Seeker,
Have you ever met someone who learnt a second language as an adult and has to use it daily in their working lives. My experience with them is they are more inhibited to expess themselves in the second language for fear of 'getting it wrong' They are concsious of their accent even though they are skilled in the language it still causes them more frustration than their native language in both learning and using.
It odd to think if you've been using a language for 15 to 21 years (adult) you would find it easier to learn another language, you've got 15 to 21 years experience with it you tend to fall back on what is now natural. We learnt to get the knack of learning our first language through an average of 10 years of school.
If what you are saying is true then researchers have it wrong... they say the best age to start learning a second language is before the age of 12 not as an adult.
Yes learning a third language is easier because you start recognising subtle similaries of some words so it is easier to form a memory bank of common words in a language. However getting the correct sentence stucture in the new language is what causes the greatest frustration. Understanding when to use the nomative, dative or the subjective case is frustrating. It certainly doesn't come easy if the language has 6 varients of the word you or 4 varients of the word love. How do you know which one you should be using? Trial and error? Learning? (ouch still bugs you when you get it wrong at any age.)
A small child starts off with single words and isn't able to form sentences until about the age of 3 when it starts to identify itself as an individual and begins to recognise that 'I 'means the self and 'you' is the other person. I can assure you that anyone learning a second language as an adult experiences more difficulty than a child.
I consider myself lucky, I also consider both German and English my mother tongues. It took me the first six years of my life to learn german and I learnt English in a matter of months. It took my mother about 3 years to get the language to flow. It was the most frustrating time in her life and I had to translate for her. To gain fluency or flow with anything one has to use it constantly and the process of learning until it comes naturally has it inbuilt frustrations.
You can't become fluent to speak read and write in a language 'skillfully' without learning it. How do you seperate the experiences of learning for 8 to 14 years of your life when you start learning another language? It is the learning process that we experience as a child that we bring into learning anything. If as adults we could let go of our past learning difficulties, then, every adult, would be able to master photoreading overnight. Learn to balance their cheque book, learn to fix a car, learn astronomy, yes even learn other languages with more ease.
The learning experiences that we had as a child not only leave traces of the frustrations and triumps we experienced, they are a part of what shaped us as indiviuals and we carry them with us in every endeavour of our lives. Everyday offers the opportunity to learn something some lessons are still more painful than others.
Alex
