I grew up with four languages around me and am currently learning another, having also added a couple of others before. Here's my take on it:
- For a child, every lesson in everything is a language lesson. Everyone you come across will correct you. Everyone will add to your vocabulary. Say you're cooking, or going to the zoo. You'll learn what pots and pans are, all the animals in the zoo, some verbs that are relevant.
- English is very relaxed about its pronunciation. If you're British, "scarf" and "giraffe" rhyme. In American English, they don't. Yet nobody meeting someone from the other side of the pond considers either to be wrong. When English speakers go and learn another language, there's a lot of these close sounds that are wrong. In fact just yesterday in a Mandarin class a guy asked the teacher what the difference between "车" (car/vehicle) and "吃"(to eat) is. He couldn't hear it until we tried a few times.
- English is everyone else's second language because pronunciation is not a big deal. You can often tell if someone is a foreign speaker from their accent, but it's still understandable and nobody complains. By contrast most people in Europe will just swap to English if they hear you say something slightly wrong.
- Institutions are bad at teaching languages because they're not geared towards teaching, they're actually just indices. When you learn something like Linear Algebra or Data Structures, you don't learn stuff in class as much as you learn that they exist. So you go to a DS class and you find out there's a thing called a hash map. You go home, fire up your toolchain, and play with it for a few hours until you get it. Everything you need is out there on the internet somewhere, in English. Same with just about everything else, you learn on your own what's been mentioned in class. If you sit in a language class, you can't do that. Nobody can hear if you are pronouncing things correctly. Also, there's a minimum amount of structure and vocab you need to be able to say anything useful, and you're constantly running into missing ideas, eg "how to I say 'used to' in this language?".
- I suspect the real reason people find it hard is economics. Contrary to this article, I don't think it's actually particularly valuable. This is why immersion doesn't happen. Kids have low opportunity cost, this is why they are able to spend their youth learning a bunch of things. If you move to a new country as an adult, chances are your livelihood depends on some specialist skill that is supported by English, and the rest of the time you're taking care of your family. So you're not getting immersion. You also don't get cultural immersion from the language class. I'm not talking about the fact they eat baguettes in France; your knowledge of France as a culture requires you to access umpteen levels more information than people normally do. How many people are going to know what the French think of secularism, or the Dreyfus affair, from just studying French? I don't think I'll be coming across essays about the cultural revolution in my Mandarin class, either. And then add to that cultural items that every local knows, but isn't considered historically/politically important. The most popular Danish song of all time?
As a non native english speaker, I don't agree that english has relaxed pronunciation rules. People have trouble understanding english coming from, say, spanish, because english has around 20 vowel sounds whereas spanish has 5. So for any spanish speaker starting to learn english, the differences between, say, cut & caught in spoken english are not evident at all. And this is going to happen to any speaker jumping to languages with more vowel sounds.
Furthermore, cantonese is a bad comparison to english because it's a tonal language; i.e. the inflection of the word changes the meaning. So on top of having to learn more or less vowel sounds, students have to struggle with a fundamentally different way to conceptualize language.
> English is everyone else's second language because pronunciation is not a big deal
That is not true. English has become the lingua franca of the day because England & America have dominated the cultural and commercial global market for centuries. The adoption of lingua francas has nothing to do with how easy it is to learn a language (after all, this is incredibly relative) and more with how international trade and history have shaped a region. For example, in the late bronze age the lingua franca was Akkadian, a semitic language that would've been pretty tough to learn for, say, indoeuropean speakers like the greeks.
Having moved to an english-speaking country because my husband is a native english speaker, I find that even with the language immersion is difficult. Unless you have a very particular hobby that allows you to connect to other people, it's difficult making friends because of the cultural differences. And even though at this point I'm so fluent in english I've written and published fiction stories in it, it's still a difference that can be felt - imagine being barely fluent or speaking barely a few words.
That's not 'more relaxed' pronunciation, it's a set of different accents (not a phenomenon unique to English). People don't arbitrarily mix and match between them, and any particular accent preserves enough vowel distinctions to largely keep different words distinct. That's different from a learner using the wrong vowels randomly.
The underlying linguistic issue here is that when we're young our brain trains itself to classify speech sounds into categories based on the speech we hear around us -- so sound differences that matter in our native language(s) go in different buckets, but differences that don't matter in that language are ignored. That makes it harder to learn a different language later where the bucketing is different because our brains naturally ignore sound changes that should be significant, and need retraining.
> I suspect the real reason people find it hard is economics. Contrary to this article, I don't think it's actually particularly valuable.
Yes, most times you don't really need to know a language. In the old times in europe, many village people never left their home village. As long as you can understand everyone in your village, everything is fine. Traders, priests etc had to learn multiple languages and often used latin as lingua franca.
Nowadays, in the western world, knowing english is often enough to communicate with most people you have to do in various areas of your life.
The exception confirms the rule: sometimes, languages are useful for jobs. In the CIA for example, they actually do encourage employees to learn languages. Because knowing the language of the country your work is about is actually helpful.
> If you're British, "scarf" and "giraffe" rhyme.
> In American English, they don't.
They don't rhyme in British English either. Maybe in one of the regional dialects - I think that you could probably force it in a scouse (Liverpool) accent.
- For a child, every lesson in everything is a language lesson. Everyone you come across will correct you. Everyone will add to your vocabulary. Say you're cooking, or going to the zoo. You'll learn what pots and pans are, all the animals in the zoo, some verbs that are relevant.
- English is very relaxed about its pronunciation. If you're British, "scarf" and "giraffe" rhyme. In American English, they don't. Yet nobody meeting someone from the other side of the pond considers either to be wrong. When English speakers go and learn another language, there's a lot of these close sounds that are wrong. In fact just yesterday in a Mandarin class a guy asked the teacher what the difference between "车" (car/vehicle) and "吃"(to eat) is. He couldn't hear it until we tried a few times.
- English is everyone else's second language because pronunciation is not a big deal. You can often tell if someone is a foreign speaker from their accent, but it's still understandable and nobody complains. By contrast most people in Europe will just swap to English if they hear you say something slightly wrong.
- Institutions are bad at teaching languages because they're not geared towards teaching, they're actually just indices. When you learn something like Linear Algebra or Data Structures, you don't learn stuff in class as much as you learn that they exist. So you go to a DS class and you find out there's a thing called a hash map. You go home, fire up your toolchain, and play with it for a few hours until you get it. Everything you need is out there on the internet somewhere, in English. Same with just about everything else, you learn on your own what's been mentioned in class. If you sit in a language class, you can't do that. Nobody can hear if you are pronouncing things correctly. Also, there's a minimum amount of structure and vocab you need to be able to say anything useful, and you're constantly running into missing ideas, eg "how to I say 'used to' in this language?".
- I suspect the real reason people find it hard is economics. Contrary to this article, I don't think it's actually particularly valuable. This is why immersion doesn't happen. Kids have low opportunity cost, this is why they are able to spend their youth learning a bunch of things. If you move to a new country as an adult, chances are your livelihood depends on some specialist skill that is supported by English, and the rest of the time you're taking care of your family. So you're not getting immersion. You also don't get cultural immersion from the language class. I'm not talking about the fact they eat baguettes in France; your knowledge of France as a culture requires you to access umpteen levels more information than people normally do. How many people are going to know what the French think of secularism, or the Dreyfus affair, from just studying French? I don't think I'll be coming across essays about the cultural revolution in my Mandarin class, either. And then add to that cultural items that every local knows, but isn't considered historically/politically important. The most popular Danish song of all time?