Attitudes toward the Oath of Citizenship

[roykirk]

Interesting point at the end, Ronnie.  I am learning Russian, and have built quite a vocabulary (but alas cannot construct complete sentences yet), but I set some limits with my girlfriend when I told her I was trying to study Russian.  She initially became very excited (too excited) that I was learning her language and that I could soon converse with her in her native tongue.  I told her the only time I would try to converse in Russian would be around her friends and family back home, but that while we're together I felt it was important to "mostly" speak English.  I told her anything less would make it more difficult for her to become proficient in English.  Now that she's mostly fluent in English, I am working harder at my Russian and asking her for help on certain words and grammar.  I feel at this point there's little chance she'll regress on her English. 

The bigger question for us is how we're going to raise our future children.  I think it's very cool that we'll have a children who will be bilingual from an early age, but we'll have to research on how to speak to them and around them when they're in those important first few years when they're learning basic words.  I imagine if my future wife speaks to them in Russian all of the time and I speak to them in English all of the time, they could get quite confused or it could actually delay them from speaking either language proficiently.  I'm sure someone has written books on such topics.

I suppose the downside to having fluent bilingual kids is that it could keep my wife from completely integrating her own English (and losing the thick accent).  Case in point:   I had a friend in high school who was fluent in Finnish from an early age since his mom was a native of that country.  He told me he always spoke Finnish with his mom while at home, even though his dad never got a firm grasp of the language.  To this day, after 40 years of living here, the woman still has such a thick accent that I can barely understand her.  I wonder if the fact that her own son became fluent in her native language kept her from becoming completely proficient in English (i.e. minus the accent).  I know accents are held dear to a lot of people as a cultural identity thing, but I think in some cases it can keep a person from becoming completely integrated in to the culture in which they're living.

[Misha]

I imagine if my future wife speaks to them in Russian all of the time and I speak to them in English all of the time, they could get quite confused or it could actually delay them from speaking either language proficiently.  I'm sure someone has written books on such topics.

Actually, no. Confusion only occurs when people switch between languages when talking to an infant. For example, if a mother were to sometimes talk to the child in Russian, sometimes in English, this would create linguistic confusion in the child as they are learning to speak.

The only real effect that the mother speaking to the child in one language and the father speaking to the child in another is that the child may take a few extra months to start talking. Once the child is 5 or 6 years old, they will have caught up and will speak both languages fluently. The trick is to be consistent.

I know accents are held dear to a lot of people as a cultural identity thing, but I think in some cases it can keep a person from becoming completely integrated in to the culture in which they're living.

Accents are close to impossible to get rid of unless you get the help of a voice coach and spend a lot of time with them to get rid of the accent.

[roykirk]

Accents are close to impossible to get rid of unless you get the help of a voice coach and spend a lot of time with them to get rid of the accent.

Do you really think so?  I think it depends on the person and how motivated they are to lose it.  I've talked with Anastassia Ash and she has almost no accent.  Ditto for a nice Russian woman I met on the airplane on my last trip who had been visiting the U.S.  When I attempt to speak Russian with my girlfriend, she notes that often times I have no American accent when pronouncing some words (i.e. she says I sound like a Russian).  But of course I'm the type of person who can spend a month in Britain and I'll come home with a noticeable British accent that takes me days to get rid of again.  I think it's a thing I do on purpose to try to blend in and speak like the locals do, to integrate in to the culture as much as possible. 

Thanks for the tips on speaking around the children.  That's good information to know.

[Misha]

Do you really think so?  I think it depends on the person and how motivated they are to lose it.

Depends what age they started learning English. I would guess that Anastassia was in a specialized English-language school and gained a great deal of fluency before adolescence (correct me if I am wrong). Under these circumstances, it would have been easier for her to learn how to make the proper sounds before puberty. The older you are, the harder it is to learn how to make new sounds and the less finely "tuned" your hearing will be to distinguishing sounds. The brain tends to lump sounds together and it is best to learn a language when young as your brain can much more easily integrate these new sounds and it will be much easier for you to learn how to create those new sounds properly. When you are an adult and listen to yourself talking, your brain hears what it wants to hear, and that is why you can't really hear your own accent.

[SANDRO43]

The bigger question for us is how we're going to raise our future children.  I think it's very cool that we'll have a children who will be bilingual from an early age, but we'll have to research on how to speak to them and around them when they're in those important first few years when they're learning basic words. 

Roy, here's a thread from some time ago discussing the subject: http://www.russianwomendiscussion.com/index.php?topic=5087.0.

[SANDRO43]

Depends what age they started learning English. I would guess that Anastassia was in a specialized English-language school and gained a great deal of fluency before adolescence (correct me if I am wrong). Under these circumstances, it would have been easier for her to learn how to make the proper sounds before puberty. The older you are, the harder it is to learn how to make new sounds and the less finely "tuned" your hearing will be to distinguishing sounds. The brain tends to lump sounds together and it is best to learn a language when young as your brain can much more easily integrate these new sounds and it will be much easier for you to learn how to create those new sounds properly. When you are an adult and listen to yourself talking, your brain hears what it wants to hear, and that is why you can't really hear your own accent.

Yes and no. I agree that learning a foreign language as a child is much easier than when one is an adult.

However, phonetics is only a part of language, and in this case having a natural predisposition for foreign languages helps at any age. I suspect it's closely related to having a musical hear, since you cannot really reproduce sounds that you do not distinguish clearly. I keep having a go at new foreign languages at my advanced age, and the first thing I get right, or almost, is their pronunciation, even with unusual ones like Japanese or Arabic. Call it a parrot-like ability, if you will .

Becoming fluent is another matter, since it implies grammar and vocabulary which latter, in the case of Russian, is far removed from those of its sister Indo-European languages. Here only exposure and practice can help.

[Misha]

I keep having a go at new foreign languages at my advanced age, and the first thing I get right, or almost, is their pronunciation, even with unusual ones like Japanese or Arabic. Call it a parrot-like ability, if you will .

When a child learns a language, they start learning the phonemes of a language. A Chinese baby by the age of 8 or 10 months is already making sounds appropriate for the language spoken around him or her, which will be different from a child speaking only English around them. In other words, the "goo goos" of a baby in China will be subtly different from a child in the United States.

If you were to take all the thousands of languages that exist in the world, there would be roughly 400 distinct phonemes that serve as the building block of spoken speech. Different languages have different phonemes. English, for example, has 44 phonemes. Some languages only have 11 and the language with the largest number of phonemes identified by linguists has 112.

Though it would be quite rare for two completely unrelated languages to have exactly the same phonemes, there is nonetheless overlap. A person who learns a number of languages as a child would therefore have a larger base of phonemes to draw upon when learning a new language as adulthood.

This, IMHO, would explain what you are describing in your case Sandro. I am positive that you learned more than one language as a child, and this helped you over the course of your lifetime and now if you try to learn other languages.

Here is another example. Knowing both French and English made certain sounds easier to learn in Russian. The French "l" sound is much closer to a Russian soft "l" sound, while the English "l" for me is closer to a Russian hard "l" sound. Having two languages, helped a bit with understanding some of the phonemes in Russian.

[Ronnie]

Learning a language has less to do with age (though it helps to be young) and more to do with genetics.  Being able to hear sounds and differentiate them as well as being able to parrot those sounds, combined with an intution about what is being said, even when you aren't sure, are the tools for successful language learning.

[Misha]

Learning a language has less to do with age (though it helps to be young) and more to do with genetics.  Being able to hear sounds and differentiate them as well as being able to parrot those sounds, combined with an intution about what is being said, even when you aren't sure, are the tools for successful language learning.

No, it is pretty much a given that children learn languages with greater ease when children and his nothing to do with genetics or having a musical ear. This quote sums it up nices:

"Babies and young infants can pick up new words and sounds effortlessly during the critical period of cortex development. After age one it gets more difficult, but it is still much easier for children to learn new words. Whether these words are all from one language or from two or more doesn’t matter. All of the words—English, French, Russian, etc.—are stored in the same brain map.

After age 10, learning new words becomes progressively harder until, as adults, it is exceedingly difficult. The older you get, the more you use your native language and the more it comes to dominate your linguistic map. You still have brain plasticity, but your mother tongue rules. Your brain trains itself to not pay attention to foreign sounds, and the space in your head dedicated to language gets rather crowded."

(Source: http://www.eldr.com/article/brain-power/why-it-easier-young-children-learn-new-language)

It is true that some people are better at learning a second language and can hear the differences between phonemes better than others. However, these people will still learn a second language with greater ease than if they start at a much later stage of life.

P.S. The Linguistic Society of America provides a good overview of why people have accents and why it is easier to learn a language as a child as well as why the languages you already know shape whether it will be easier to learn a new language. Source: http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-faqs-accent.cfm

[Ronnie]

Yes, of course you are correct Misha.  Being young makes learning a second or third language so much more effortless.  What I rather inartfully was trying to argue is that learning languages is a talent, much like singing and dancing.  One who is born with the this talent will do much better than another, who though the same age, is born without it.

[Misha]

Yes, of course you are correct Misha.  Being young makes learning a second or third language so much more effortless.  What I rather inartfully was trying to argue is that learning languages is a talent, much like singing and dancing.  One who is born with the this talent will do much better than another, who though the same age, is born without it.

Well, I will use a sports metaphor to explain how I see it. Some people do have innate talent and are more likely to become great athletes. I think of Wayne Gretzky in hockey. He had talent and started playing hockey at a very young age. Other children with less talent could play decently, but never made it to the NHL.

Now, let's take these same kids and have them start learning to skate as adults and learning to play hockey. The one's with the innate talent may become okay hockey players, but it is highly unlikely they will play in the NHL. The one's with no innate talent, will be lucky if they become good enough to skate around the rink without falling down.

The same principle applies to learning a language IMHO.

[BC]

The difference between being able to speak a foreign language and really being fluent is whether or not you can think, even dream in the foreign language.

IMHO it's not so important which foreign language is learned at an early age. The ability to think in two or more languages makes it much easier even later in life to pick up new languages and gives the ability to effortlessly switch between them.

[SANDRO43]

If you were to take all the thousands of languages that exist in the world, there would be roughly 400 distinct phonemes that serve as the building block of spoken speech. Different languages have different phonemes. English, for example, has 44 phonemes. Some languages only have 11 and the language with the largest number of phonemes identified by linguists has 112.

Misha, I think your figures are overestimated, unless you consider allophones as 'different phonemes':

Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 represent consonants and vowels, 31 are diacritics that are used to further specify these sounds, and 19 are used to indicate such qualities as length, tone, stress, and intonation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa
I'd be interested in learning what language has 112 different phonemes .

Though it would be quite rare for two completely unrelated languages to have exactly the same phonemes, there is nonetheless overlap. A person who learns a number of languages as a child would therefore have a larger base of phonemes to draw upon when learning a new language as adulthood.

Of course. However, the case of a child learning 'two completely unrelated languages', say English and Chinese, is not as frequent as what we're discussing here.

This, IMHO, would explain what you are describing in your case Sandro. I am positive that you learned more than one language as a child, and this helped you over the course of your lifetime and now if you try to learn other languages.

No. I started studying my second language at 12 in our 7th grade (discounting Latin the year before), was taught some Russian intermittently by my grandmother at age 16-18, studied German at a language school for one year at 20, French and Spanish at University at 22-25, and so on. Therefore you can see that I'm quite a late learner .

Here is another example. Knowing both French and English made certain sounds easier to learn in Russian. The French "l" sound is much closer to a Russian soft "l" sound, while the English "l" for me is closer to a Russian hard "l" sound. Having two languages, helped a bit with understanding some of the phonemes in Russian.

That's because vowel sounds are much more indistinct in English than in most other languages. I know no Scandinavian languages (yet), so the only parallel that comes to my mind is Arabic, with just 3 official vowels (A,I,U).

[Ronnie]

My experience with foreign language is less that Sandro's of course.  But similarly I did not learn a second language until I was nearly 20 and was immersed in Italian.  After 1 year I was often mistaken for a native speaker in terms of accent but my vocabulary was not yet up to par.  Russian came as a result of two semesters of study as a college freshman but abandoned for 25 years until immersed again at the age of 53.  Because Russian if far more complex than Italian, I still cannot say my Russian is better than my Italian despite speaking it daily for the past 7 years. 

I remember having a dinner date in Poltava once with a Ukrainian woman who had lived and worked in Sicily.  We created a hybrid of Russian and Italian and understood each other perfectly.  It was great linguistic fun!

[Misha]

Misha, I think your figures are overestimated, unless you consider allophones as 'different phonemes':http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipa
I'd be interested in learning what language has 112 different phonemes .

No Sandro, I know the difference between a phone [sound] and a phoneme [meaningful sound used a phonetic building block in a given language]. Feel free to look up what linguists have been written on phonemes. The languages with 112 phonemes are the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa. If you remember The Gods Must Be Crazy, the indigenous people in the movie were Khoisan speakers. Their languages are unique in that they use clicks as consonants.

[SANDRO43]

The languages with 112 phonemes are the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa. If you remember The Gods Must Be Crazy, the indigenous people in the movie were Khoisan speakers. Their languages are unique in that they use clicks as consonants.

Oh yes, I had forgotten about Bushmen & related peoples using clicks. The IPA calls them non-pulmonic consonants, so they should be included in that count of 107 consonants and vowels.

[AnastassiaAsh]

Well, i see this thread evolved into learning languages discussion.  I started learning English since I was 5, in kindergarten. I grew up in the environment of foreign things and English - both parents being professional translators and interpreters and working abroad. But if my mom hadn't made me or pushed me, nothing would happen and I wouldn't be where I am today. Tedious work every single day for so many years - yes, I went to a special English school, we started learning English in the 2nd grade and French in the 8th grade. Later the same thing in the University.

But I would say these outside sources of learning languages constituted only a third of what i know and learnt. The biggest part was taught to my by my mom and myself based on my own interest. If you go just by what they teach you at school and University - you are not going to progress much and it will take forever.

As to the accent, Roykirk, thank you very much for your assessment.  Always nice to hear that. I am convinced that if a person wants to have no accent or close to that he or she should start learning language with the correct pronunciation at the very beginning. You will pronounce things the way you are taught at the very beginning. I am very fortunate to have a mom who is also a professional phonetist and she definitely spent considerable amount of time with me on that, both in English and French. When that was done, we had to concentrate on other aspects of the English language. When I came here and emerged into this environment I picked up American English pretty fast. If i had moved to England, it would be the same. I had an absolutely excellent base, as we say. I think yes, it highly depends on the predisposition of a person to languages and music. Although i am a total zero in music and do not have a musical ear, for some reason i am really good at catching intonations and sounds, and mimicking them and hearing subtleties. Again, i am not sure if that is because of my mom's excellent work with me or also because i just had it in me. In Russian even specialized English schools they do not teach you pronunciation, so you are on your own with that. Only private lessons of a professional phonetist can get you there. But in general this is just a cherry on a top of a cake, very very few people can afford it and even fewer can master it. Usually people concentrate on Grammar and vocabulary and listening comprehension.

[SANDRO43]

Although i am a total zero in music and do not have a musical ear

Don't be too sure about that, Nastya. I thought the same until I started playing the guitar many years ago, and discovered that with some harmonic support I was not as hopeless as I thought . Much later, with choir singing, I made a, to me, surprising progress. Some are blessed with a native musical ear, those who aren't can yet develop a decent one with regular practice.

There are a lot of neurophysiological affinities between music and language (both are left-hemisphere activities). My former choirmaster used to say that there no really off-key people, the problem lies in their ears rather than in their vocal apparatus: if they cannot hear the difference between one note and another, they can hardly be expected to reproduce it correctly.  Same as with pronumciation .