Bilingual people are more adept in picking up a foreign language than their monolingual counterparts, according to the latest research.

Their bilingual advantage persists even when the new language they study is completely different from the languages they already know.

“It’s often assumed that individuals who’ve learned multiple languages simply have a natural aptitude for learning languages,” said Viorica Marian, associate professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northwestern University (NU).

“While that is true in some cases, our research shows that the experience of becoming bilingual itself makes learning a new language easier,” said Marian.

Yes and no…  This, at first glance, appears to be a “duh, we knew that” issue.  As Dr. Marian states, the facility of L3 learning by bilinguals is often attributed to natural aptitude towards language learning, but it’s much more attributable to the greater linguistic awareness enjoyed by bilinguals.  Simply put, they have more resources (phonetically, grammatically, etc.) to pull from when learning the new language.  I’ve always told people that after about 3 languages, new ones become progressively easier…

However….

One cannot make the point blank assertion that bilingualism = improved language learning.  Bilinguals often first have to make a significant hurdle, depending upon how they first learned their L2.  I’ve noted that people who learn two or more languages as children can still struggle to learn a language as an adult.  This is largely due to the dramatic difference in learning styles between children and adults.  Children seem to literally absorb language.  They learn largely through observation, repetition, and deduction.  Adults learn (and are usually taught) in a much more analytical manner.  Studying a foreign language is a skill unto itself which child bilinguals won’t necessarily have learned, and thus, they are going to struggle in the same way as monolinguals studying their first language.  However, later in the course of study — once study habits develop — the natural advantages of bilinguals should start to kick in.

I believe I’ve told this story before on this blog, but honestly I can’t be bothered to troll through the old posts to look for it, but I saw this in action some years ago when I lived in Japan.  I observed two friends — a boy and a girl, both English/French bilinguals with no prior Japanese experience — struggling to learn Japanese.  While both were advancing slowly (Japanese is kindov tough!), the boy was (initially, at least) progressing much more quickly than the girl.  Given that they were putting roughly equal amounts of effort into learning, and that they had realtively equivalent amounts of input, it aroused my curiosity.  I started talking to them to get a handle on what the difference was, and in the end, what I determined was probably 99% to blame for the disparity was the fact that the boy had learned French (well!) largely as an adult (he had begun study in secondary school, but had only really sought mastery of the language in his twenties), whereas the girl had grown up speaking both (she had attended a French immersion school).  My discussions with them on what they were doing to learn Japanese revealed that the girl was floundering in trying to figure out how to learn a language, whereas the guy had immediately set about employing the same methods that he had put to the task of learning French.  Once the problem was identified, and some tips were laid out for the girl to facilitate adult language learning, her Japanese level started to progress markedly.  The point being that for every adult learner of a second language, the first task in language learning is learning “how to learn a foreign language…”

A great article by Patrick Mattimore in yesterday’s Examiner.  He hits the nail on the head that most schools and language-learning systems do assume an average level of linguistic ability (and often an above-average amount of motivation).  The truth is, however, that some who, for various reasons, find themselves needing to study a foreign tongue, DO have less than average language learning ability.  What to do??

So here’s the advice. If you don’t want to play Ugly American, learn at least some  French, if you come here. Throw out all the nonsense you’ve been led to believe about French snobbery, particularly Parisian snobbery, when it comes to an American speaking their language. I’ve had nothing but great experiences largely because I subscribe to the nouveau Marcel Marceau school of communication- if the words ain’t working just go super enthusiastic and get the arms in motion. (This has some drawbacks in phone conversations, however).

When you are in France nod a lot, throw in a lot of ouis (which should be pronounced as ahhhhhh way) and always say merci a couple of times- if your correspondent gets a merci in first be sure to then say merci a vous. Comme vous voulez (as you wish) worked really well for Westley in the Princess Bride and it’s a great fall back line here too. Of course, sometimes you will have no idea what the other person has said, where you are going (if you asked for directions) or what you ordered for dejeuner (lunch), but remember you can pretty much always go hang out at the Tour Eiffel or a great museum (not the Louvre) and be impressed.
The French don’t like to pronounce all their letters. It’s not like English where we are occasionally embarrassed by a “gh” that should have been an “f” at the end of a word or the singular “e” which is always silent at the end of our words. For the French there is, in nearly every word, something distasteful that needs to be banished. What’s more, the French subsume the sounds in their nose so the key to speaking French is to simply pronounce the beginning part of a word loudly and lose the rest of it in your sinus cavity.

Sarcasm aside, it is quite possible to get by with a lot less than fluency.  As an educator, I’m well aware that not all (and dare I say, in low level classes, most ) students will achieve anything approaching fluency.  Part of my job is to impart the minimum amount of linguistic skills to function in the language medium, while still allowing continual opportunities for improvement for those who can (i.e., I can’t start pitching my teaching to the lowest common denominator in the classroom).  Oftentimes, this takes the role of consciously teaching skills of circumlocution and how to gracefully acknowledge a linguistic breakdown.

I know that a lot of teachers/learners will get there hackles up at the assertion that some people should simply be content with lower expectations.  To this I respond that, yes, in theory everyone is capable of every language, but in real life how does that pan out???  There simply are people who are more adept at language learning than others.  There are actual language learning handicaps (both physical and learning disorders) which can preclude certain types of learning.  We’ve all known people who had “bad ears” — i.e., had extreme difficulty distinguishing sounds.  Furthermore, there are personality variations which can make one more or less inclined toward adapting to both foreign ways and languages.  Finally, one’s impressions of individual languages and cultures can easily cause one to close off from input, making progress next to impossible.  I’ve known people who spoke certain languages with ease, but could not for the life of them even get a foothold in certain other languages.  For instance, in both Taiwan and Japan, I’ve known fellow expats who spoke multiple European languages but for either lack of volition or necessity, never got beyond pidgin-levels of Chinese and Japanese, respectively.

One of the most important recent changes in general education in recent years (in my opinion) has been the steady proliferation of distance learning.  Coupled with internet communications, this is already radically changing ideas on how education is conducted.  Many of the undergraduate students at my university, for example, take core courses via distance providers as a cost-effective means of getting the necessary (transfer) course credit.  I also know quite a few people who have either completed or are currently working on advanced degrees via correspondence.  Distance learning, of course, has been around for a long while.  My older brother took high school AP English via satellite correspondence back in ‘89-’90.  It has taken longer to trickle down to language learning — mostly due to budgetary constraints (and, sadly, the fact that FL departments are usually the low-men-on-the-totem-pole as far as school budgets are concerned).  Fortunately, as internet technologies make distance learning of all types much cheaper, this is turning around, and soon, we may reach a point where the majority of coursework has at least some distance components to them.  This article, highlighting Youngstown State University’s embrace of the medium to enhance their foreign language offerings is typical:

While the Bitonte College of Health and Human Services has offered distance learning classes since 1999, last year was the first time the foreign language department participated in video conferencing courses.

In the fall, there will be 14 YSU students studying foreign languages via video conferencing courses sent by partner institutions. YSU will be sending Swahili and Greek courses to other campuses.

The advantage, of course, in distance education is that it allows course offerings that would otherwise be limited in certain (remote) locales.  It also has the potential of vastly improving instructional competence by allowing the better teachers to reach an ever-wider audience.  In the case of foreign language instruction, the expansion of distance learning can also lead to expanded contact with native teachers and conversational partners, thus greatly increasing students’ opportunities to practice the language in natural conversational settings.  High schools are quickly catching on to distance learning formats for teaching languages for which it may otherwise be difficult to recruit teacher.  I recently discovered that my old high school in rural Utahis now offering Chinese language courses that are mostly conducted via satellite correspondence.  Other language programs are in the works.

This seems like a great way of “democratizing” language offerings across the U.S., at least.  As the technology and availability expand, more students will have a wider array of language learning options at all levels of education.  For accomplished teachers, as well, this may actually even lead to some intriguing job possibilities.  Combining distance courses with the courses they teach may provide some much-needed extra income.  Additionally, in principle at last, as teachers can conduct the course from anywhere, this may give some teachers the option of teaching for high-salary districts, while living in areas with a much more reasonable cost of living.  This type of remote teaching is probably some years off, but I, for one, would relish the thought of teaching at a Japanese university (and on a Japanese salary!), for example while living in Thailand…  Ah!!  Dare we even imagine an age wherein teachers no longer gripe about their salaries?  How about teachers being considered relatively wealthy (for their region)?  Such is the stuff that dreams are made of, my friends…

15 new entrants to the Oxford English Dictionary…  I’m errrr underwhelmed…

These, of course, are the goofier of the newly-established words in the English lexicon, not a total listing.  Still, as the article states, such words being granted the legitimacy of the Oxford press does make one “fear for our future.”

Given that I only recognized about half of these terms, I guess it’s official that I’m no longer young and hip (ok, I was never actually hip)…  I guess the fact that I switched from watching MTV to VH1 some years back should have tipped me off. Another decade and I’ll probably eat exclusively at Wendy’s…  The next stop — Country Kitchen Cafe…  Sigh!

I’ve been gone and “gone” for the past few weeks.

First, “gone” means that the end of the semester had the normal impact on my available free time — i.e., it all disappeared.  Thankfully, I’m firmly into my summer vacation period now….

I also just returned a few hours ago from just under a week spent out of town.  My in-laws are visiting from Taiwan, and as they speak zero English (and in my father-in-law’s case, it was his first time ever on an airplane), the wife and I drove out to LA to pick them up, and then took “the long way” back home via Vegas, Bryce Canyon, and the Grand Canyon.  Other than general travel exhaustion, it was a good trip.  My in-laws will spend another (nearly) two weeks here.  While their presence will take up some of my time, I do not think it will in any way prevent me from fulfilling my normal blogging quotas, so expect to see new posts in the coming days.

Blog on!!!

Considering the number of times I’ve been asked whether I speak Klingon — which I’m certain is more often a result of my general bookishness Urkel-like nature than any true consideration of my linguistic knowledge — I should not be as amused by this as I am.  Akira Okrent, a fellow linguist-nerd, traces the history and development of the Klingon language.

Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Klingon is something altogether different. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. This is not surprising, considering that Klingon was created by Marc Okrand, a linguist whose dissertation was a grammar of a now-extinct Native American language.

True.  Klingon is one of the few “made for cinema” languages that has actually been developed into a full-fledged language, albeit that there is a school of thought that languages can only truly be considered as such when they have native speakers (which, of course, Klingon is decidedly lacking in).  Usually when asked if I speak Klingon, I respond that I prefer to stick to real languages.  For purely economic reasons, in fact, I tend to gravitate towards commercially viable languages.  Many of my linguist colleagues will happily spend years learning languages with an isolated speaker base of 1000 or less people world-wide, in order to get a better handle on the universalities of human language.  While such pursuits fascinate me, my bread-and-butter, so to speak, is in second language acquisition, so I tend to stick to languages that a broad swathe of the population would be interested in learning.  Nothing against such pursuits, and in fact, one of my (eventual) career goals is to embrace the David Crystal challenge of documenting an endangered language, but to date, probably the most obscure language I’ve studied thus far is Hokkien Chinese (pop. 35 million speakers).

That said, I can still see why people would be interested in learning Klingon.  In developing the language, Marc Okrand took almost the exact opposite track from Esperanto.  Esperanto was created to be learner-friendly, but Klingon was basically pulled together from every difficult trick in the linguist’s arsenel.

Klingon sentence structure is about as complex as it gets. Most people are familiar with the idea that verb endings can indicate person and number. In Spanish, the -o suffix on a verb like hablar (to speak) indicates a first-person singular subject (hablo—I speak) while the -amos suffix indicates a first-person plural subject (hablamos—we speak). But Klingon uses prefixes rather than suffixes, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most romance languages, it has 29. There are so many because they indicate not only the person and number of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (whom it is being done to). In the “Live long and prosper” translation above, for example, the Da- on SIQ indicates a second-person subject and a third-person object (”You endure it”), and the bI- on the verb chep indicates a second-person subject and no object (”You prosper”).

As if that weren’t complicated enough, Klingon also has a large set of suffixes. Attached to the end of the verbs SIQ and chep is the ending -jaj, which expresses “a desire or wish on the part of the speaker that something take place in the future.” Klingon has 36 verb suffixes and 26 noun suffixes that express everything from negation to causality to possession to how willing a speaker is to vouch for the accuracy of what he says. By piling on these suffixes, one after the other, you can pack a lot of meaning on to a single word in Klingon—words like nuHegh’eghrupqa’moHlaHbe’law’lI’neS, which translates roughly to: They are apparently unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress).

Such is to say, that learning Klingon is a hellacious task, but obviously success can grant some serious bragging rights.  It’s an exercise in mental agility, in other words, however, due to the paucity of true speakers, it’s a self-paced activity much like a consuming passion for crosswords or sudoku.   One does it for the pure fun of mastering a complicated system.

Obviously, an appreciation for Star Trek has to come into play as well, and this is where I honorably part ways with all students of Klingon.  While I can appreciate Star Trek to a point, I’ve never been all that into it.  It’s never held my fascination in the way that other films of similar genres have.   Ultimately, that’s why I’m confident in the assertion that I’ll never spend any time studying Klingon, but I tip my hat to those of you who make serious efforts at mastering Klingon grammar and syntax…

For those who thought that Bush’s retirement from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. would mark the end of embarrassing flubs and mangled language, President Obama is not doing very much to cool the frazzled nerves of hard-core syntacticians and grammarians, not to mention foreign language enthusiasts.  Fresh off his recent invention of a new “Austrian language“, President Obama today managed to twice mangel a joke referring to tomorrow’s Cinco de Mayo celebration:

Obama joked that it was “Cinco de Cuatro,” botching a play on the Spanish word for “four” when he meant to say “Cuatro de Mayo,” or the Fourth of May. He tried again, but he still did not get it right.

So what?  President Obama has never claimed to speak Spanish, so his verbal blundering is not a such a big deal in the full scheme of things, I think most will admit, but as Mary Katherine Ham correctly notes in the Weekly Standard, “if Bush had made such a blunder, it would have been the basis of a four-part MSNBC investigative series on the malapropism’s deleterious effects on the Republican Party’s attempts to woo Hispanic voters, Mexican-American relations, and our “place in the world.“  Turn about is fair play, so one can expect the right wing of the blogosphere to snark on this for a few days.  Bush-Obama comparisons on this particular issue are pretty much irrelevant, as one would have to admit that Bush would probably have gotten it right, as he does speak some Spanish, whereas, despite having some exposure to Indonesian and Swahili, Obama is an admitted monolingual.

In the end, not too important, but pretty funny….

p.s.  While talking about language flubs, I’d be remiss not to mention this clip, wherein Obama not only flubs the line, but also mangles the French pronunciation (as a former French teacher, I’d give him about a C minus on a pronunciation test)…