BedHead

^^^

I used the word facilitate for a reason. I didn't say it was impossible. What I have heard about accents is that people tend to form their sounds in their voice box in ways that become rigid, so that for instance in order to make the sounds of Mandarin, they have to use the pre-set sounds that were more or less locked in place at a certain age rather than developing the sounds the way native speakers would. It seems to make sense given that some people never lose their accents or significant traces of their accents if they migrate past about the early adolescent stage. I don't know enough about the theory other than this thing that I've heard -- and it seems to jibe with reality.

Regarding the grammar which was a different point and adult language learning, I make all sorts of mistakes in my Portuguese because I learned it on the fly and am too lazy to actually iron out my grammar mistakes since I am understood. On the other hand, I learned for instance German or Mandarin by starting with the grammar and building from there. I certainly make fewer mistakes, at least with the grammar. This has less to do with when I learned it than how I learned it.

galoisien

As a student of linguistics (albeit a mostly self-taught one, until I get to college), I must say that this strongly smells of pseudoscience.

Now, muscle memory is helpful, and what happens is that learners of an L2 have a tendency to reuse their L1 grammatical categories (be it phonological, syntactical or morphological, etc.) when attempting to establish L2 categories, so speakers might use L1 sounds for an L2 language, but the voice box is the voice box. Linguists don't know about any phenomenon about the voice box being "locked". They do know that some languages make full use of the glottis' five different openness states (most English speakers use two, and some Chinese languages use three), but boy, if the glottis was the key to understanding why late learners often fail to fully learn their target language's sounds, you bet phoneticians would have studied (or would be currently studying) it.

Also, the glottis controls voicing and aspiration (the two characteristics that separate /p/ and /b/) but not other things like place of articulation or other manners of articulation etc. That is, the glottis is not responsible for why Beijing Mandarin "sh" is different from English "sh", and only partially responsible (through aspiration and voicing) for why Beijing Mandarin "q-" is different from the English ch- sound. The tongue is mainly responsible for that, and it does all sorts of acrobatics in the mouth that we don't feel (and described by physiological technical jargon I don't want to bombard CC with), only because we've become used to it.

Mmm, but it's definitely not due to any sort of voicebox "locking" or "presetting", or even the nerves that control the tongue or the glottis. A large problem is perception -- and perception of a distinct sound is key to reproduction of that same sound. HVPT addresses this.

From my own experiences, I think a large portion of it is somewhat like attention span (not the technical term -- perhaps more related to how the thalamus filters sensory stimuli). I find I master French better if I read "like a child". I think many of us have forgotten how arduous for us to even learn to read in our native language, even if we did grow up to become very good at it and eventually became known as the bookworm, etc. I remember I would be splayed out on my bed and looking strangely at one word, pondering (and probably assimilating). But now when we're older, when life is much more hectic, and more things fill our minds (I'm just speaking as a high school graduate here!), we have a different approach to reading, perhaps in a "get most information in the shortest amount of time" kind of way, even when we commit ourselves to poring over a book. And this is just for reading, not speaking. But I quite suspect that the fact that four-year-olds are still at the "perceiving the world is so exciting!!!" stage, and sixteen-year-olds may not, may have something to do with it. (This is not yet a rigourous hypothesis, naturally, and to get anywhere with it I will have to search for some way to make it falsifiable.)

When we as children first came across names for concepts, actions or objects in our own language, most likely the things being named themselves were also new to us, and we pondered their meanings and assimilated them into our "framework" so to speak. But looking things up in a foreign language dictionary is quite different -- we don't do any rediscovery of the objects we're looking up because we already know them.

I find that if I do an proactively-initiated "rediscovery" process I find that my language retention is much much better. That is, the words that come out of my mouth are no longer a mere translation of something I would have said in my own native language.

RatedPG

I'm going back to the OP since this thread has morphed slightly away from the main issue (imho)

"Now I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But … understand this: Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English—they’ll learn English—you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. "

So what is BO really saying here? All he is doing is pandering to both sides, just as he always does. He tells us not to worry about immigrants learning English "they'll learn English".... uh wrong Barry..... they don't want to learn English. If they did I wouldn't be listening to recorded messages asking me to select 1 for English, 2 for Spanish. Only a matter of time before the recording says select 1 for Spanish, etc...

This is a huge economic drain on our society but that is obviously secondary to being PC.

vicariousparent

Obama's response was perfect and balanced- he agreed that immigrants should learn English- but he also reminded us that it is not so easy to learn a foreign language- most Americans don't do it.

galoisien

How peculiar -- this issue was just covered by Language Log (for those not in the know, LL's authors are prominent well-published professors and/or researchers in linguistics).

Language Log Pushing buttons

Yes, God forbid American firms to conduct international trade and attract migrant customers.

How so?

I wasn't aware we spent any significant amounts of GDP on translators. Or even translation research -- otherwise I wouldn't be the only high school student in my city or even county interested in linguistics.

RatedPG

That's quite a stretch in interpretation vicarious. I don't think he was saying that at all. As I said he was pandering. And has been pointed out previously several generations have managed to overcome the "difficulty" of learning English.

galoisien

The US is one of the rare countries where multilingual signs and service are not the norm.

In the Netherlands you will get service in French, English and Dutch. In Germany there will be a signs for a host of various dialects. In the Negev region of Israel there might be a comingling of Yiddish, Arabic on top of Hebrew. In my home country of Singapore, signs were regularly in Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil on top of English. Even in China, the reason why Chinese subtitles are so prominent (as opposed to no subtitles) is because the wide degree of linguistic variation means that a common writing system is a convenience.

And of course the major investment banks who have clients overseas should definitely not be allowed (by law) to conduct their investment business in anything but English.

Go monolingual America!!!

katliamom

RatedPG, fine, you think he was pandering; vicarious doesn't. Clearly you two interpreted O's comments in two different ways.

I don't know the larger context of O's speech so it's hard (and dangerous) to interpret this one comment. But let me throw in a third possible explanation.

Obama is always advocating education and moving forward. What he is saying -- I believe -- is, look guys: this is the reality of 21st century America. Spanish in the US isn't going to disappear and it doesn't have anything to do with immigration, rather with the realities of US/Central/South American economies. We are interdependent, for better or worse. Obama says: get over it. Get used to it. Deal with it: be proactive about your future and about your options, and make Spanish yet another aspect of your skills.

galoisien

Also the stigma against Spanish is highly bugging me. No one here has complained about the fact that in the Northeast, many businesses often have signs or notifications in French to cater to tourists from Quebec as well as older Francophone immigrants who came in the early 20th century.

Naturally, a bit of socioeconomics is involved.

I suspect that some people are simply uncomfortable around low-income people.

RatedPG

galoisien,
bad analogy. Or haven't you been to Europe? Folks in Europe travel to and from countries as we would drive from state to state. Your describing a scenario that is mainly geared towards facilitating tourism and commerce that occurs on a daily basis.

I am not dismissing the importance of learning other languages or recognizing that we live in a global society.

The point I am trying to make is the resistance of the largely Spanish speaking immmigrant population to learn the language of the country that they want to be productive citizens of. A lot different than multi-language road signs in Germany or menu in France.

galoisien

Have you ever been a migrant yourself? Ever been an expat, perhaps?

And what is this largely Spanish-speaking immigrant population? I wasn't aware that hispanophones comprised the majority of incoming immigrants.

And shouldn't border states expect to get similar commerce?

Note that once you have paid for capital resources to implement multilingual interfaces in your company, it doesn't take much more to implement your multitranslated interface at every outlet.

It's pressing one button ... sheeesh.

Try then the situation in Singapore, or in Israel, or in Algeria ...

RatedPG

"And what is this largely Spanish-speaking immigrant population? I wasn't aware that hispanophones comprised the majority of incoming immigrants."

I didn't start the Spanish reference, read the OP... it was BO said we should all learn that language.

Again, this thread keeps spiraling away from the OP and BO's comments. Which I think is pandering.

katliamom

Jeez PG, you've said that already.

RatedPG

Jeez, katliamom, so sorry, just a reiteration. Not the first time its been done here on CC.

galoisien

And do Americans expect to never venture out of their own country? Latin America together comprises one of the largest trading partners of the US. You guys are on the same continent for goodness sake.

Here's why I want to learn Spanish:

Because it's quite inflected though pro-subject-drop and as a Romance language it is one of the living inheritors of the Latin legacy. French has thep peculiar habit of having homophonic conjugations, so it's not quite the same.

Because I plan to make trips to, and maybe set up businesses or trading relationships in, Latin America.

As a wannabe field researcher in the social sciences, I imagine that in order to have a reasonable time making demographic studies or researching other (non-Spanish-speaking) languages and cultures on the American continents it would be useful to speak Spanish.

Furthermore, it's spoken in the Philippines, an ASEAN ally of Singapore. This gives me access to Tagalog, from which I can jump to other Austronesian languages (a diverse family of languages that descended from nomadic seafarers who dispersed from Taiwan 5000 years ago -- Malagasy in Madagascar and Hawaiian are two further examples of Austronesian languages; Malay-Indonesian is a third.)

As a Romance language it shares further ties to Italian, Romanian, etc. so it would make learning further Romance languages easier.

It's a lead-in to a fluent command of Esperanto, the ultimate international auxiliary language.

Note the absence of a reason like, "So I can order Big Macs in Southern California."