I’m from Vietnam. I’ve been in the UK for 10 years now. When I met my English husband 13 years ago at 19 I knew 0 English. We communicated using machine translation. So that’s when I started learning English. Fast forward to present day after immersion, living in an English speaking country, formal study, etc. and I’d say my writing and listening (understanding) are good, but my speaking and reading are still bad. I kind of gave up on trying to become fluent at this point.
Chiming in with more context, my PhD was in neuroscience and I worked in a language lab. As others have stated, there is a critical window for learning a language. The biology behind it is fascinating.
As early as about 9 months of age, your brain begins to decide what speech sounds are important to you. For example, in Japanese the difference between /r/ and /l/ sounds doesn’t matter, but in English it does. Before 9 months, most babies can tell the difference between the two sounds, but babies living in Japanese-speaking environments (without any English) LOSE this ability after 9ish months!
Language is more than just speech sounds, though. Imagine all these nuances of language - there are critical moments where your brain just decides to accept or reject them, and it’s coded somewhere in your DNA.
i’ve never understood this, i’m slightly older than 9 months and i’ve been perfectly able to pick up new sounds, and people learn new languages all the time…
Perfectly? In a language system different than your own. English to French/Spanish doesn’t require these sounds. English to like Thai or Chinese has a lot.
People learn new languages because you can get the ability back with training (hooray neurplasticity) but it is more difficult and takes longer.
that’s moving the goalposts, the previous poster claims that you simply cannot tell the difference between sounds that don’t exist in your native language, which is fucking obviously false and they should be ashamed of posting something like that
oh my god… relax. they’re called allophones, it’s when two different sounds are treated as the same phoneme in a language. so like whether you make a click sound with your K or not, it’s still a K right? well in some languages it would be a totally different phoneme. but to you, whether you can hear the difference or not is irrelevant to you because it either way it just means K. that’s what they’re talking about.
it can be very hard to hear the difference if you never grew up with it, especially in the course of conversation. just try and understand the difference between 살 and 쌀, it sucks.
can you chill with the “you should be ashamed” and try more of “i should generously try to understand what they mean and ask questions to get there instead of raging at any perceived weakness”
Have you tried learning Japanese / English after learning the other? I studied Japanese and learned how to pronounce the /r/ in Japanese correctly.
For some people, the difficulty is less in production, and more in interpretation for someone who is native Japanese speaking and later learned English.
I can’t hear the difference between the Rs in Rohr (from German Rohrbacherstrasse). I can do just fine with all other German phonemes, but these, I can’t hear or speak it.
Conversely, Japanese people learn to tell the difference between an “o” vowel held for shorter or longer periods, a skill that I find incredibly difficult even though I lived in Japan for 7 years.