Think You’re Too Old To Start a New Language?
“What’s the use? It’s too late!” Then again maybe not.
There’s an old maxim in the field of second language learning, the 10,000-hour rule. It supposes that it takes on average that amount of concentrated investment to reach a fluent level in a new language.
Now, say, that you’re 75 years old and you’re thinking of spending some of your golden years in Brazil. And you’re going to make the most of it by learning Portuguese. Here’s the math. There are 8760 hours in a year. Since some of those hours, you have to devote to eating, sleeping, etc., etc., let’s cut the actual available time for learning to two hours a day. That comes out to about 730 hours. So you’ll reach fluency in just 14 years. If you wait till you’re fluent to leave, you’ll be 89 years old.
Discouraging? Definitely!
The 10,000-hour rule, tied as it is to the goal of fluency, should raise a flag as to what we mean by fluency and if fluency should be the only goal of language learning.
Fluency or mastery is something you get promised in the advertising of those companies that sell language learning materials. Some promise success in three months at only 15 minutes a day. That comes out to about 20 hours total, about 500 times faster than what those fussy academics claim. That’s 500 years to fluency according to the rule. You’re not going to sell a lot of language learning materials if you’re honest about the effort.
What these purveyors of learning materials essentially mean is that you’ll possibly end up with fluency in the amount (small) of language they include in their materials. So how many words and phrases is that? They don’t say it out loud, but what they do cover is pretty limited.
A typical first-year high school language textbook, for example, contains about 800 different root words, but the average fluent native speaker will have an active speaking vocabulary of about 10,000 to 15,000 root words. Their passive vocabulary, words they recognize but can’t produce, can be as large as 50,000 root words.
And we’re not done with the quibbling here, because the notion of a root word can be pretty complicated. Think about a root word like “hang” in English. Besides the two different stems (“hang” and “hung”), there are dozens of differing meanings that attach to the word — Hang/hung a picture but hanged a criminal, hang loose, hang out (verb) and hangout (noun), hang in there, hang glide, hangman, hang for a while, hung (the naughty meaning), hung jury, get the hang of, hang up (a phone) and hang up (a fixation), hang on (wait), hanger (planes) and hanger (clothes), hanger on (persistent guy) and hanger steak. You can see there’s a nub of common meaning, but the devil is in the details, that being the varying contexts.
I’d expect a fluent English speaker to know all these meanings (maybe not hanger steak). But it’s easy to see that as an English learner, you could spend your precious 15 minutes a day plus just on this one word and its different word forms and meanings.
Consider a typical high school foreign language class — one hour a day for five days a week for 30 weeks in the school year. That’s about 150 hours of instruction. I don’t think many high school language teachers will claim that this is going to get you to fluency, maybe because you still have 9,850 hours to go. Even if you add in homework at an hour a day, you’ve still got 9,700 hours to go. So at that rate, it will take 75 years to reach fluency.
Discouraging? No doubt.
We have all heard of people who pick up languages faster than others. Some of the best language learners lay claim to having dozens of languages swirling around in their brains and rolling off their tongues. We also know of people who fail high school Spanish and claim to have no facility for language learning. Then there’s everyone else who falls somewhere in between these outliers, myself included.
By the way, everyone does have a facility for language learning, if you consider that everyone does learn at least one, the one they pick up from birth. That’s their so-called mother or native language. It’s learned in a very different way from a second language, though.
The key to understanding these apparent differences in the ability to learn languages is tied up with the notion of fluency. It’s a bit of a weasel word, whose precise meaning depends on your communication needs and on context. Contexts such as plumbing, gardening, physics, religion, etc. all have their own standards for fluency, mainly in respect to vocabulary.
Fluency also can vary with respect to what mode of language we’re talking about: listening, speaking, reading, or writing, with the proviso that an individual can vary in proficiency in each of those skills. You can be more or less fluent in one mode over another.
Skill acquisition in any language typically proceeds in the order those skills are listed, listening comes before speaking, speaking before reading, and reading before writing. That’s the normal first language pathway, but it’s disrupted in most academic settings where there’s an expectation that you’ll be acquiring all modes simultaneously. That isn’t the way you did it for your native language.
Whether this shoot-for-the-moon strategy is effective in reaching overall fluency is problematic, but it does give you, the second language learner, options to focus on one mode more so than others. And that being so, it raises the distinct possibility that you can develop greater fluency in one mode than another by choice.
So getting back to the hypothetical 75-year-olds, what do they do? The answer, as it must be, is that it depends. Are you moving or traveling, probably the two most common scenarios. Will you have guides and servants who can intercede with the locals on your behalf? Are you going to rely on Google Translate or that five-dollar phrase book you bought at the airport?
But there is another possibility, that being you’re going to stay in your current home and learn from there. In that case, the fluency goals can change dramatically.
As a stay-at-home learner, you will likely tamp down your expectation of reaching speaking fluency and settle initially on being able to read or listen to the speech of others in movies, radio, news programs, and so on. That goal might be less of a burden than training your tongue and vocal cords to produce the language. Speaking is an active muscular process, whereas listening in comparison is more passive. There’s still action required, but it’s less burdensome. It’s typical of language learning in general, whether it’s your first or second, that you’ll understand more than you’ll be able to produce.
To get personal for a moment, I have a hearing disorder that makes it difficult to pry apart a stream of sound into its component words and phrases. My hearing deficit, which came about from an accident as a teenager, has always made me an iffy kind of language learner, in spite of always being fascinated by languages. Fascinated enough by the way that I earned an advanced degree in linguistics.
Fortunately, there was a way to work around the hearing problem, that is to focus on written language — grammar, historical records, dictionaries, texts, and then later books, with maybe the goal of amazing my friends (most don’t care though) or translating.
But whatever your preference in tackling a new language, understand that whatever your reason, you’re doing your brain a favor and it will reward you by increasing your ability to focus your attention and keep your thinking and problem-solving more nimble. Those functions that brain scientists call executive control mechanisms. Additionally, established bilinguals show greater overall empathy toward others and their environment. In our troubled times, that’s probably worth the purchase price.
One particular recent study looked at how quickly these advantages might show up, under what circumstances, and whether they might persist or not. The study involved only a week of directed study of Scottish Gaelic for an experimental group versus a week of non-language learning for one control group versus a week of no directed learning for a second control group. Ages within each group ranged from 18 to 78.
The results showed a statistically significant advantage on a simple executive control test for the language learners over the two other groups and the effect persisted even after nine months. Actually, they persisted best if the group continued to invest time in practicing after the course — five hours per week was the threshold.
Why did language learning work better than some other kind of learning? It likely has to do with the unique, novel challenges a new language presents — making your brain express your thoughts other than by the familiar pathways of your mother language. You’re forcing your brain to add new cells and synapses, something that takes not just any old stimulation, but out of the ordinary stimulation.
The important takeaway of this study is that we can see a benefit to language study without first having to invest those 10,000 hours we’d need to reach full fluency. And since it works with older people, it’s never too late to get started. As the ads say, “You’ll be glad you did.”
