On the one hand, many people seem to be under the (perhaps erroneous) impression that babies are 'stupid' - that they forget everything immediately, cannot learn, cannot think abstractly, etc. There are several flaws with this belief; I can't go into details on every one of them (as I'm not an expert in child psychology/neuroscience), but I can offer my opinion. The fact that babies do not seem to have a long-term memory (how many of us remembering being a one-year-old?) may be linked to the fact that they have not (yet) acquired language. Consider the following quote:
...language and memory... seem to be linked in important ways. Several studies (e.g., Rose, Feldman, Wallace, & Cohen, 1991) have demonstrated that memory is related to verbal ability... preliminary results provide support for the idea that the emergence of language is linked to the development of memory.
i.e., since our language defines our understanding and perception of the world around us, a lack of language makes it considerably harder to remember things precisely. So to say that babies lack intelligence would be both inaccurate and unfair; it's the equivalent of blaming a plant for not growing when it was never watered. Without the right 'tools', certain things can't happen. Ditto for language and memory.
The reason why all of this is worth mentioning is because there is one more thing that is often said about babies (in relation to language/learning), which is extremely contradictory to the first one. It is often said that babies have some kind of "language advantage" - only babies can learn languages properly. Adults (or teens) can't do it - we have bad hearing, our brains are fried, we're too white/black/yellow/rich/poor/American/Canadian/OCD/ADD/etc to ever get anything done right.
Something smells fishy here. One minute babies have 0 memory or reasoning skills, the next minute they're the ones with intelligence and it's us adults who are stupid? Well, which one is it? It can't be both. I think a logical approach to the question would be best:
At what age do children generally start speaking fluenty? 3, 4 years of age? If the average baby/toddler spends a total of ~12 hours a day sleeping, that leaves up to 12 hours a day that they are awake and receptive to the sounds of their mother tongue (for simplicity's sake, let us assume that said baby is being raised monolingual). Of course, in practice, I doubt very much that any baby actually hears their language being spoken every single second that they are awake; it would be nigh on impossible for any parent to talk that much without ever taking a break. But even if a baby spends anywhere from 4-8 hours a day listening to their language directly, that would mean that by their 4th birthday, they will have spent 5840 - 11 680 hours listening to their language.
4 hours x 365 = 1460 x 4 years = 5840
8 hours x 365 = 2920 x 4 years = 11 680
You'd be kidding yourself if you said that this is an insignificant amount of time, and yet, some people in the language-learning community will tell you that you can "learn" a language in 300 hours... I don't know who these people think they're kidding, but the morale of the story is, you can't. Especially when anyone who's ever studied a foreign language before will know that 300 hours is literally just scratching the surface; you can't put in that little effort and then, upon seeing your lack of results, vear off into pseudo-scientific theories about babies having magical superpowers.
Babies are neither the epitome of human intellectual capabilities nor the epitome of human stupidity; they're normal people (intellectually-wise) who happen to have acquiring their language for a very, very long time. And you were honestly thinking that half an hour of grammar excercises a day for a year or two would get you somewhere? Please.
For anyone interested in more on the topic: Cute Girls, Mathematics, & Language
Very good article. Interesting approach you have going on and I think that it will pay off. Adding some structure or levels,however, may improve your style--such as, listening/watching child-like input eg. cartoons, nursery rhymes, etc. before going on to young child material, then tween, then teenager, etc. What do you think? I will keep on following.
ReplyDeleteThe "growing up approach" (I can't think of another way to describe what you just mentioned) is interesting... I kind of did it with French, though I never went all the way down to baby-level cartoons/songs.
ReplyDeleteI'm watching anime nowadays in Japanese and it's really mainly stuff for young children/tweens... I will indeed watch some stuff for older teens/adults later on. I guess what I'm doing is kind of similar to what you described, but maybe with less noticeable differences in the levels?