How do we learn? Why do we struggle when learning? Do adults have a bigger problem learning than kids?
We all believe that languages should be learned early, and we’re not wrong. However, most adult learning is based on a school system that’s boring and plainly illogical.
Why do adults struggle so much?
The short answer is that they don’t learn like kids. The question is: what do kids do differently that makes learning so enduring? Let’s find out.
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How do ants find food?
Ants forage. They set out to find food for the day without any idea where the food might be located. Yet once a foraging ant runs into a food source, it will consume some and then return to the colony.
While making its way back, it leaves a trail of pheromones. Other ants pick up the trail, and follow it to the food source. This in turn, creates a pheromone trail that's incredibly intense, leading to more ants following the same path.
Suddenly, you have an invasion of ants, simply because they're following the strongest signal.
When we start learning a language, we too look for the strongest signal. Except most language learning often leads us down the wrong trail and frustrates us.
We start, stop, start again, get lost a lot and then decide we're hopeless at the task. Maybe if we'd learned languages as kids, we'd have been better off, we think to ourselves. And you'd be right, because kids don't learn like adults do.
Kids approach language learning in a manner that is remarkably different from adults.
No kid can be bothered with vocabulary. Grammar? What's that? While a child may learn some core language recognition skills in kindergarten, it's not until the ages of 7-8 that they learn structure in language. How then, do they manage when there's no instruction at all? While there is an early earning–or critical learning period– that's not the only reason kids learn.
The biggest reason why kids learn is because the trail they follow is almost diametrically opposite to what we follow as adults. Keen to find out more? Stay with me.
Here are three reasons why adults struggle more than they should.
Reason 1: Reading instead of hearing.
Reason 2: An absence of randomness
Reason 3: The curse of vocabulary
Reason 1: Reading instead of hearing.
How do you say the word “croissant” in French?
French? Surely, we'd say the word in the same way as we'd say it in English. Yet, if you've heard the word being expressed correctly, you'll be saying it in a completely different manner.
When you read the word in English, it seems to read like “cr0y-sawn-t” or “craw-sann”. Most of us make this mistake because we read the word in English—or our native language—and then decide to fudge our way forward.
It's the same reason why a non-English speaker might trip over words like “enough”, “receipt” or “island” which sounds more like “en-o-ugh” or “rec-eh-ipt” and “is-land”.
Kids, as you may have noticed, are pretty hopeless at reading.
From the time you're born, or possibly even before, a substantial part of your pattern recognition is devoted to hearing. You can't figure out what's being said because you have no context, but you keep listening. People around you keep chattering, and a pattern seems to develop in your very young brain.
Adults, on the other hand, seem to use reading as their primary source of learning.
They can work their way through the written word if it's a language like Spanish or Italian. If it's completely alien, like Malayalam or Mandarin, they may resort to learning the structure of the written word to make sense of it.
However, in most cases, reading becomes the first crutch. Unfortunately, when you read, you are prone to make mistakes based on your text interpretation.
On the other hand, when you listen to something, you have no idea how it's written.
I've covered about 60 hours of French learning so far, and one of the sentences I've learned to say is: “Things will get better. In French, you could say it as: “les choses vont s'arranger”
Or let's take another sentence that, when spoken, sounds like: “Tout se passera bien. ”
Try reading that out in English—or whatever language you speak—and you will almost certainly end up with an inaccurate pronunciation. Yet, if you simply listen to the sentence, you will almost always do a lot better. It may take a few tries, but you'll be understood and be more likely to be 100% accurate after a while.
A child learns exclusively through sound.
Adults, on the other hand, are given words. The written language is dumped on them.
Ugh!
That leads them to make pronunciation mistakes in many languages.
If they're referring to Japanese rice wine,” they may incorrectly say “sah-kee” instead of “sah-keh.” If they were to switch to French, they most certainly don't hear the French “r” sound, which is produced at the back of the throat, and the “t” at the end is silent.
This ends up with an incorrect rendition of “croissant” or even the name of the country. Most of us say “France” as we read it in English, and not like it's really pronounced.
The first correction that we might need to make is to hear the language rather than read it, just like kids do. This means that even if it's visible in your learning program, you need to close your eyes to get the right sound.
With that first shift in your strategy, it's time to move to the second point, namely chaos.
Most language situations put you in a location. You're at the cafe, ordering a set of drinks and, um, croissants. Almost all the vocabulary and structure are based on a logical sequence.
Kids have no such logic. Let's explore why that's the case and take a step into randomness.
Reason 2: The beauty of randomness in language learning.
A child's first word is sudden and magical.
Around the age of eight or nine months, a child may say “dada”, “mama”, or “ball”. Yet, long before they speak, they've been inundated with as many as 20,000 to 30,000 sentences. Most of those sentences are random in nature.
The sentences might be:
“Where's the birdy?”
“Are you hungry?”
“Let's get your favourite toy”.
Notice how disconnected those sentences happen to be?
It's not some tidy situation with logic. In fact, most of our daily conversations bounce madly in the same manner. One minute, we're talking about which soup we prefer, then swing wildly to the weather, only to talk about how the windows need cleaning.
Those tens of thousands of sentences a child hears have little connection to each other.
Taxes, table tennis, biryani, sheep, carpet cleaning, and hundreds of other weird topics clash with each other. The child can't make much sense of it all and doesn't try to. The sounds are like a song playing in the background and sometimes have context—or not.
Randomness isn't as terrible as it seems.
The sentences you encounter need to be highly diverse, not just in terms of context, but also need to jump through the present, future and past tense as though it's perfectly normal to do so. Why? Because that's what “normal” is all about.
As I sit here typing this article, my wife Renuka turns to me and says: “How about this vegetable soup—with chicken broth?” Her next sentence is: “Is it okay to eat at 6:30?” She follows it up with: “We just got the plumbing bill, and it's $340 just to fix the tap”.
Tenses, sentences, and context are all fluid in a real-world situation. Your learning app—or learning program may not have quite the same emphasis on randomness.
And yet, every child on the planet, without exception, faces an avalanche of topics on a daily basis.
The brain doesn't seem to worry about randomness. Instead, it seems to build a database of different situations, tenses, and whatever other stuff is involved in language learning.
Order isn't terrible, but it's plainly unnatural.
When I first learned how to speak Spanish, I knew perfectly well how to buy a ticket, get on a train, and ask for a window seat. But if I needed some food, I'd just have to make weird noises and point because I might have never been exposed to randomness. A child, however, has almost all the variety it needs.
Plus, no child has to deal with single words of vocabulary, which is the bane of most language learning. Every child will always hear a complete sentence and rarely a single word.
Let's find out why learning mountains of vocabulary can make you feel brilliant yet hopeless at conversing in a language.
Part 2: Why Adults Struggle With Language Learning
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