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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."
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.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
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!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
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.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So it's like English in the USA....
True, but American English is the predominant form of English at this point.
A billion Indians disagree.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Britain officially abandoned the long scale billion when Harold Wilson was P.M.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
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."