All of the the research I have seen on this topic have been observational retrospective studies, which are worthless and should be ignored. The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language (let alone a third or more) are so large that they cannot be overcome without a randomized control. This stuff is churnalism, right up there with "does coffee make you live longer?" [1].
But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy.
I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring.
[1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.
Learning another language is difficult, but never occured to me to think it would be somehow impossible to anyone. It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position as it is the default international language. World is getting smaller and people coming from smaller languages usually also learn the local international language as well. If you are born to family speaking estonian today you probably pick up also english or otherwise you spend your life surfing only estonian websites. It requires no special talent (although some people are fast at picking up new languages)
And it is only getting easier to learn a language now too. What FINALLY got me over the hump with Spanish was YouTube and discovering resources like Dreaming Spanish (leveled content for comprehensive input that probably exist in most major languages). Content that was fun and at my level.
Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.
There are so many tools now that didn't exist even when I started. I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example. Or in the case of Japanese, being able to take a picture of text, and select the kanji for lookup. Life. Changing.
I'm also old enough to remember when getting listening materials required going to the library for cassette tapes. Today, you can talk with a wide selection of native speakers, listen to essentially infinite audio and video content, and immerse yourself in a culture halfway around the world for the price of an internet connection.
I am trilingual. All of my languages belong to different language groups; I regularly read and write in both directions. I use all of the three languages every day. I can also bulldoze my way through a text in a fourth language given a dictionary and a reference for its grammar. I can read the alphabet of a fifth language (mostly w/o understanding the sounds that I make, but I am told that I get it right).
I got there 15 years ago. I seem to be unable to learn anything new since.
Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best.
If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.
For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.
you need serious motivation to learn a new language. First ask yourself if you have a really good reason otherwise you will give up. I, for example learned english because I needed for work. But I wouldn't dive into learning another language unless I'm going to engage with it in some form every day
Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2.
> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've certainly met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.
As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
I have learned all of my Spanish since I turned 30?
If you’re immersed and just use anki to build out your vocab it isn’t that hard. Tbh, it’s kind of easier than when I was learning languages as a teen.
Before Covid I got my German B1 certificate. I was diligently going to German-speaking meetup twice a week.
One of the meetups had a bunch of googlers in it regularly. One of them was a loud gregarious Italian from the north. He was telling me a story about cleaning fish and chopping their heads off with a machete and how he cut the end of his finger off and had it reattached. He seemed nice but a little inept and lacking caution.
Covid was starting. In the newspapers it was reported that Zurich had its first case of Covid. They were cautious to not say who it was - no clues at all in the paper. But a friend at Google forwarded me an internal email that said no one at Google had it yet other than someone in the Zurich office who had just been in northern Italy.
I stopped going to the meetups. I really should start again but not sure what's going to happen next.
The biggest obstacle to learning a foreign language is that it's so much slower and more frustrating than using your native language, right? Compared to your native-language typing speed, even English typing speed is only half...
So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?
The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less.
As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is).
But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc..
The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media.
It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning.
It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know.
English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.
It’s exceedingly frustrating, and you either get an awful lot of exposure ( say you stop reading in English , only read in Norwegian and read 10k pages a year ) or you grind and learn word lists.
The good news is that word lists are now much easier to learn thanks to SRS systems.
You put yourself in a situation where nobody understands you in your native language, nothing helpful for your daily life is written in your native language, and you must constantly try to comprehend and produce the target language if you want to accomplish even basic tasks.
If you can't up and move, then studying a language with a lot of cultural export helps a bit, if you can get into the habit of switching all of your media consumption to the target language. It's not the same, though.
I think ultimately the highest barrier is looking stupid. I try not to care, like how kids do not and simply try. People underestimate you all the time when you do not speak a language, or do it badly.
A second language, almost from the start, will also open up a whole second world for you.
When I go to somewhere that speaks Spanish the whole place “jumps into 3D” for me. I can understand what people at the table next to me are complaining or laughing about, I can make small talk with people, I don’t have to follow the “avocado toast” trail that the non-native speakers sort of get jammed into because they struggle off of it. It is a much more human experience when you understand the language.
At home, I can watch Spanish movies as well, and listen to music artists I probably might never have heard about like C. Tangana and Rosalia otherwise. It has doubled my cultural landscape for me.
After reading the article, I wonder if this isn’t a key secondary benefit to learning the language itself. It gives you a larger variety of things to enjoy in your life.
I don't think it's really possible to learn a new language unless you have to. Sure, you can learn some words and grammar from books and games like Duolingo, but you'll never really learn the language if you don't use it, and you'll only use it if you have to. This is why it's hard for English natives to learn another language: too many people speak our language already. And now people won't be learning computer languages any more either.
You also get to learn another culture which to some extent prevents you from becoming an a.hole. Lack of foreign language instruction in k-12 education in the USA might be a little correlated with this...
probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)
I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin
similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain
All of the the research I have seen on this topic have been observational retrospective studies, which are worthless and should be ignored. The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language (let alone a third or more) are so large that they cannot be overcome without a randomized control. This stuff is churnalism, right up there with "does coffee make you live longer?" [1].
But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy.
I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring.
[1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.
Learning another language is difficult, but never occured to me to think it would be somehow impossible to anyone. It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position as it is the default international language. World is getting smaller and people coming from smaller languages usually also learn the local international language as well. If you are born to family speaking estonian today you probably pick up also english or otherwise you spend your life surfing only estonian websites. It requires no special talent (although some people are fast at picking up new languages)
And it is only getting easier to learn a language now too. What FINALLY got me over the hump with Spanish was YouTube and discovering resources like Dreaming Spanish (leveled content for comprehensive input that probably exist in most major languages). Content that was fun and at my level.
Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.
There are so many tools now that didn't exist even when I started. I don't know how people managed without being able to use translation apps, for example. Or in the case of Japanese, being able to take a picture of text, and select the kanji for lookup. Life. Changing.
I'm also old enough to remember when getting listening materials required going to the library for cassette tapes. Today, you can talk with a wide selection of native speakers, listen to essentially infinite audio and video content, and immerse yourself in a culture halfway around the world for the price of an internet connection.
I am trilingual. All of my languages belong to different language groups; I regularly read and write in both directions. I use all of the three languages every day. I can also bulldoze my way through a text in a fourth language given a dictionary and a reference for its grammar. I can read the alphabet of a fifth language (mostly w/o understanding the sounds that I make, but I am told that I get it right).
I got there 15 years ago. I seem to be unable to learn anything new since.
Anyone have experience learning a new language in their 30s? I've tried and failed a few times. I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best.
If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.
For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.
you need serious motivation to learn a new language. First ask yourself if you have a really good reason otherwise you will give up. I, for example learned english because I needed for work. But I wouldn't dive into learning another language unless I'm going to engage with it in some form every day
Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2.
> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've certainly met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.
As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
I have learned all of my Spanish since I turned 30?
If you’re immersed and just use anki to build out your vocab it isn’t that hard. Tbh, it’s kind of easier than when I was learning languages as a teen.
Yep, I learned Spanish, then French.
The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn.
Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.
Before Covid I got my German B1 certificate. I was diligently going to German-speaking meetup twice a week.
One of the meetups had a bunch of googlers in it regularly. One of them was a loud gregarious Italian from the north. He was telling me a story about cleaning fish and chopping their heads off with a machete and how he cut the end of his finger off and had it reattached. He seemed nice but a little inept and lacking caution.
Covid was starting. In the newspapers it was reported that Zurich had its first case of Covid. They were cautious to not say who it was - no clues at all in the paper. But a friend at Google forwarded me an internal email that said no one at Google had it yet other than someone in the Zurich office who had just been in northern Italy.
I stopped going to the meetups. I really should start again but not sure what's going to happen next.
Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it’s probably safe to go to a language meetup.
The biggest obstacle to learning a foreign language is that it's so much slower and more frustrating than using your native language, right? Compared to your native-language typing speed, even English typing speed is only half...
So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?
The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less.
As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is).
But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc..
The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media.
It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning.
It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know.
English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.
No that’s correct, I fully agree.
It’s exceedingly frustrating, and you either get an awful lot of exposure ( say you stop reading in English , only read in Norwegian and read 10k pages a year ) or you grind and learn word lists.
The good news is that word lists are now much easier to learn thanks to SRS systems.
Thanks for the advice.
For me, reading is fine, but writing and speaking are hard. Especially speaking. What should I do about this?
Should I change my environment first, after all?
Immersion, unfortunately.
You put yourself in a situation where nobody understands you in your native language, nothing helpful for your daily life is written in your native language, and you must constantly try to comprehend and produce the target language if you want to accomplish even basic tasks.
If you can't up and move, then studying a language with a lot of cultural export helps a bit, if you can get into the habit of switching all of your media consumption to the target language. It's not the same, though.
I guess that's the only way. Thanks for the advice.
I think ultimately the highest barrier is looking stupid. I try not to care, like how kids do not and simply try. People underestimate you all the time when you do not speak a language, or do it badly.
Go somewhere you are forced to learn and speak it.
Defaulting to your native language will get zero comprehension, which is much more frustrating than some.
A second language, almost from the start, will also open up a whole second world for you.
When I go to somewhere that speaks Spanish the whole place “jumps into 3D” for me. I can understand what people at the table next to me are complaining or laughing about, I can make small talk with people, I don’t have to follow the “avocado toast” trail that the non-native speakers sort of get jammed into because they struggle off of it. It is a much more human experience when you understand the language.
At home, I can watch Spanish movies as well, and listen to music artists I probably might never have heard about like C. Tangana and Rosalia otherwise. It has doubled my cultural landscape for me.
After reading the article, I wonder if this isn’t a key secondary benefit to learning the language itself. It gives you a larger variety of things to enjoy in your life.
I don't think it's really possible to learn a new language unless you have to. Sure, you can learn some words and grammar from books and games like Duolingo, but you'll never really learn the language if you don't use it, and you'll only use it if you have to. This is why it's hard for English natives to learn another language: too many people speak our language already. And now people won't be learning computer languages any more either.
I had a massive stroke. I should be in a wheelchair. I'm mostly fine now.
It's postulated that my multilingual abilities helped, among other things.
You also get to learn another culture which to some extent prevents you from becoming an a.hole. Lack of foreign language instruction in k-12 education in the USA might be a little correlated with this...
does this include programming languages which after all are a system of meaning?
Also wondering about instruments and learning to read sheet music.
probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)
I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin
similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain