Too old?

[johnmck]

Character, two of the things I noticed about being 40 compared to 16 is that living outside a "learning environment" effects the speed that one learns and also the time I have available to dedicate to learning is shorter and highly variable.

While I guess there may be some truth in the idea that the brain is not as apt at learning as when one is younger I feel that the other two points have a stronger influence. They say that when a child moves to a foreign country it takes them five years to correctly learn the new language. Well, if I moved to another country and had no other responsibility but to study 8 hours a day, I suspect that after 5 years I should be able to obtain a reasonable level in the new language. I'm not convinced that children are so much better than adults at learning, it is just they spend 8 hours a day at it instead of 2 hours a week.

Recently I have been following the FSI course for the last 4 months. This course is nothing but speaking and listening. While my progress is slow I have definitely made progress (I go to Paris French-Chinese meetup every two weeks and can see the improvement). Being realistic I expect to take two years to finish the course. At the end I hope to be at a level were I could "survive" in China and even have a basic conversation and listen with difficulty to the television. We will see.

[renzhe]

I found that some things improved with age.

I am far more organised and persistent than I was when I was a kid. Even with the best memory in the world, I don't think I'd learn characters as well as I do now that I actually have the patience and persistence to force myself to review every single day over the course of several years.

While it might be true that you lose some inborn language learning ability with age (though I personally haven't noticed this at all yet), there are other benefits. All the years spent at the university have helped me organise and structure my learning and get the best results with the time and resources I have available. This is extremely important, as I'm mostly self-taught. Given a textbook and a set of resources, I can make up my own learning plan, set intermediate goals and measure my progress -- I couldn't do this when I was 13 or 16.

I'll say this though -- it has been my experience that people who grow up bilingually, or learn languages early in their lives, tend to retain the language-learning abilities into adulthood. All the people I've met who grew up with more than one language were really good at picking up languages as adults.

[Lu]

Johnmck, imho with one class a week one can never learn decent Chinese, not even in 27 years. More classes are needed.

One woman in my uni class was over 50 when she started learning Chinese, and she did have a much harder time than the rest of us. I do think that was because she's a lot older. But she worked very, very hard, and graduated even earlier than a lot of others in our class.

[leeyah]

I've been thinking of learning Hebrew actually, but Chinese is much, much "less work" at any age...

[Lu]

A great-aunt of mine started on Hebrew when she was well over 70 (one of her daughters was living in Israel). I don't know how far she got, though. The advantage of starting at such an old age is that you have a lot more time than when you're 30.

[rezaf]

My grandmother is 80 something years old and is trying to learn English. She is persistent and she can speak French and Arabic but no matter how hard she tries, she can't make progress. So I guess there is an age limit (maybe 65<) but a 16 year old talking about an age limit is just crazy. Now I am 23 and I am about to start studying a new undergraduate degree. I really feel smarter and more organised than when I was 18. I also have a classmate who is 40 something and he is one of the best students I have seen. Many of my classmates are in their 30s and they are all doing much better than the younger students.

[Lugubert]

I already wrote that I took up Chinese at 59. Languages need more work now, but I hope that I will be reasonably comfortable with conversations in Chinese before I turn 70. At 65, translating is slow but not bad at all.

I should perhaps also mention, that from 58, I've also taken a year of Modern Standard Arabic, which went reasonably well, despite the competion in the second half of only much younger people already having Arabic as their first or second language. And I'm in for a year of Bible Hebrew, which proceeds smoothly.

Some facts have helped me: there seems to be genes for languages running in the family. Father was a merchant marine captain, so I grew up knowing that having several languages is useful. Between the ages 12 and 18, I learned three foreign languages in school.

I have tried to understand the mechanisms of learning languages, but am clueless about the process. At least, I think, learning many languages teaches you how to learn languages, even if it as a process is unconscious.

If you start Chinese at 16, and keep your motivation, I see no reason to doubt that you might be reasonably fluent before 20, depending on how much time you can put into it.

[johnmck]

I admit that 27 years is a bit of an extrapolation. The 2200 hours is based on a full-time course that is done over 2-3 years (the last year in China itself). I have been doing self-study now for 5 years and I am only now starting to get a "feel" for the language. I still have great trouble speaking or understanding simple sentences, but I can translate a good part of the subtitles on soap operas. I reckon I will need another 5 or more years before I can speak it with any confidence.

I would estimate that if one is going to do self-study of 1 hour per day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, one can expect to take 10-15 years to get to a comfortable level. (or maybe I am just particularly bad at learning foreign languages). In France 10 years is not a particularly long time, it is the same amount of time I have to spend between buying a good bottle of wine and opening it.

Unless you are going to study this language full-time, one's main objective for learning it should be that it brings you pleasure to do so. I meet this objective every day.

[character]

The things I seem to struggle with more than younger members of the class I'm in are:

1) distinguishing between similar sounds and tones (also hurts pronunciation)

2) processing speech spoken faster than a certain threshold

3) grammar differences when formulating sentences

I find recognizing characters and translating from Chinese to English much easier than the above.

[johnmck]

The things I seem to struggle with more than younger members of the class I'm in are:

1) distinguishing between similar sounds and tones (also hurts pronunciation)

2) processing speech spoken faster than a certain threshold

I have exactly the same problem (although it wasn't any easier when I was younger ). That is why I am following the FSI course, it is nothing but listening and speaking practise.

[ipsi()]

Character, I find I'm in a similar position on 2 and 3 (not so much one though), and on translating from C -> E, and I'm only 22... I think it's more an artifact of how I study than anything else.