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contributed by Sue Copas This is an often asked question and generally the standard answer is that the optimum age for learning a language is between 3 to 7 years of age, but is this necessarily so? There can be no doubt that children tend to pick up on information much faster than adults do and that a child of primary school age, having picked up the basics of a language will appear to be more confident and have a better knowledge of the language than an adult who has been studying for a comparable time. Let us examine the type of knowledge accumulated by both types of student though and see whether the younger student is really any better. The younger student will probably have been given a few nouns to learn each week in order to expand his vocabulary and will also probably have been given an insight into simple verb structures. The medium of communicating this knowledge is most likely to be working through simple story like passages, translating them in a group and by repetition, a great breadth of knowledge of complete structured sentences will have been gained. The adult learner will probably in a similar manner be given a list of nouns to learn complete with their gender specific definite and indefinite articles. Although in English grammar, the definite and indefinite articles (a & the) are not gender nor number specific, they are in many foreign languages and this will probably be easier for them to comprehend than for a child. The adult student will spend time working through verb conjugations and verb tenses during their studies; once again, this generally difficult subject for most learners, will be somewhat easier for an adult than for a 5 year old student. This structured knowledge of the workings of foreign grammar will then be combined with the same story like passages as put to the younger students, but a much deeper knowledge of grammar and workings of a language will be inherent in the adult's progress. So what in actual fact is the net outcome of a comparison of the progress of these two groups of students? Basically one would be hard put to quantify whether one group was better than the other; the younger group would generally be more fluent, confident and have a wider breadth of knowledge, on the other hand, adult learners would almost have a deeper and more grammatical knowledge of any given language. If we look to real world examples we can perhaps find some analogous corroboration of the point made above; if we take a language translation service in London they have general translators as well as technical translators. The general translators, whilst being fully qualified and more than competent, can be fairly young and recently qualified. The technical translators, however, will be fully qualified in a language but also hold some sort of technical qualification, or have worked in a specialist field for a number of years. They will be somewhat older than the general translators and will have used their advantage in age and experience to accumulate a depth of knowledge. This is perhaps a somewhat loose analogy, but I believe it still demonstrates the point that the learning process taken up at different ages produces different types of final result, ultimately none really being superior to another. So what is the best time to start learning a foreign language? The answer is probably…anytime! About the Author: Sue Copas is the Account Manager of Lingo24 translations company, a top technical translations company in the UK. |
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