Elders, come take a look at my new carrrrrrr.""

That'll have been Somerset/Cornwall.

Apparently the accent associated with pirates is the way it is precisely because the actor who played a pirate in one of the earliest/most influential pirate films came from that part of the UK and didn't alter his accent much when playing the role.

Again though given that it's also historically one of the most sea-faring parts of the UK (Bristol for example was the largest slave trading port in the world for a long time acting as the hub for trade of slaves and other commodities between Africa/Asia and the new world), and that the UK is a historically prominent sea-faring nation it's quite possible that there were a number of pirates who indeed actually spoke with such accents.

Re:Well, here is an anecdote

[kaatochacha]

I TOTALLY have to go there now.

Re:Well, here is an anecdote

[Xest]

To be fair it's also one of the prettiest parts of the UK so is actually worth visiting if you ever go to the UK.

Bath which sits right next to Bristol is where a number of Hollywood celebs have situated themselves at least part of the time for exactly this reason. I believe people like Nicholas Cage and Johnny Depp have homes there

Though I like to think that Johnny Depp bought his home there so that he could continue playing Jack Sparrow and not feel out of place even when he wasn't filming for Pirates of the Carribean.

Re:And this needed research?

[Kielistic]

That's changing the goalposts a bit don't you think? Of course their features are similar; they're the same language and they're geographically close. But to try to lump Canadian English as American English is just not true. You may be able to place them on the same branch but they are distinct from one another (even one of the letters of the alphabet is pronounced differently). Especially considering the original remark was about the words "learnt and spelt" and how they're not going to be seen because they aren't used in American English but I use both of those in Canadian English. Especially spelt.

Re:And this needed research?

[Muad'Dave]

'I already ate'

That grates my nerves as well, and I'm purebred American mutt. I would allow "I've eaten", but not "I already ate". That just reeks of ignorant hick.

Beer and Girls

[canadiannomad]

Ok, doesn't need to be beer, and doesn't need to be girls... Just needs to be some combination alcohol and some attractive member of the sex that you are most attracted to that only speaks the desired language....
I guarantee higher retention rates and more fluid communication :D
Probably some historical/evolutionary reason for it... ;)

Re:And this needed research?

[isorox]

Britain officially abandoned the long scale billion when Harold Wilson was P.M.

Yet India never had Harold Wilson as PM

Re:And this needed research?

[TheGeneration]

Americans are the largest group of English speakers on the planet. You can hold onto whatever piddly rules you want, but we are the majority of the spoken language. Sorry you lost the war sweet cheeks.

Re:And this needed research?

[iggymanz]

you're confused, English as a second language for business, engineering and science in asia dwarfs that native american numbers. american english is not the main type of english spoken on earth.

Re:And this needed research?

[iggymanz]

There is a recognized standard dictionary of American English, which is also the oldest. They invest huge amounts of time and money in R&D. Your disembling is hilarious.

Re:And this needed research?

[kaatochacha]

Hmm. now you've got me interested in trying some languages again!

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I suspected so but I didn't understand a word of what they were saying.

Re:And this needed research?

[xelah]

Americans are the largest group of English speakers on the planet.

No, they aren't. But just because they aren't doesn't mean they aren't going to maintain a spoken language with a distinct identity (albeit still with plenty of variety within it), and part of that maintenance will come from avoidance of things which grate in the US but don't in, say, India or Nigeria.

You can hold onto whatever piddly rules you want,

Indeed we shall, as indeed will American-English speakers and speakers with particular US regional accents. It's why UK English isn't the same as US English.

but we are the majority of the spoken language. Sorry you lost the war sweet cheeks.

UK and US English are quite similar. AIUI, some linguists expect English to split in to Western, Indian and African variants, and I can't help thinking someone Americans will find it quite hard to take if Indian consumers start making fun of US products and call centre operators full of comical English 'mistakes' and weird/cute dialect words like 'million'.

cultural immersion

[D-Fly]

"Cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue" because you are forced to communicate exclusively in the foreign tongue. It's a lot more practice in a lot more contexts 100 percent of the time, instead of just some casual class time that you barely pay attention to. It has nothing to do with this fairly irrelevant research about cues for your home culture causing temporary confusion.

Likewise immigrants who settle in ethnic enclaves don't learn the local language as fast for the very simple reason that they don't have to; they get most of their business done in their original language, and most of their social interactions are in their original language. Less practice, less forced use of the new language means slower learning.

I have experienced both alternatives; I have twice been put into complete immersion situations. Both times I learned the local language relatively fluently in about 4 to 6 months. And the one time that I lived in a sort of foreign enclave bubble for two to three years, despite working very hard at studying the local language, I never attained full fluency. It's just too easy to fall back on speaking English if it's there all around you.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an EFL teacher out in the field for 15 years, you are totally wrong.
Most understand AmE, but most want to speak BrE.

Sorry dude.

Re:And this needed research?

[MarkCollette]

I agree, I'm a Candian and I use spelt, as well as kamut.

Re:And this needed research?

[Imbrondir]

Wikipedia cites around 125 million english speakers. Not every Indian knows English

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

English much? You should have learnt it at school.

Re:And this needed research?

[flyneye]

And yet it still has nothing to do with standards of language construction. It is about definitions, including slang and pop culture invention. At best it will show nouns, verbs and pronunciation.
We might as well get a manual on the Ford Fiesta to consult in a matter of the English language.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see you learned at public school.

Re:And this needed research?

[iggymanz]

So to some up, in the world between your ears:
1. the word "learnt" is not and never was a part of American English
2. The leading standard dictionary of American English does not in fact research and track word usage language construction and is not authoritative?
3. The leading standard dictionary of the American English in 1976 made up the word "learnt" and added its definition as a prank?

You have completely lost the argument, are willfully ignorant of your native tongue, and moreover know nothing of how dictionaries are compiled.

Re:And this needed research?

[flyneye]

The word "learnt " is part of slang. Slang is not considered good grammar.
The leading dentists surveyed found that leading and trailing competitive publications publish opinions on word usage and are as subject to error as The Enquirer. The name Standard Dictionary of American English is no more standard than Federal Express is federal.
Definitions of all sorts of cultural terms are included in dictionaries. Definitions of all sorts of cultural terms disappear from dictionaries over time.
All this "look a bird" aside; in the several states public school system at the middle school level you were taught past, present, future perfect and conjugated them in first, second and third persons until you thought you would die.
The end result. You are currently trying to use a screwdriver to turn a nut.

Re:And this needed research?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that what they were saying? I couldn't tell since their ability to speak understandable English is exaggerated.

Re:

[iggymanz]

"Learnt" never was slang, it is in fact from the Germanic origins of English.

Re:

[flyneye]

We have loads of words with Germanic origins. Doesn't change it from learned.
Learnt, is still slang. If you find it in use here, you will be in a KOA park or truck stop in Tennessee, Arkansas or Mississippi or the deep south.

Re:

[iggymanz]

That is false, it is found in formal writing. A word in constant use for over 1,000 years is not slang. There are other verbs conjugated exactly in the same way, that you use.