Lateral Drift

While reading one of Nietzsche’s books today, I came across one section that reminded of a previous post I had written on the importance of the independent mind. It is the fictional character Zarathustra that also spoke to encourage independent thinking when he said:

“Now I go alone, my disciples!  You too now go away and alone!  So I will it.

Truly, I advise you: go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra!  And better still: be ashamed of him!  Perhaps he has deceived you.

…One repays a teacher badly if one remains always only a student.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pg 68-69

Beware simplification.  We are all prone to it’s allure.  Efficiency being it’s most attractive feature.  Watch how the stout defenders of some ideology embrace it!  Moving past the simplified brings light to the opponents arguments.  Something which the pride in us finds difficult to digest.  Simplification finds it’s home in advancing technology, where minute by minute updates mutates complex situations into 160 character messages.  Beware those who always seek to simplify.  They are likely lazy, ill informed, or dishonest.

I couldn’t resist any longer.  After playing the trial version of Myst for the Ipod, I officially made my first Itunes purchase to buy this classic game.  I, like so many others, have always been enchanted by the Myst series.  I finally played and finished (beat seems to be the wrong word to use here) this game a couple years back and am still enjoying it the second time around.

The transition to the Iphone/Ipod touch is a good one.  The controls hardly seemed hindered by the touch screen format.  In fact, in some ways it could be superior to mouse navigation.  There has only been a couple instances so far that the buttons you need to press seem a little difficult to hit because of screen size.  The graphics are also much better than the original version, which allows you to be absorbed into the new world without feeling like the game was made almost 20 years ago.

If you still haven’t gotten the chance to play the game that held the title of best selling PC game of all time for nearly a decade, I encourage you to try it now,  and for only $4.99, it’s fairly painless.  Just be forewarned that this game is hard and will take up 500mb of your storage space!  I also recommend staying away from the hint guide as much as possible as liberal use of it will take away much of the satisfaction of completing Myst.

Certainly, you have heard this assertion made before.  In fact, I feel that this idea has become ubiquitous; which is sad, because I think that a lot of people would take up learning a new language if they didn’t feel that somehow the odds were stacked against them and that it is too late.  Here is a quote that I took from the Linguistics Society of America.  They are not the only ones to express this opinion but I think it will serve as a good example for argument.

“When you were born, you were not able to communicate with the adults around you using their language. But by the time you were five or six, you were    able to produce sentences, understand jokes, make rhymes, and so on. In short, you became a fluent native speaker. All of this happened before you entered first grade! (If you studied a foreign language in high school, you know that learning a language later in life did not go nearly as smoothly or as quickly.) During those first few years of your life, you accumulated a wide range of knowledge about language.”

Lets take some of these statements and examine them.

“But by the time you were five or six, you were able to produce sentences, understand jokes, make rhymes, and so on.”

The important fact to pull from this is the time period – five or six years!  Remember, as a child I would consider this full time study.  From the moment they wake to the time they fall asleep they are analyzing and working on perfecting their language skills.  Again, for five or six years.

“In short, you became a fluent native speaker.”

Please keep in mind that fluency is not a true/false issue but one that is based on a spectrum.  Surely, you do not claim that a six year old is of the same fluency as a doctoral student.

“If you studied a foreign language in high school, you know that learning a language later in life did not go nearly as smoothly or as quickly.”

Here is where we must argue that we are not comparing apples with apples.  When studying language at school, as I did for four years, you know that the amount of time in the target language is very minimal.  In fact, it is likely that only a couple hours a day at best are spent studying the language.  Moreover, as was the case in my school, you are not immersed into the learning experience.  I was taught Spanish in English and the amount of time spent speaking the language was very little.*  To the last part of this statement, I am not sure that learning English was easy as a child (it obviously wasn’t quick), but what other choice did we have.

Now, I don’t have a linguistics degree and neither do I have the experience that many of these linguistics have that assert this common belief but the facts do not appear to be conclusive.  I think that if you placed an adult into a foreign culture where they were forced to speak and be surrounded in the target language 24/7 for five to six years you would find that they were at least able to speak at the level of a 1st grader.  Although, I have the sneaky suspicion that they will be performing much better, as they will most likely have gained this level of fluency years before.  It is up to you to decide if really kids are better at learning a second language but I say the jury is still out.

*Here is one way that kids may have an advantage.  Practice makes perfect in language learning as with anything else and a child is much less nervous to speak incorrectly and learn from his/her mistakes than an adult in a classroom.  One on one tutoring may be a solution for more timid language learners.