3563. On the Way We Adults Learn a Language. So Great, Look!

Do you need to learn a language? I do. English. I’m working on it. 

Now I can help you by giving more advice from the scholar we’re treating about on our last posts, H. D. Brown, who is an ace at learning and teaching languages. 

So now we could think that children, young ones, infants actually, have a lot of facility to learn a language, right? But if we are adults… So what? Adults have a great potential to learn and grab a language. 

Our author puts, “(S)hould you, like a kid, try to pick up language subconsciously? The answer is a qualified yes. As an adult now, you most likely analyze yourself too much. Your tendency is to memorize, focus on grammar rules, translate from one language to the other, and do just about everything except subconsciously acquire it. You’re probably learning facts about the language at the expense of learning to use it. And one sure way to fail at learning a foreign language is not to use it for genuine communication.” (page 21 from the book we’re analyzing on the last posts from this blog). 

Thus we adults can learn… and also acquire the language we want to learn, as Stephen Krashen said (1981). And that is a nice piece of news. 

Even more, we adults may have qualities that facilitate learning a language: self-control, self-assessing, self-correcting, self-discipline, self-help, creativity, intuition, flexibility, planning, experience or life experience, a lot of knowledge, learning strategies that we have acquired over the years, skills and abilities, will power, perseverance, mental processes also acquired over time… I can assure you I have seen that in the classroom of adults. 

As well we can acquire the foreign tongue for example whilst reading a book which is a bit above our level: we may be devouring that nice foreign language without noticing it, or not much noticing it. 

Have a nice week. Next time I could say further things about this stupendous learning field. 

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