Starting a language later

There is a widespread belief that anyone who begins a foreign language after childhood has already lost. The belief is not baseless. Children who move to a new country before their early teens usually end up sounding like the people around them, while adults who move at thirty almost never do, however long they stay and however well they come to read and write the language.

But pronunciation is only one part of knowing a language, and it happens to be the part where adults do worst. On vocabulary, adults learn faster than children in the first year, because they already understand what a word is for and can attach a new one to an idea they already possess. On grammar they can be given a rule and apply it on purpose, which a six-year-old cannot. What they lose in accent they often gain in speed.

The practical disadvantages of the adult learner have less to do with the brain than with the day. A child receives the language free of charge, all day long, from people who repeat themselves patiently and do not mind being corrected. An adult receives it in the evening, after work, from a book or an application, and from colleagues who switch to English the moment the conversation becomes difficult. Hours of use, rather than age, explain most of the gap in the first few years.

This matters for the way courses are built. If adults learn words quickly but lose them quickly without use, then a course that teaches two hundred words a month and never comes back to them is wasteful of its own effort. Programmes that spend less time introducing and more time revisiting generally produce students who can still speak a year later. And because adults can be told rules, a short clear explanation is often worth more to them than another hour of listening.

None of this makes the accent gap disappear. Most adult learners keep a recognisable accent, and trying to remove it altogether is a poor use of study time, since being understood depends far more on stress and rhythm than on individual sounds. Many teachers now aim at being clearly understood rather than at sounding native, and say so on the first day, which saves a good deal of quiet disappointment later on.