Stuff You Should KnowToday, Chuck and Josh dive into the ins and outs of language learning.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Guten get routin Blowing and welcome to the podcast. Come Josh, there's Chuck and it's just the two of us today, which is why we're feeling a little crazy.
Oh man, I just did a cow bell as donk donk. I think it's flunk.
Came through, It came through. There's a bit of a dunk to it.
I owe a big apology to uh, what's his name, Rick Allen? Is that his name? The drummer def Leppard's drummer.
Yeah, sounds like it sounds right.
I mean, can you believe that a major rock band's drummer lost his arm and learned how to play without that arm? Well, not only that like an amazing story.
It is amazing because they were like right right about to hit their peak. They were like rocketing up and again you'd think that was just the end of it, but nope, can't keep him down.
What a story. I think when I was a kid and that happened, I was like, oh wow, that's cool. But now that I'm an adult and I'm like, if I have a bad ankle sprain, I'm done. It's just amazing to me that he lost an arm and like persevered, just incredible.
What's also cool, I think is that this is in the eighties and somebody was sharp enough to develop software that could kind of like help him with the extra beat that he couldn't get to with just one arm. Like that was just amazing in and of itself as well.
Well, I thought he used the other foot, right, isn't that what he did?
I believe there was software involved as well.
Oh I didn't know that. I thought he just learned how to incorporate that.
Oh no, are you like, well, I'm not really impressed. After all, I have to look into that more.
This has nothing to do with what we're talking about, except for the sort of German that's not even German.
Is it? They're British?
I know, But that those are even real words, are they?
No? I don't think so. It seemed like a Swedish chef kind of thing.
Oh goodness, we're talking about learning foreign languages, because that is something Ed helped us out with this, and he very quickly points out that's a real mark of and always has been like, oh you know, they speak four languages. It's like, yeah, that means boy, they're super smart and they're very worldly, and you know it. It certainly requires some intelligence to speak many languages. I think to be a polyglot, But it's always something that people tout and I don't blame them. If I speak four languages, that's the first thing I'd say, Hey, I'm chuck. I speak four languages.
By the way, it almost rivals telling people that you went to Brown or Harvard.
That's only two languages.
Yeah, So do you speak anything other than English these days? Well?
No, We've talked a little bit about our language background. I took high school German and then college German and did a little traveling in Germany because because I did my European tour, but I don't remember much of it. I don't ever practice it, but it is it was something that I would pick up, you know, quicker than if I tried to learn Spanish, which is on my list to try and do. Yeah, I really want to. It's just like do I have the time, and then the answer is yes, I just have to do it, you know. But I really would like to learn Spanish because Spanish.
Spanish is on my list.
But before we talk about what people in the biz call L two. We should talk a little bit about L one, which we've talked a little bit about before, But L L one is like when you when you're just a little dumb baby and you learn how to talk, which I can now attest as a parent is one of the most remarkable things you can witness as a human learning language that's really neat, seemingly by themselves, because you're not saying like this is how you say spoon. Kids learn language quickly and it seems like innately, and we'll talk about all that now.
I remember learning to read, and it almost seemed to me like overnight, like it just started clicking. And I think first grade. Jeff always wondered, isn't that kind of late?
No? Okay, good, No, it's not at all. If you're reading, you're doing fine.
I got to impress everybody with what age I started reading at the No.
In fact, if you're reading like pretty well at six, that's pretty good.
I wouldn't say pretty well. But all of a sudden, it was like books went from just lines of scribble to sensible, sensical things that I could decode and interpret. And I was like, wow, that's neat.
No, No, that's good. Six is great?
Okay, good you look at you. Thank god you're a parent, because I'd be totally lost if you weren't.
All right, So we'll talk about some of the language theories the first, like whether or not they're still relevant or not. The first is called critical period hypothesis. Long standing debate about this. It was proposed by a dude named a neurologist named Wilder Pinfield along with Lamar Roberts in a nineteen fifty nine book called Speech and Brain Mechanisms. And this is the idea that there is a critical period in a young person, a young human's life where your brain has the plasticity that's just off the charts and it can learn language then, and after that, learning a new language is a lot harder.
Yes, which seems to be what generally people think of today, right.
I mean sort of. I think critical period hypothesis made it seem like it was really, really, really hard after this because they didn't really believe in They thought plasticity stopped at a certain point.
Okay, I got you. Yeah, Because there was a time where people thought that you had all the neurons you were ever going to have when you were born and you just you know, smoked hashish and lost them over time.
I was about to say the same thing. Oh yeah, like you smoked them away a few at a time or what exactly.
Yeah, And that all of your neural connections were formed, you know, in your by your teens maybe, and then after that you just got dumber and dumber. Right, So this is this is that that that's that school of thought.
Yeah, that that basically things are pretty fixed after that certain age, and that that's why it's so hard to learn language later on. But we now know that that's not true, and your brain can still be very plastic.
But it's remarkably close just in its principle, in the basis of its idea, it seems.
Yeah, pretty hard.
What were the names of the two guys again.
Wilder Pinfield and Lamar Roberts.
They sound like an alternate universe Steely Dan, you know, like those are the members of Steely Dan in the eighth dimension.
Yeah, yeah, Pinfield and Roberts. I like it.
I just made myself laugh.
Sponge theories next, and that's one that has really gone the way of the DODO, right.
Yeah. They used to think that you just kids just absorbed everything like sponges. Like you were saying, it was remarkable and magical to watch Ruby just suddenly learn to speak. Yeah, that was noteworthy enough to enough people that they're like, we didn't teach this kid anything. They just absorbed it, right, And there's a certain degree of that. But one of the problems with sponge theory, which has generally been discarded, like you said, is that it really underestimates the importance of active learning. It's basically saying passive learning. I read there's like a New York Times blog post about kids learning l one and somebody was saying they were pointing out just how poor an analogy the sponge theory is Bye Bye. They put a picture up during one of their talks. There's a bucket of water and then a sponge like on the table next to it, right, and it's like their proximity isn't enough, Like there has to be some sort of action and activity as well.
You gotta dip it son. The other another good analogy Ed pointed out is like that's like saying, if you're just an American household and but you'd let your kid watch nothing but Spanish speaking television, that they're just gonna learn Spanish.
Yeah, but apparently that works if you're an adult.
No, okay, no, but watching foreign language movies can be a tool.
I have a friend from way back. He taught himself French by watching French movies, got himself a job with UPS, worked there for eight months, and then put in for a transfer to Paris and moved to Paris.
What.
Yeah, he was very cool. He went on to become the bass player and the number two most popular rock band in Turkey according to a Pepsi cola full of that nation years after he moved on from Paris.
Is a friend of yours. Yeah, that's amazing.
Yeah, he was very cool. I don't know what became of film. I lost him after he moved to Turkey, but yeah, good guy.
That happens. Yeah. So behaviorism is the next one, and that is BF. Skinner was a big proponent of this, and he wrote that language learning was akin to verbal behavior. So basically your blank slate and learning a language is like learning any other behavior. You learn it through reinforcement, through either being praised or being punished, and like really working at.
It right and then if you, like you said, it's the reward in punishment is really really important, you know. Yeah, that's how you learn what's right and what's wrong. That has a little bit of basis in reality too, Like all of these competing theories, if you just carve a little bit out of each one and put it together, you've got learning language.
Yeah. I think that's with a lot of theories, like people aren't usual one hundred percent wrong.
Sure. So the opposite of behaviorism, by the way, is called nativism. It says no, no, no, we're not born as blank slates, and we just learned by observing and through trial and error, reward and punishment. There's our brains are basically pre wired to not only give rise but then also interpret and use what's called the universal grammar. That humans have some sort of inborn ability to speak languages to one another. And this was a cornerstone of Noam Chomsky's career, if not the whole thing.
Yeah, he talked about and I know we talked about this in another episode. The language acquisition device, which is not a sort of a real body part, but it's like a hypothetical tool, right that no chomps chomps key, Why is a T in there? It's already a baggy name. Who names are Kidnome?
I don't know, but I mean it really works. Those two names together work really well.
I don't know much about this guy, but it's a name that I've heard three thousand times in my life, so I need to brush up a little bit.
He was, in addition to being a linguist who's very very opinionated, very far left leaning cultural critic as well, who made him some really great points. But he, you know, anybody like that attracts scorn and ire. Sure there's a lot of critics of Noam Chompsky as well, but he was very interesting. He was a public intellectual. As a way to put it, I guess.
Yeah, all right, So about phonemes, Yeah, phonemes. I always want to say phenomes. I know, I just scooped up. Josh corrected me. We did that that part. Phonemes, Yeah, phonemes. Ed points out that a language, maybe let's say a language has like forty ish phonemes phonemes.
Are you doing this on purpose now?
I'm really not. I'm sort of losing my mind right now.
Yeah, I'm watching an unravel.
It's fast, but babies start to grasp these or at least the relevant ones of their language is early at six months and baby talk, the little gobbledygook sounds that babies make are different than like an American baby's gobbedygook is different than a child than a little baby in Africa's gobbledygook.
That's amazing.
That is so cool.
So those are the kind of the big theories about language acquisition. L one acquisition, right where you just learn your native language and you become fluent in it for whatever reason. Apparently we don't have that quite figured out yet. Now we move into L two acquisition, and one of the fundamental hallmarks of learning a second language in particular is that it seems to be way easier for kids than it is for adults.
That is true, Why I don't think that it's that like they've, like you said, earlier, discovered that plasticity can occur in adults. And it's not like an impossibility or really really really hard like they used to think. It is definitely easier for a kid. A kid can learn many languages. There really is not like a limit. There are outliers where kids, you know, like these little phenoms learn you know, six seven, eight languages. Those are outliers for sure, But like your average just sort of bilingual kid raised in a bilingual household is very common these days, and it's not the case where like well, but if you're teaching your child Spanish, you know when are growing up as well as English, you're not the time you're spent talking about Spanish is taking away from the English that they're going to fall behind, and that is just proven to not be the case.
Yeah, I would think, if anything, it would make you excel a little more in other stuff.
It does. Supposedly bilingual kids do better at problem solving situations. We'll talk about some other stuff like socially, but they don't experience learning delays or issues. It's just not something that they've seen happen.
And the fact that there's outliers like you were talking about, who who learn multiple languages as children makes you kind of wonder, what is there an upper limit two languages that a kid can learn? And the answer is yes, apparently it's three.
Oh I said there was none?
Is there there's oh?
Non outliers? Okay, I got you right.
Practically speaking, three is the max because language experts aka linguists suggests that you need to spend about twenty to thirty percent of your waking time practicing learning a language. If you're learning another.
Language, so do the mas, right, and that would.
Leave time for I'm never doing that again. That would leave time for nothing else. If you were focusing on learning three languages at once, that would be the upper limit, right, at least learning them at once.
I guess, yeah, that makes sense.
But there are people out there, just real quick, Chuck, who have learned tons of languages. There's a guy, a Canadian named Powell Janulus or Powell Janulus. He's credited with knowing forty two different languages. What another guy named Ziad Faza he I think is the current record holder at fifty nine.
These are kids are just people people, okay.
And then back in the eighteen fifties, the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Browning, was reputed to know two hundred languages and speak one hundred of them. What so that's what everybody said when they met him.
Yeah, and he said, would you like to hear that in a hundred different ways? Before we break real quick. I did want to mention because one of the things I when I was sort of assigning this article out, was like, is there you know, is there any like research on why Americans tend to be less multi lingual? And there's really not research that I've seen, but it seems to be that there's just like you don't think of it when you live in a big city and you're you're you have people that speak all kinds of languages in big cities, but lots and lots of America doesn't do that.
Well, They're not exposed to it as much.
That's what I mean. It's like lots lots of towns and lots of cities in America, you don't get a lot of foreign languages. So if you don't have that exposure, then you're you're probably not going to be as interested. And then there are also and I'm not like call anyone out, but like there are also a lot of people that still think like, well, no, gosh darn it, like this is what you speak here, and this is what you're gonna learn here, and I don't want you to learn in any Spanish or anything like that.
People used to say that publicly. Yeah, I'll bet though it would be easy to study if you you know, went along the border with Mexico, you probably find way more bilingual people than say in Atlanta or the border of Canada, you find more people who spoke Canadian and English. It'd be easy to study, is what I'm trying to say. I don't know why.
Anyone should we take a break? Sure, all right, let's break and we'll go learn a language and we'll be right back.
So check. I got fascinated with this critical period stuff that we kind of went over. The critical period hypothesis. It makes a lot of sense to me. It's backed up by some research. Apparently. What the problem with the seely Dan guy's hypothesis was that they went too far. They made it too absolute. And it's just not the case that people can't learn things as adults. I mean, they should have probably figured that out from the outset. But it is much harder to learn a language as an adult than it is to learn an L one language as a kid, or even L two language as a kid.
Yeah, and I used to hear when I was younger, because fluency is a funky word that I don't even know, like everyone agrees on what that means. Because when I was younger, I used to hear you know, and this is just that probably playground stuff, you know, when you're just talking linguistics on the playground by the jungle Jim Like, I used to hear two things. One is you can never be fluent in another language because you're always translating it in your mind, and to be truly fluent means that you are thinking in that language. Not true. You can thinking in another language is a learned skill. As it turns out, you can teach yourself to do that. And then the other thing I heard was you can never be fluent or maybe a sign of fluency is if you dream in a different language, And that isn't true either, because I look that up today and apparently, even like basic knowledge of another language, you can dream in that language. I think if you know how dreams go, if you're like thinking about that free fall a sleep, you might dream in a language and it apparently has nothing to do with fluency.
God, is there anything that you heard on the playground that you could trust?
Yes, is that your father could be sued for all the money that he's got very easily by a child. Apparently sure? Oh no, I think the kid's parent would usually sue my dad's gonna sue your dad. It's work.
Yeah, typically, I mean even as a kid, you knew that you had very little standing in the court of law.
That'd be a funny sketch for a sketch show, like like a juvenile court if their dad's going to sue your dad and then they actually take it and adults try the case.
If there were funny sketch shows on TV anymore, that would be great.
Oh but there are. Oh yeah, yeah, I think you should leave with Tim Robinson.
Oh that's true, very funny with the party Hardison too. Have you seen her Instagram stuff? No?
Is that an account I should follow?
She? Yes, for sure. I don't know if that's I think that is her handle on Instagram. But she's a writer. She's also on his show, like as a character here there, and she's hilarious. But yeah, she's great too.
I think I might know who you're talking about.
Do you remember? I think in the first episode of the first season they're doing kind of like a shark tank thing and one of the sharks is like, I'm rich because I've won the lottery. Now I drink wine all day long. I can't get enough wine. Do you remember that that one? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's them. And I can't remember their real name, party Hardiston is just their handle, but I think it's like Patty Harrison or something.
It is, it's Patty Harrison and I knew her from Adie Bryant's show Shrill. That was so great.
Oh I saw that one.
I need to follow It was good. I need to follow Harrison's account though, because she like every time I see her on TV, I'm like, she is one of the weirdest comedians. Yeah, all the best ways.
Yeah for sure. But yeah, I think you should leave. Is amazing.
So where were we? Uh you were talking about critical period?
Yeah, that's right. So the whole idea of why it's harder for a kid or for an adult to learn a language, a new language then it is a kid, is because supposedly there is this critical period. There's a window of time it's estimated to end anywhere from five to your mid teens, where your brain is like, I'm down for whatever. Teach me whatever you want, I'm going to I'm going to learn it. You just have a higher degree of neuroplasticity, right, you can form in adjust new neural connections, which is the basis of learning and like memorizing and retaining new things.
Yeah, and we talked about the fact that now we know that we can regenerate new neurons, make new neural connections, all the good things that you can do as a child in that critical period you can still do as an adult. Should we talk about inhibitory neurons.
I want to do at least a short stuff on them, if not a whole episode. They are fascinating.
Yeah, I feel like we've talked about them before, for sure. These are neurons that basically say, you know, is this new input that getting worth making a neural connection for? Or am I just watching another dumb sketch show. And they give weight to like new things and novel experiences. So I would think that those inhibitory neurons are if they're still around when you're an adult, then learning a new language is new and novel, So they would fire up, right.
You would think so. But apparently they have kind of set your language in stone. And the only explanation, because I had the same question as you, is like, that's novel, that's new, those are new combinations of sounds. Why wouldn't it activate your inhibitory neurons to just stand down, right, And the best I could come up with this is just me editorializing, I'll admit it, okay, is that those new novel sounds are still following the same neural pathways that say, English does. It's like the neural pathways you established for languaeuage, right, and that it's not distinguishing a signal a different signal coming from that same neural pathway, whether it's in Spanish or in English, it's still traveling that same neural pathway. And the thing is so well worn that the inhibitory neurons like, it's going to take a lot for me to let you fire anymore because you know this stuff.
That kind of makes sense because I was reading that L two acquisition as an adult. It kind of giveth and receiveth the fact that you already know a language, because there's one school of thought that's like, well, since you've done it before and you know what language is and what grammar sort of is, and let's say English, that it might be easier to pick up as a concept because you already know that stuff. And then I've also read other schools of thought that says, well, no, it's just more difficult because you've ingrained those things, right.
But the thing is is you can overcome that. You can be like, no, no, brain, I need you to pay a little more attention. This is novels stuff we're trying to do. And apparently as an adult, if you put adults in kids head to head in a test, which is hilarious strength, yeah, it always reminds me of Billy Madison, like smacking that blocking that shot from that little kid on the playground. Yeah. If you put adults and children head to head. In language acquisition, adults just dust kids in almost every category. The difference is kids develop a richer understanding or acquisition of language. Adults as a second language are acquiring something more intellectually than you know, more fundamentally.
That's interesting. By the way, I've never seen Billy Madison. Oh does he block a shot on the playground of a kid?
Yeah, with them to the Ramones beat on the brat.
It's perfect because Bill Murray does that in Rushmore. Did he copy that?
Yeah? I mean I'm pretty sure Billy Madison was out Yeah, long before Rushmore for sure.
Although I just saw Asteroid City and I was just reading up on that and other Wes Anderson stuff. Rushmore came out twenty five years ago.
Dude, oh my god, please.
Don't that crazy things like that. I know, my god. So we should probably go over there, like and I know we talked about this a little bit, so we can kind of speed through it. But the language learning parts of the brain.
Oh wait, I had one more thing on inhibitory neurons.
Oh, let's hear it.
So there's a key trait in Alzheimer's disease, which is your hippocampus or hypothalamus, one of the big h regions starts going like an overdrive, like really becomes super active. And they long thought that it was basically your brain trying to compensate for just the degradations of its functions. It's really trying to do whatever it can, and it does that as the hypothalmus or hippocampus. They think now that what's happened is your inhibitory neurons in your hippocampus or hypothalamus have worn away, and that's what your brain would be doing if it weren't for inhibitory neurons. They're the ones that set the pace in the rhythm for your brain waves from nanosecond to nanosecond, and somehow they're all coordinated with one another to give you your experience of consciousness because you have tons of data coming at you all the time. They're the ones that decide what makes it into your conscious awareness and what doesn't. How how do they do that? They're neurons. There's one called a basket neuron that wraps itself around other neurons so it can control it more directly. And it looks like a basket just wrapped around a neural cell. It's amazing stuff.
Is that a comforting thing? Or is it scary that there'shions now that you can be enveloped in two ways?
You know? Oh no, that's scary for sure. Okay, I don't like anything enveloping anything else. It's just creepy.
Even a hug from you, from your most beloved creepy.
Okay, everybody knows being touched is creepy.
Yeah, that's true. So, like I said, we're gonna go over sort of the parts of the brain that have to do with language acquisition that we've talked about before. But they are three areas. Broca's area Wernicke's area and the angular gyrs. Yeah, two out of the three. Broke As area handles the creation of language. That's the stuff that is really active, you know when you're the bb Wernicke's handles comprehension, and then the angular gyrus is a bit of a hub that connects things together.
Yeah, And we know that there's these distinct regions that do these distinct things because you can have damage to one region and the others will keep going. There's one called Wernicki's aphasia, which is where your Broker's area is perfectly fine. You're able to say things, you're able to generate speech, you're able to talk, but the comprehension area is damaged, so you're not making any sense. And I think the yeah, it was the National Institutes of Health gave an example of what a sentence like that would sound like, are you ready?
Yeah, let's hear it.
You know that snoodle pinkred and that I want to get him around and take care of him like you want before. That's what like somebody would say if they have that type of aphasia, and you just be like what, and they might not have any idea what they're trying to say either because their comprehension region is damaged both ways. So you comprehend what you're saying, you also comprehend what other people are saying, and so in that sense, it's very disconnecting. Although Broke's area is disconnecting too, But apparently you can still get out enough, like in a word or two, that people generally know what you're saying. With where Nikki's aphasia, they can have no clue what you're saying at all.
Yeah, and I think that was what can happen when you have a stroke sometimes.
Right, that's how it usually comes about.
Yeah, that's because my granddad when I was little, he had a stroke and he could understand what you were saying, and he would talk at you using you know, walking, walking, secure, rock and rocking and they weren't even words, they were it was just stuff like that.
But they were like enunciated and like individual like you could see that these are distinct things that he's saying. They're just nonsensical, right, yeah.
Yeah, And it was very frustrating for him, which is an imagine.
Especially if he knew what he was trying to say and.
People that's you know, yeah, I think that's the thing.
It always reminds me of that that newscaster outside of the Emmys or the Oscars or whatever, who had, like I said later, it was a migraine, but she's like a very very heavy bairtation. And I have no I've never seen anybody say like, this is what she was trying to say.
I have no idea like a translation. Yeah, I know, And at the time, I remember people are like shaming, people are like that she had a mini stroke and like, how dare you laugh? But I don't think that was the.
Case, right, No, she had good migraine.
Heavy, she had heavy Britat Barry.
Barry heavy bartation. I'm not sure that's gonna survive the final edit.
I'm not sure we'll see. I saw the video not like sometime within the past year. Again, somehow, Yeah, it holds up.
You know what else holds up is Arthur the weather Man saying pretty much everywhere it's gonna be hot. And then I don't.
Know if I know that one.
Oh you do too. We talked about Arthur the weather Man, and then the news anchor goes, then I don't need a jacket, and then he just starts laughing like maniacally. He's a he's a I guess, the one of the weather people in Haiti, and that was his forecast pretty much everywhere it's gonna be hot.
Okay, maybe I have seen that you have now that.
That was like two thousand and seven or something.
Yeah, I think when you said Haiti, it kind of zeroed it on it. I pulled it up from my Haitian file. So as far as those those language areas of the brain, though, one thing that's sort of interesting is two out of the three of those are on the left side of the brain, on the on, yeah, the left hemisphere, and so for like an adult human language generally is on the left, but when you're a kid, your brain is its firing all over. So they've done fMRI scans that shows that both hemispheres are going wild when kids are learning their language, which is interesting.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. What also strikes me is interesting is that kids learn in a general pattern that you can predict people like basically make charts. Like I was saying, like it is reading in first grade, you know, okay, right, like these milestone charts. The idea that you can be like, oh, your kid's going to be saying this age you know, eighteen months, well, you know, by twenty four months, they'll be putting two words together to make a sentence or something like. I just think that's really neat, and I think it kind of underscores the idea that there is some sort of innate ability or desire to learn languages. Yeah.
I mean I think it's like it's it's got to be evolutionary because it's a survival thing, Like you have to learn that language to know how to survive the world that you're born into.
But then that supports behaviorism. You can be like, this is so important that you're born with a blank slate, no language acquisition skills or anything, but it's so important that you learn it just by observing and everything because you know that this is how you're going to survive.
Or that it is innate and that you are born with an ability because it's you know, passed down to you through natural selection. Yeah, am I thinking of it wrong?
I think the only way to settle this is for us to get in a skinner box and debate. Okay, between electric jolts.
That sounds good. Uh, we'll take a break in a sec. But before we do, Like you were talking about that sort of process. For kids, their vocabulary grows, you know, very quickly from the time they start learning up until about the age of eight, and their vocabulary still grows for sure, like it never stops. I still learn your words all the time. But by the age of eight, Supposedly by that time, if everything is on track, then a kid has has basically mastered how to speak at least and understands basic grammar and basic concepts, sometimes even complex top concepts. But I think the vocabulary is the outlier where like you will always be learning words.
Yeah, I mean, you're just not exposed to as many. I think there's like three hundred main words used in English, more than you know, like the vast majority of English is just a few hundred words, a couple hundred words.
Yeah, I tell you the true sort of check yourself moment as a parent, as when you're kid is constantly asking what a word means when they're like Ruby's ah, she's about to turn eight? Is well yeah, uh it really because it's hard to define a lot of words. So as you know, you like, you know, what does this mean, I'll be like, oh, well it means, well, I don't know what it means, like how to define it. So I'll either look it up or I'll do my best and then look it up. You know what I'm saying, what's your score?
How often are you like?
Oh?
Right?
Oh, I mean I'm It's tough, though, because some words are just hard to define in words, you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, well, I know what you're saying.
I'm even having trouble putting this into words. So let's take that break and we'll be right back by the way. I think the reason I was struggling was I was trying to think of an example recently where she said what does this mean? And I couldn't think of how to define it. Yeah, it was like it happens all the time though.
Chewing gum and tap dancing at the same time. It's hard to do. You were talking while trying to recall an incident at the same time.
Yeah, Or it's just you know, some words are just conceptually hard to really just sort of say in a few words that a kid would understand, you know.
Sure, like what irony, it's a great example.
Here are some tips. Well, I guess we should talk a little bit about your expectation as an adult to learn L Two. There was a paper in twenty eighteen that basically said, you know, up to about seventeen or eighteen, you're gonna have a much easier time. After that, it is much more difficult to obtain what they call native like fluency. But like we've been saying the whole time, it's not like it's impossible. It's just something that you're gonna have to work at harder than when you would have when you were sixteen or seventeen or ten.
Yeah, because you're overcoming those inhibitory neurons. And apparently the way you do that is by making a concerted intellectual effort to stridy and learn this language.
Yeah, there are lots of different ways the immersion technique. As Ed points out, there's nothing magic about it. Immersion just means you're just exposed more and more, and you're repeating a foreign language more and more, in hearing a foreign language more and more. So, like we said earlier, watching that foreign language TV show that can be a nice little training tool. But one thing Ed points out which I never really thought about, is the second part, which is input and output. Like just watching that movie and saying like, oh, I'm understanding this, Like that's great, but you got to be able to say it. You got to be able to write it. So maybe watch that movie and then like write a little summation of the movie in that language.
Yeah, pretty neat. You also need to know vocabulary. It's just it's important.
Got to do it.
Yeah, I mean, if you can point to something, it's almost like having broke as of phasia. You can point to something generally kind of say the word. People get what you mean. You can build from that and learn grammatical rules over time, But the vocabulary is the basis of speech for sure.
Yeah, there's no way around it. You were going to be looking and memorizing lists.
But that's cool. I mean the key here that I think people who teach languages have found in the last few decades you do not do this in like any kind of marathon cramming way. You break it into manageable pieces lessons that are short enough and interesting enough to keep the person's attention who's learning this extra language.
Yeah. I saw another thing too, where it's easier. They found in studies they do it in a non threatening environment, and that I knew you're gonna laugh. It sounds funny because threatening means, you know, you get the idea of you know, someone's like yelling at you to learn a language, or like.
You're learning a language in like a dark alley.
Yeah, exactly. But what that really just means is like, like they did the study of Malaysian kids learning English and they found that they did better when it was done through like children's stories rather than like grammar lessons. I see, and like the grammar lessons would be like a threatening thing. And it's probably not a great use of the word, but like threatening meaning just sort of intimidating. I think maybe is the better word.
No, for sure, but if you hadn't used that word, this would not be the classic episode that it is.
That's right, because I did see to go to kind of tie in with that. As native speakers like when they are come across someone who is maybe like in their country and someone is trying to speak their language very in a rudimentary way, then you will often go into what's called like foreigner speak or teacher talk, and it's akin to that baby talk where they will sort of sort of dumb down and slow down their speech a little bit and what they're really doing is making a non threatening environment.
Oh okay, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Another thing you want to do that I found very difficult is mimicking the sounds that you're hearing. And apparently, even if you're not getting it quite right, you're still getting your mouth used to saying, making the sounds the phonemes of that language, and then you'll they'll just get better and better, or you'll get better and better at it over time with practice. But it's not something you just jump into necessarily. You can learn by imitating like a kid.
Is this the same thing as like when my mom would speak a little like a British person when she would meet someone who was Brittish.
Oh did she do that? Is she like Madonna?
She did that occasionally?
Wow?
Or a couple of times that we didn't know a lot of British people growing up. But I remember on vacation a couple of times meeting people and my mom was like, all of a sudden, saying words that they were saying that she's never said before, And I was like, what's going on?
She's like frushing you drink Kaefner.
Yeah, sort of trying to fit in but with the imitation, and I'm not trusting me. My impressions are not great. But I've always been able to like mimic a sound pretty well since I was a kid, And so when I was taking German, I always got complimented on my pronunciation of my diction because I could just roll the R and I could make it. I could make it sound like My teachers are always like, hey, listen, you're not the best German speaker, but you sound fairly German when you're speaking it. And other kids in there, remember, especially in the South, you would get these people speaking German with like a Southern accent and yeah, and just couldn't make that separation. And I think I always had a little bit of a leg up because I was always trying to mimic or impersonate it or do impressions and stuff like that. Since I was a kid.
Did you end up wearing one of those kind of alpine caps with the feather in it in high school? You take it to that extreme.
I was not the Saint Pauly girl or boy. I didn't have later hosen, but a pretty good pronunciation.
That's impressive. Nice nice work, Chuck, But.
That kind of goes to what you're saying is just like practice the sounds of that language, because the sounds of that of German are can be very different than English exactly.
And then there's there's so there's so many apps out there it's crazy to just learn that have figured out how to break these down into like digestible sections. And if you want to learn a language as an adult, there's never been a better time to do it, or an easier time even, I would say, but there are some reasons you might want to learn a language as an adult. If you're not traveling, if you don't have a significant other who speaks another language, there's if you stop and think about it, there's not that many reasons you would think of to learn another language other than to show off. But in showing off, I'm sure is there one reason some people learn languages, But there's other things that Studies have shown people who learn additional languages exhibit more than others who are monolingual, and one of them is empathy.
Apparently, Yeah, that makes sense. They've done studies and it's proven if you're bilingual you are more empathetic. Then if you speak one language.
Yeah, try to dispute that you can't do.
It try it in two languages.
That sounds to me just it just smells like one of those social psychology studies for sure, But I like to think that it's true.
It makes sense. It also said supposedly that if you're bilingual, you're better at conflict management I said before problem solving, and that kind of ties in with the next on the list here, cognitive abilities. There are a variety of things cognitively that you supposedly perform better on if you're bilingual.
Yeah, like semantic conflict tests where they show you the word red but it's colored in blue when they ask you what color it is, and your brain's like does not compute if you're bilingual or multi lingual. Apparently you score better on tests like that. It's not entirely clear why, but that kind of goes to show that it supports that showing off idea. People just inherently know that you're smarter and superior to them if you know more languages than they do.
Yeah, And like you were talking about earlier with Alzheimer's, if you it's a workout for your brain, So any anytime you were doing something so sort of intimidating and drastic is learning a completely new language a little later in life? You are giving your brain a real, really solid workout.
Yeah. Supposedly, all bilingual Alzheimer's patients had onset five years later on average than monolingual Alzheimer's patients.
Man's that's reason a lot of years.
Yeah. Yeah, you got anything else about learning a language?
Nine good pick.
By the way, nice work, hiks. If you want to learn more about learning a language, go learn another language and you can figure it out firsthand. And since I said that, of course it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this Josh ohs Chuck and apologies that that's a boy.
This sounds familiar.
Yeah again, Hey, guys, this is from a trucker. We heard from a lot of truckers, which I knew we would, which is great. Shure. Hey, guys, really enjoyed the trucker episode. I thought it was funny and ironic when you two had a disagreement of the pronunciation of Steve Adore during listener mail. Chuck infested not questioning Josh when he used it earlier in the show, thinking it was better to not appear ignorant than Josh pontificated about how's pronounced exactly like it's spelled Steve Dor. But I got news for you guys. It's most assuredly Steve Door. So Josh please apologize to Chuck. Sorry, Chuck, no problem. Thanks for the fun, guys, yours knowingly.
That's a great sign off, Steve Door.
Oh Man, I wish Tom Hubert in Seattle, Washington.
Tom Hubert's another name for a longshoreman. No is it Tom Hubert? No?
I think it's tomay Hubert.
Yeah, thanks Tom. We appreciate you big time, and keep on trucking. Tom was a trucker, right, I don't know. I think it is in the industry somehow. Okay, Well, if you want to be like Tom and you're in some sort of industry that we've touched upon, you want to correct us, that's cool. We're always open to that. You can be like Tom and be very nice about it. We appreciate those the most. But either way, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcast guests my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
