leaving the mother tongue_ why languages are so hard to learn and which are easiest

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Leaving The Mother Tongue: Why Languages AreSo Hard To Learn And Which Are Easiest

May 11, 2015 12:36 PMBy Chris Weller

Picking up a new language requires constructing brand new linguistic structuresin the brain, and some are easier to build than others. michael davis-burchat CC BY-ND

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Unfortunately for Americans, fluency in a second language is somethingonly enjoyed by a select few. Either you grew up in a home where Englishshacked up with a mother tongue, or you found the discipline to master anew language through practice. For the rest of us, English is all weveknown and all well ever get.

Thats not to say some languages arent easier to pick up than others.Assuming we get the urge to learn more about a culture or make a pact totravel like a native, which means talking the talk, we can fold in a newway of speaking, and indeed, thinking. The trick is knowing what toexpect. Some languages sound like English just a littleoff, whileothers might as well be indecipherable codes intercepted by warringcountries. How does science explain that difference?

Apples And OrangesLinguists like to pick things apart, so we can think of languages as beingmade up of three basic components: the phonology (how words andletters sound), the grammar (how those sounds are organized in asentence), and the words themselves (how ideas and objects arerepresented verbally).

For English speakers, who operate with 44 producible sounds (known asphonemes), sentences that flow from subject to verb to object, and overa million words made up of 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, the basicchallenge in learning a new language is staying as close as possible tothose three benchmarks. Some accomplish the goal much more easilythan others.

Spanish, for instance, is widely regarded as a natural second language forEnglish speakers. With its 24 easy-to-pronounce phonemes, subject-object-verb grammar structures, and only one additional letter many English speakers find Spanish a quick pick-up. Mandarin,meanwhile, is much harder. While it does use fewer phonemes thanEnglish and is generally thought to use a simpler grammar structure, itrelies on tones to impart meaning, which English doesnt employ, and



instead of 26 letters to form words it uses thousands of representativecharacters.

Nuria Sagarra, associate professor of psycholinguistics at RutgersUniversity, also argues morphology a languages structure, based onparts of speech plays a presiding role. English, for example, has a poormorphology, Sagarra explains. We need more than the verb slept toknow who did the sleeping. But in Spanish and other languages withricher morphologies the subject is embedded in the verb: durmi, orhe slept.

What makes one language harder to learn than another, Sagarra says, ishow experienced the learner is with transferring between linguisticallycomplex structures. That ability tends to arrive at intermediateproficiency, she told Medical Daily in an email.

If your native language is more similar to the foreign language (e.g., yournative language has rich morphology and you are learning a richmorphology, such as a Russian learning Spanish), things will be easier.

It also doesnt hurt to have a good memory, she says.

How Can We Know?Its tempting to say earning an A on a Spanish test means a person ismoving toward fluency, but based on Sagarras experiments, she says,this is far from real. Learning languages is hard because it requiresbrand new cognitive frameworks. Simply translating the new structuresthrough the filter of a native language isnt learning. Its memorizing.

For people like Sagarra who study the way our brains make sense of newlanguages, the challenge is figuring out when learning actually takesplace. When is the brain playing by the new rules? In 2013, Sagarra andher colleague Nick Ellis, of the University of Michigan, found through eye-tracking technology that peoples proficiency level determines wherethey spend their time concentrating. In that particular study, the



investigators focused on adverb-verb congruency (Yesterday the maneats versus Yesterday the man ate) among English and Romanianlearners of Spanish.

They discovered people read the Spanish sentences in line with thestructures of their native language. As people got more proficient, theirtransfer rates increased, until a point when they knew the language wellenough that their new frameworks supported the learning withoutneeding to go back and forth.

Unfortunately, there arent in-depth studies that compare each languageon these grounds. The best linguists can do is draw out some principlesabout language complexity and deduce which languages might be difficultfor which native speakers.

Romance languages tend toward the top, often joined by Dutch, Swedish,and Norwegian. A little more time-consuming are Asian and EasternEuropean languages, which make use of different morphologicalelements: Hindi, Thai, Greek, Finnish, and Turkish. Then come theheavy-hitters, such as Mandarin, Arabic, Farsi, and Korean, which lookand sound completely different than English.

It Gets BetterLuckily, the road ahead for language learners seems to get smoother withtime. As you accumulate more languages in your arsenal, you gain an abilityto transfer new languages through smarter filters. Success breedssuccess. If you already know Japanese and want to learn Mandarin, forexample, youll probably have an easier time than someone who justknows English. Instead of transferring the new language through English,which stands at the opposite end of the morphological spectrum, you canuse the frameworks for Japanese instead.

With that in mind, where you learn could end up making all thedifference. Research has repeatedly found the immersive experience oflanguage learning cant be recreated in a classroom. If people have any



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hope of securing bilingual status adopting all the nuances of everydayspeak, not simply the stale phrases found in a textbook they need todive in headfirst.

The net effect of this is a brain that is forever more complex. People whospeak more than one language exercise more executive control, mentalflexibility, and concept formation. In this, Sagarra offers a word of adviceto parents thinking of raising their kids bilingual.

Bilingual kids need more time to talk and some teachers suggest parentsto raise them monolinguals, she said, but bilinguals kids catch up atthe end, so it's better to be patient and wait.

Chris Weller Chris is a Senior Reporter at Medical Daily, where he covers brain healthand other fun stuff. read more

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RobbKvasnakGoetheUniversityFrankfurtAgoodstrategywouldbetoteachgradeschoolchildrenEsperantofirst.ItiseasilyacquiredandonceyouhavetakenEsperantoandexperiencedthesuccessofbecomingfluentinaforeignlanguage,thenextlanguageisaloteasiertoacquire.RecentexperimentswiththisinEnglandandAustraliahaveshownamazingresults.Thisisreferredtoasthepropedeuticmethod.IhavenoticedthatmostEsperantospeakersalsospeaktwoorthreelanguagesbesidestheirmothertongueandEsperanto.ItseemsthatknowingEsperantoencouragesthemtolearnmore.ReplyLike12hoursago



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