Name: Becoming fluent
ISBN: 9780262029230

Becoming fluent

Adults who want to learn a foreign language are often discouraged because they believe they cannot acquire a language as easily as children. Once they begin to learn a language, adults may be further discouraged when they find the methods used to teach children don't seem to work for them. What is an adult language learner to do? In this book, Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz draw on insights from psychology and cognitive science to show that adults can master a foreign language if they bring to bear the skills and knowledge they have honed over a lifetime. Adults shouldn't try to learn as children do; they should learn like adults. Roberts and Kreuz report evidence that adults can learn new languages even more easily than children. Children appear to have only two advantages over adults in learning a language: they acquire a native accent more easily, and they do not suffer from self-defeating anxiety about learning a language. Adults, on the other hand, have the greater advantages--gained from experience--of an understanding of their own mental processes and knowing how to use language to do things. Adults have an especially advantageous grasp of pragmatics, the social use of language, and Roberts and Kreuz show how to leverage this metalinguistic ability in learning a new language. Learning a language takes effort. But if adult learners apply the tools acquired over a lifetime, it can be enjoyable and rewarding.--Publisher description.

What Hacker News says

panglottSep 2016

Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying—these are methods that adults can use to make use of the metalinguistic knowledge acquired from their native language. There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015). https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Fluent-Cognitive-Science-Lan...

People acquire languages, they don't study them. Study is just a way of speeding the process—with immersion you can gain a huge amount of passive knowledge of a language without any study or realizing you are doing so. Questions like "what books are you studying" or "how many hours did you do grammar drills" aren't very useful. I suspect that the typical high school foreign-language study is a sneaky way of enforcing the US as a society of Anglophone monolinguals. If the US wanted a multilingual population, they would permit dual-language immersion elementary schools, but those have only been popping up in the last decade or so.

How much time do you spend fumbling around in German without falling back on English? How often do you try to communicate with German monolinguals? Is your main problem comprehension or production? If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think. The heart of a language is in its words more than its grammar, but there are just a lot of them.

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4adSep 2016

> Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying [...] People acquire languages, they don't study them.

I know. Absolutely agree.

> There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015).

Thanks, I will check it out.

> Is your main problem comprehension or production?

I think my main problem is production.

> If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think.

You might be right, I know a lot of words. When it comes to cooking stuff, sometimes I know words my german-speaking friends don't know (I like to cook and buy lots of less-than-usual ingredients).

But I can't create meaningful sentences.

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