Learning a language as an adult

Can you really learn a language as an adult? Yes! Absolutely!

A great podcast episode between adult language learner Emily Kwong, and Linguist Dr. Sarah Frances Phillips
were the two discuss adult language learning, does it work? How does it work?

Some key things to note, as linguists we know you can learn languages as an adult and we know that the research shows the more personally motivated you are to learn, the greater probability of success. But what is success? Often students, particularly ones like Emily Kwong who are trying to learn to connect with family want to sound like their grandparents or parents, and this is where we linguists will break your heart and then mend it.
You will never sound like your grandparents or your cousins back in the home country or your patients—because you have had different experiences. Even if you had grown-up in the same town as your grandparents, and monolingual in a shared language, your language would be generationally impacted — you won’t have the same vocabulary, your syntax will vary a bit, someone else speaking the same language will know that you aren’t the same as your grandparent.

Instead of focusing on setting an expectation of sounding exactly like someone you aren’t perhaps set the expectation to be understood, to be able to communicate.

Is your goal to be able to order a meal? To greet someone who always smiles kindly when the see you? To ensure your patient returns to their follow-up appointment? If this is your goal, you can have success. If you are communicating and being understood and understanding that is success.

That said, I often make the joke “sharing a language does not mean understanding nor communication, if that were the case there would probably be a lot less divorce”.



Enjoy the podcast and feel free to leave questions/comments below.

Learning a second language as an adult can be hard — but it's not impossible
”Becoming fluent in a second language is difficult. But for adults, is it impossible?

Science says no.

In this encore episode, Short Wave host Emily Kwong dissects the "critical period hypothesis," a theory which linguists have been debating for decades — with the help of Sarah Frances Phillips, a Ph.D. student in the linguistics department at New York University. Together, Emily and former Short Wave host Maddie Sofia explore where the theory comes from, how it applies to second-language acquisition and what it means for Emily's efforts to learn Mandarin Chinese as an adult.”