- Do children really learn languages
faster than adults?
(sizzling)
Hello I'm Julian Northbrook
from DoingEnglish.com.
One very common concern
that my coaching clients tend to come to me with
is that they're worried that they are too old
to reach the level in English
they want to reach.
What they are touching upon here
is an idea in linguistics called
the Critical Period Hypothesis.
I'm not going to get into this
in detail in this video
because it's not what I want to talk about.
But this idea basically says
that your brain changes at a certain point
commonly believed to be puberty,
and therefore you are unable to learn languages
or at least in the same way
as you could when you were a child.
This is an incredibly complex theory
and one that has been bounced around for decades,
and one which has never conclusively been proven
and we probably never will be able
to come up with a hard and solid
it's true or it's not answer.
The general thinking and certainly the thinking
on my side of the research camp
is that it's not really true,
or at least not in the hard core language
is this special thing embedded
in the human genome camp of people.
But where this becomes a problem is
when people start to interpret ideas
that come from research and put one and one
together and come up with 20.
Good example of this, couple of years ago
I made a video called
Are You Too Old to Learn English
linked up about here.
In that video I said that age is irrelevant
and it's not something you should worry about,
and I stand by that opinion.
But the top comment on that video
essentially says while I agree
that you shouldn't worry about age,
there is lots of established research
that proves children are better, faster,
do it easier at learning languages than adults.
Now what does this actually mean?
Think about this for a moment.
Yeah there is plenty of research out there
that shows that kids learn fast.
They learn faster than adults.
And this is often being put forward
as an argument for the Critical Period Hypothesis
But again think about this just for a moment.
Say I decided to do a research project
asking do married people get divorced
more often than single people?
What do you think the result
of that is gonna be?
I mean it's pretty obvious, isn't it?
You've gotta be married in order to get divorced,
therefore if you're single you can't get divorced
Well of course there's gonna be a higher rate
to divorce in married people.
All I proved here is that I have
set up a research project
comparing apples to oranges,
and the conclusion I've come to is pineapples,
i.e. I've proved absolutely nothing
and this is the problem
when it comes to doing research
with children and comparing 'em to adults.
In order for a research study to be able to show
do children learn languages faster
and better and easier than adults,
well those studies would have to be set up
in a way that actually gives us the result
that we want to get,
i.e. the two groups of people
would have to be learning the same things
for the same amount of time,
using the same methods,
all with the same kind of background knowledge,
and in exactly the same conditions.
But this just isn't possible
because adults and children are not the same.
We're never going to be able to do a study
which looks at these two groups
under the same kind of conditions,
because they are fundamentally different.
And although there is research
that shows yes children learn faster,
the most likely reason for that is actually
not that their brains are completely different
and therefore they're able
to learn languages at supersonic speed,
but rather that actually they have more time,
fewer responsibilities,
and less going on in their heads.
Children are concerned with asking
if they can have a biscuit.
Adults are in meetings
negotiating billion dollar deals.
You can't come up with conclusions
that mean anything under those conditions.
So when we see comments like
the one that I've just discussed,
really the only conclusion
that you can come to from that
is that the commenter doesn't really
understand the research.
But the problem is is as I said
we see these things
and we put one and one together
and come up with 20,
i.e. we start to feel inadequate,
bad about ourselves because we believe suddenly
oh here's this research that proves
only children can do this,
I'm not a child, therefore perhaps I can't do it,
perhaps it's impossible,
doubt creeps in and we tell ourselves
it's just not worth the effort
it can't be done anyway and we quit.
Hopefully you can see that
that is rather foolish thinking.
And while I'm not criticising the commenter
of that particular comment,
it's not a good comment
because it doesn't actually tell us
anything useful whatsoever.
If you want some solid advice about things
that you can do to see improvement
in your English, head on over
to DoingEnglish.com/FreeTraining
to checkout my free training
where I will teach you the five key changes
that you need to make to the way
that you approach and use English
in order to see real progress
with your English speaking.
Alternatively if you are ready
to take things to the next level,
work with me directly either
as one of my coaching clients or as a member
of one of my coaching groups,
head over to DoingEnglish.com/Talk
to book a time to talk to me directly
about you and your English
and see whether we are
a good fit to work together
and whether I can help you
to get your English goals finished, done,
accomplished and get you actually out there
doing real stuff in the real world.
This is me Julian Northbrook
signing out from another video.
I'll see you in the next one. Bye, bye.
(upbeat theme music)
