ALG: The Most Unique Language Learning Method
Language Learning: Why Adults Struggle to Learn a New Language
In this video, we explore why language learning is easier for children than adults. We examine the differences in experience and approach between children and adults when learning a new language.
Children vs Adults
- Children learn languages more easily than adults.
- The decline in language learning ability only happens much later, around adolescence.
- Children spend a lot of time getting experiences where people talk about what’s happening around them. This means they hear a lot of language in ways that they can understand what is being said.
- Adults often spend far less time with their new language, and much of what they hear is about abstractions and things that are happening elsewhere.
Approach to Learning
- Young children hear and understand a lot of language before they speak it much. They focus on what they’re experiencing rather than the language they’re learning.
- Adults often try to speak a new language a lot before they’ve even heard it much. Instead of listening and understanding, they begin by learning about the language, studying and practicing it.
- Dr. J. Marvin Brown discovered that we become fluent in a language not through study and practice but through understanding things in the language.
Teaching Methods
- Dr. Brown tried to teach adults to become like native speakers in their second languages through study and practice but found that his students could never speak both fluently and accurately.
- In 1984, he created new classes where adults could learn Thai without study by watching and listening as teachers acted out scenes, gave demonstrations, told stories, made jokes, all in Thai.
- The students could understand and pick up the language because the teachers used things like pictures, gestures, and props as they spoke.
- Dr. Brown told the students to just listen to the language and not try to speak it. Most students ignored his advice and tried to speak from the very beginning.
Results
- Some adults had picked up languages better and faster without studying or even trying to speak by doing things they enjoyed with people who spoke the language.
- Students who tried to speak from the start ended up speaking broken Thai with bad pronunciation while most who just listened first ended up sounding a lot like native speakers.
Adults Can Learn Languages Like Children
Dr. Brown concluded that adults haven’t lost the ability to learn languages like children. Rather, they’ve lost the opportunities for experience that children get, and gained abilities to consciously think about language, and try to speak, study, and practice it.
ALG: Automatic Language Growth
- The approach Dr. Brown developed is called ALG: Automatic Language Growth.
- The key is to give learners a lot of understandable experience with a new language from the start.
- This experience should be really interesting, fun, and memorable.
- Learners begin to speak without trying as words and phrases come to mind automatically.
Opportunities for Adult Language Learning
- Unfortunately, there aren’t many opportunities besides the Thai program Dr. Brown started over 30 years ago.
- We need research that has adults learn languages like children —without study or practice—to see what the results will be.
- Without the opportunities to pick up languages like children, it’s hard to find out just how well adults can learn this way.
Turning Vicious Cycle into Virtuous Cycle
- New research suggests how we learn languages may matter much more than when.
- Let’s turn this vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle where countless opportunities are being created so we can effortlessly pick up languages at any age while having fun doing and learning many other things.
Conclusion
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