Stuff You Should Know - Learning a Foreign Language

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Today, Chuck and Josh dive into the ins and outs of language learning. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Buy your tickets for our 2023 I-Hard Radio Music Festival now. Starting at just $55 plus taxes and fees. At AXS.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHR Radio. Good evening, Gluten. We're out in Glowin' and welcome to the podcast. Oh, can't Josh. There's Chuck and it's just the two of us today which is why we're feeling a little crazy.

Oh man, I just did a cowbell as donk donk. I think it's plunk, plunk. It came through. There's a bit of a donk to it. I owe a big apology to, uh, what's his name? Rick Allen? Is that his name? The drummer? Dreadiff Lepert's drummer, yeah? Sounds to it. I owe a big apology to, what's his name? Rick Allen? Is that his name? The drummer?

Definitely a drummer, yeah. Sounds like it. Sounds right. I mean, can you believe that a major rock band's drummer lost his arm and learned how to play without that arm? Well, not only that, like an amazing story. It is amazing, because they were like, right, right about to hit their peak. They were like rocketing up.

And again, you'd think that was just the end of it, but no, can't keep them down. What a story. I think when I was a kid and that happened, I was like, oh wow, that's cool. But now that I'm an adult, and I'm like, if I have a bad ankle sprain, I'm done. Or it's just amazing to me. Yeah. That he lost an arm and like, if I have a bad ankle sprain, I'm done. It's just amazing to me that he lost an arm

in like, persevered, just incredible. Well, it's also cool, I think, is that this is in the 80s, and somebody was sharp enough to develop software that could kind of like help him with the extra beat that he couldn't get to with just one arm. Like, that was just amazing in and of itself as well. Well, I thought he used the other foot, right?

Isn't that what he did? I believe there was software involved as well. Oh, I didn't know that. I thought he just learned how to incorporate that. Oh, no. Are you like, well, I'm not really impressed after all. I have to look into that more. This has nothing to do with what we're talking about except for the sort of German, that's

not even German, is it? They're British. I know, but that doesn't believe in me. Those are even real words, are they? No, I don't think so. It seems like a Swedish chef kind of thing. Oh, goodness. We're talking about learning foreign languages because that is something, Ed helped us out with this

and he very quickly points out that that's a real mark of and always has been like, oh, you know they speak foreign languages. It's like, yeah, that means, oh boy, they're super smart and they're very worldly. And you know, it certainly requires some intelligence to speak many languages, I think, to be a polyglot. But it's always something that people tout. And I don't blame them. If I speak for languages, this is the first thing I'd say, hey, I'm chucked. I speak for languages, by the way.

It almost rivals telling people that you went to Brown or Harvard. Right. That's only two languages. Yeah. So do you speak anything other than English these days? Well, no. We've talked a little bit about our language background. I took high school German and then college German.

Oh, that's right. And did little traveling in Germany because I did my European tour. But I don't remember much of it. I don't ever practice it. But it was something that I would pick up quicker than if I tried to learn Spanish, which is on my list to try and do. Yeah. I really want to, it's just like, do I have the time? And the answer is yes.

Yeah, true. I just have to do it, you know. Yeah. But I really would like to learn Spanish Because Spanish Spanish is on my list But before we talk about what people in the biz call L2 We should talk a little bit about L1 Which we talked a little bit about before but L1 is like when you when you're just a little dumb baby and you learn how to talk, which I can now attest as a parent is one of the most remarkable things you can witness as a human

learning language. That's really neat. Seemingly, by themselves, because you're not saying like this is how you say spoon, kids learn language quickly and it seems like innately and we'll talk about all that now. I remember learning to read and it almost seemed to me like overnight like it just started clicking and I think first grade. Oh yeah. I've always wondered, isn't that kind of late? No. Okay. No, it's not at all. If you're reading in the grade, you're doing fine. I got to impress everybody with what age I started reading at these days. No, in fact, if you're reading like screen, you're doing fine. I got to impress everybody with what age I started reading at these days. No, in fact, if you're reading like pretty well at six, that's pretty good.

I wouldn't say pretty well, but all of a sudden it was like books went from just lines of scribble to sensible, sensical things that I could decode and interpret. And I was like, wow, that's neat. No, no, that's good. Six is great. Okay, good. Thank you okay good thank you look at you thank god your parent cuz i'd be totally lost if you weren't uh... alright so we'll talk about some of the language theories on the first

like whether or not they're still relevant or not uh... the first is called critical period hypothesis long-standing debate about this uh... it was proposed by uh... a do a dude named a neurologist named Wilder Penfield along with Lamar Roberts in a 1959 book called Speech and Brain Mechanisms and this is the idea that there is a critical period in a young person a young human's life where your brain has the plasticity human's life, where your brain has the plasticity that's just off the charts and it can learn language then and after that, learning a new language is a lot harder.

Yes. Which seems to be what generally people think of today, right? I mean, sort of. I think critical period hypothesis made it seem like it was really, really, really hard after this. Oh, God, yeah. Because they didn't really believe in, they thought plasticity stopped at a certain point. Okay, I got you.

Yeah, because there was a time where people thought that you had all the neurons you're ever going to have when you were born and you just smoked hesheesh and lost them over time. I was about to say the same thing. Like you smoked them away a few at a time or whatever. Exactly. And that all of your neural connections were formed by your teens maybe and then after that you just got dumber and dumber, right?

So this is that, that's that school of thought. Yeah, that basically things are pretty fixed after that certain age, and that's why it's so hard to learn language later on. But we now know that that's not true, and your brain can still be very plastic. But it's remarkably close, just in its principle, in the basis of its idea it seems pretty as it is harder. What were the names of the two guys again? Wilder pinfield and Lamar Roberts. They sound like an alternate universe steely day-end. You know, like those are the members of steely day-end in the eighth dimension.

Yeah, yeah pinfield and Roberts. I like it. I just made myself laugh. Spongebob series next and that's when that's really gone the way of the Dodo, right? Yeah, they used to think that you just kids just absorbed everything like sponges. Like you were saying, it was remarkable and magical to watch rubies just suddenly learn to speak. Yeah. That was no worthy enough to enough people that they're like we didn't teach this kid anything

They just absorbed it right and there's a certain degree of that but one of the problems with sponge theory, which has generally been discarded like you said is that it really underestimates the importance of active learning It's basically saying same passive learning. I read there was like a New York time blog post about kids learning L1. And somebody was saying they were pointing out just how poor an analogy the sponge theory is by they put a picture up during one of their talks. So there's a bucket of water and then a sponge like on the table next to it.

Right. And it's like the proximity isn't enough. Like there has to be some sort of action and activity as well. You got a dip at Sun. The other good analogy Ed pointed out is like, that's like saying, if you're just an American household and but you let your kid watch nothing but Spanish speaking television, they're just going to learn Spanish. Yeah, but apparently that works if you're an adult.

No. Okay. No, but watching foreign language movies can be a tool. I have a friend from Wayback. He taught himself French. By watching French movies, got himself a job with UPS, worked there for eight months, and then put in for a transfer to Paris and moved to Paris. What?

Yeah, he was very cool. He went on to become the bass player in the number two most popular rock band in Turkey, according to a Pepsi Cola poll of that nation, years after he moved on from Paris. Is it for any of yours? Yeah, that's amazing Yeah, he was very cool. I don't know what became a film. I lost him after he moved to Turkey, but yeah, that happens. Yeah So behaviorism is the next one and that is B.F. Skinner was a big proponent of this and he wrote that language Learning was akin to verbal behavior. So basically, your blank slate and learning a language is like learning any other behavior, you learn it through reinforcement, through either being praised or being

punished, and like really working at it. Right. And then, if you, like you said, that reward and punishment is really, really important. Right. You know, yeah. That's how you learn what's right and what's wrong. That has a little bit of basis in reality too. Like all of these competing theories, if you just carve a little bit out of each one and put it together, you've got learning language. Yeah. I think that's what a lot of theories, like people aren't usually 100% wrong. Sure. So the opposite of behaviorism, by the way,

is called nativism. It says, no, no, no, we're not born as blank slates, and we just learn by observing and through trial and error and reward and punishment. There's our brains are basically pre-wired to not only give rise, but then also interpret and use what's called a universal grammar. That humans have some sort of inborn ability

to speak languages to one another. And this was a cornerstone of Nome Chomsky's career, if not the whole thing. Yeah, he talked about, This was a cornerstone of Noam Chomsky's career, if not the whole thing. Yeah, he talked about, and I know we talked about this in another episode, the Language Acquisition Device, which is not a sort of a real body part, but it's like a hypothetical tool

that Noam Chomsky, why does it have a T in there? Not long. It's already a baggy name. Who names your kid Nome? I don't know, but I mean, it really works. Those two names together work really well. I don't know much about this guy, but it's a name that I've heard

of 3,000 times in my life, so I need to brush up a little bit. He was, in addition to being a linguist, who's very, very opinionated, very far left leaning cultural critic as well, who made some really great points. But he, you know, anybody like that attracts scorn and iron.

So there's a lot of critics of known chomsky as well, but he was very interesting. He was a public intellectual as a way to put it, I guess. Yeah, all right. So about phonemes. What is it? So about phonemes. Yeah phonemes. I always want to say phenomes. I know. I just scooped up Josh corrected me. So we did that part. Phonemes. Yeah phonemes. Ed points out that a language maybe, let's say a language has like 40-ish phonomes. Phonemes? Are you doing this on purpose now? I'm really not.

I'm sort of losing my mind right now. Yeah, I'm watching an enrave. Let's fast. Babies start to grasp these, or at least the relevant ones of their language as early as six months. And baby talk, the little gobbity-gook sounds that babies make are different than, like an American baby's gobbity-gook sounds that babies make are different than like an American baby's

gobbity-gook is different than a child, then a little baby in Africa's gobbity-gook. That's amazing. That is so cool. So those are the kind of the big theories about language acquisition, L1 acquisition, right? Where you just learn your native language and you become fluent in it for whatever reason. Apparently, we don't have that quite figured out yet. Now we move into L2 acquisition. One of the fundamental hallmarks of learning a second language in particular is that it

seems to be way easier for kids than it is for adults. That is true. Why I don't think that it's, like you said earlier, discovered that plasticity can occur in adults, and it's not like an impossibility or really, really, really hard like they used to think. It is definitely easier for a kid. A kid can learn many languages.

There really is not like a limit. There are outliers where kids, you know, like these little phenoms learn, you know, six, seven, eight languages. Those are outliers for sure. But like, your average just sort of bilingual kid racing a bilingual household is very common these days. And it's not the case where like, well, but if you're teaching your child Spanish, when they're growing up as well as English, you're not the time you're spent talking about Spanish

just taking away from the English that they're gonna fall behind and that is just proven to not be the case. Yeah, I would think if anything, it would make you excel a little more in other stuff. It does. Supposedly bilingual kids do better at problem solving situations. We'll talk about some other stuff, like socially, but they don't experience learning delays or issues.

It's just not something that they've seen happen. And the fact that there's outliers, like you were talking about, who learn multiple languages as children makes you kind of wonder. What is there an upper limit to languages that a kid can learn? And the answer is yes. Apparently it's three. Oh, I said there wasn't none, is there? There's...

Oh, non-outliers. Okay, I got you. Right. Practically speaking, three is the max because language experts, aka linguists, suggest that you need to spend about 20 to 30% of your waking time practicing learning a language if you're learning another language. So you get to do the math. Right. And that would leave time for, I'm never doing that again. That would leave time for nothing else if you were focusing on learning three languages At once that would be the upper limit right at least learning them at once. I guess. Yeah, that makes sense But there are people out there just real quick Chuck who have learned tons of languages

There's a guy a Canadian named powell Janulous or powell Janulous He's credited with knowing 42 different languages. What? Another guy named Ziad Faza. He, I think, is the current record holder at 59. These are kids or just people? People. Okay.

And then back in the 1850s, the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Browning, was reputed to know 200 languages and speak 100 of them. What? That's what everybody said when they met him. Yeah, and he said, would you like to hear that in 100 different ways?

Right, exactly. Before we break real quick, I did want to mention, because one of the things I, when I was sort of assigning this article out, was like, is there any, like a research on why Americans tend to be less multilingual? And there's really not research that I've seen, but it seems to be that there's just like, you don't think of it when you live in a big city and you're, you have people that speak all kinds

of languages and big cities, but lots and lots of America doesn't do that. Well, they're not exposed to it as much. That's what I mean. It's like lots of towns and lots of cities in America, you don't get a lot of foreign languages. So if you don't have that exposure, then you're probably not gonna be as interested. And then they're also, and I'm not like calling anyone out,

but like there are also a lot of people that still think, like, well, no, gosh darn it. Like this is what you speak here, and this is what you're going to learn here. And I don't want you to learn in any Spanish or anything like that. People used to say that publicly. Yeah.

I'll bet though it'd be easy to study if you, you know, went along the border with Mexico. You probably find way more bilingual people than say in Atlanta or the border of Canada you find more people who spoke Canadian and English. It'd be easy to study is what I'm trying to say I don't know why anyone has a break. Should we take a break? Sure. All, let's break and we'll go learn a language and we'll be right back. From I Heart Podcasts, everyone has their limits. I'd never confronted a situation like this. I just thought it was just a really terrible moral thing.

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It's backed up by some research. Apparently, what the problem with the Seely Day and Guys hypothesis was that they went too far. They made it too absolute. It's just not the case that people can't learn things as adults. I mean, they should have probably figured that out from the outset. But it is much harder to learn a language as an adult than it is to learn an L1 language as a kid or even L2 language as a kid.

Yeah, and I used to hear when I was younger because fluency is a funky word that I don't even know like everyone agrees on what that means. Because when I was younger, I used to hear, and this is just that probably playground stuff, when you're just talking linguistics on the playground by the jungle gym, I used to hear two things. One is you can never be fluent in another language because you're always translating it in your mind and to be truly fluent means that you are thinking

in that language. Not true. You can, you thinking in another language is a learned skill as it turns out. You can teach yourself to do that. And then the other thing I heard was you can never be fluent or maybe a sign of fluency who is, is you, if you dream in a different language. And that isn't true either because I looked that up today and apparently even like basic knowledge of another language, you can dream in that language. I think if,

you know, how dreams go if you're like thinking about that free fall sleep, you might dream in a language. And it apparently has nothing to do with fluency. God, is there anything that you heard on the playground that you could trust? Yes, is that your father could be sued for all the money that he's got. Very easily by a child, apparently. Sure. Oh no, I think the kid's parent would usually sue.

My dad's going to sue your dad. That's how it works. Yeah, typically. I mean, even as a kid, you knew that you had very little standing in the court of law. That'd be a funny sketch for a sketch show, like a juvenile court. If there were, it's going to sue your dad and then they actually take it and adults

try the case. If there were funny sketch shows on TV anymore, that would be great. Oh, but there are. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think you should leave with Tim Robinson. Oh, that's true. Very funny.

With Party Hardison too. Right. Have you seen her Instagram stuff? No, is that a account I should follow? She yes for sure. I don't know if that's I think that is her handle on Instagram. She's a writer. She's also on his his show like as a character here there. She's hilarious. But yeah, she's great too. I think I might know who you're talking about. So I'll look it up. I think in the first episode of the first season,

they're doing kind of like a shark tank thing. And one of the sharks is like, I'm rich because I've won the lottery. Now I drink wine all day long. I can't get enough wine. Do you remember that one? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's them. And I can't remember their real name. Party Hardeston is just their handle. But I think it's like Patty Harrison or something.

It is. It's Patty Harrison. And I knew her from 80 Bryant's show, Shriil, that was so great. Oh, I never saw that one. I need to follow. It was good. I need to follow, um, Harrison's account though, because she, like every time I see her on TV, I'm like, she is one of the weirdest comedians. Oh, you should see her on the screen. And then I call the best ways. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, I think you should leave his amazing.

So where were we? You were talking about a critical period. Yeah, that's right. So the whole idea of why it's harder for a kid or for an adult to learn Language a new language than it is a kid is because supposedly there is this critical period There's a window of time. It's estimated to end anywhere from five to your mid teens estimated to end anywhere from five to your mid teens, where your brain is like, I'm down for whatever, teach me whatever you want, I'm going to learn it. You just have a higher degree of neuroplasticity, right? You can form and adjust new neural connections, which is the basis of learning and memorizing

and retaining new things. Yeah. And we talked about the fact that now we know that we can regenerate new neurons, make new neural connections, all the good things that you can do as a child in that critical period. You can still do as an adult. Should we talk about inhibitory neurons? I want to do at least a short stuff on them, if not a whole episode. They are fascinating. Yeah, I feel like we've talked about them before for sure. These are neurons that basically say, you know, is this new input that I'm getting worth

making a neural connection for? Or am I just watching another dumb sketch show? And they give weight to like new things and novel experiences. So I would think that those inhibitory neurons are, if they're still around when you're an adult, then learning a new language is new and novel so they would fire up, right? You would think so, but apparently they have kind of set your language in stone. And the only explanation, because I had the same question as you, that's novel, that's new, those are new combinations of sounds, why wouldn't they activate your inhibitory neurons to just stand out, right? And the best I could come up with, this is just

me editorializing, I'll admit it. Okay. Is that those new novel sounds are still following the same neural pathways that say English does. It's like the neural pathways you're you established for language, right? And that it's not distinguishing a signal, a different signal coming from that same neural pathway. a signal, a different signal coming from that same neural pathway, whether it's in Spanish or in English, it's still traveling that same neural pathway and the thing is so well-worn that the inhibitory neurons, like, it's going to take a lot for me to let you fire anymore because you know this stuff. That kind of makes sense because I was reading that L2 acquisition as an adult,

it kind of give it and receive it. The fact that you already know a language because there's one school of thought that's like, well, since you've done it before and you know what language is and what grammar sort of is and let's say English, that it might be easier to pick up as a concept because you already know that stuff. And then I've also read other schools of thought that says, well, no, it's just more difficult because you've ingrained those things.

Right. But the thing is, is you can overcome that. You can be like, no, no, brain. I need you to pay a little more attention. This is novel stuff we're trying to do. And apparently, as an adult, if you put adults and kids head to head in a test, which is hilarious. It's a strength. Yeah. It always a strength. Yeah. It always reminds me of Billy Madison, like smacking that, blocking that shot

from that little kid on the playground. Yeah. If you put adults and children head-to-head in language acquisition, adults just dust kids in almost every category. The difference is kids develop a richer understanding or acquisition of language. Adults as a second language are acquiring something more intellectually than more fundamentally. That's interesting. By the way, I've never seen Billy Madison.

Oh, chalk. Does he block a shot on the playground of a kid? Yeah, with the, to, to, uh, the remote beat on the brad. It's perfect. Because Bill Murray does that in Rushmore. Did he copy that? Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure Billy Madison was out, yeah, long before it. It was a rush more for sure. Although I just saw Asteroid City and I was just reading up on that and other Wes Anderson

stuff. Rushmore came out 25 years ago, dude. No, my God, please stop saying that crazy. It's like that. No, my God. So we should probably go over there, like, and I know we talked about this a little bit, so we can kind of speed through it,

but the language learning parts of the brain. Oh, wait, I had one more thing on inhibitory neurons. Yeah, let's hear it. So there's a key trait in Alzheimer's disease, which is your hippocampus or hypothalamus, one of the big H regions, starts going like in overdrive, like really becomes super active. And they long thought that it was basically your brain trying to compensate for just the degradation of its functions. It's really trying to do whatever it can and it does that as the hypothalamus or hippocampus. They think now that what's happened is your inhibitory neurons in your hippocampus or hypothalamus

have worn away. And that's what your brain would be doing if it weren't for inhibitory neurons. They're the ones that set the pace and the rhythm for your brain waves from nanosecond to nanosecond. And somehow they're all coordinated with one another to give you your experience of consciousness. Because you have tons of data coming at you all the time. They're the ones that decide what makes it into your conscious awareness and what doesn't. How? How do they do that? They're neurons. There's one called a basket neuron that wraps itself around other neuron so it can control it more directly. And it looks like a basket just wrapped around a neural cell. It's amazing stuff.

Is that a comforting thing or is it scary? That there's an envelope? No, you can be enveloped in two ways. Oh, no, that's scary for sure. I don't like anything enveloping anything else. It's just creepy. Even a hug from your from your most beloved? Creepy. Okay. Everybody knows being touched is creepy. Yeah, that's true. So like I said, we're going to go over sort of the parts of the brain So, like I said, we're going to go over sort of the parts of the brain that are, have to do with language acquisition that we've talked about before, but they are three areas, Broca's area, Weirnake's area, and the angular gyros.

Two out of the three, Broca's area handles the creation of language. That's the stuff that is really active when you're just a BB. Wernicke's handles comprehension and then the angular gyros is a bit of a hub that connects things together. Yeah, and we know that there's these distinct regions that do these distinct things because you can have damage to one region

and the others will keep going. There's one called Wernicke's aphasia, which is where your your your broke his area is perfectly fine. You're able to say things, you're able to generate speech, you're able to talk, but the comprehension area is damaged. So you're not making any sense. And I think the yeah, was the National Institutes of Health gave a an example of what a sentence like that would sound like. Are you ready? Yeah, what's your name? You know that snoodle pinkered and that I want to get him around and take care of him like you want before. Like you want before? That's what somebody would say

if they have that type of aphasia and you just be like, what? And they might not have any idea what they're trying to say either because their comprehension region is damaged both ways. So you comprehend what you're saying, you also comprehend what other people are saying. And so in that sense, it's very disconnecting. Although Brokus area is disconnecting too, but apparently you can still get out enough like in a word or two that people generally know

what you're saying with where Nikki's aphasia, they can have no clue what you're saying at all. Yeah, and I think that was what can happen when you have a stroke sometimes. Right, that's how it usually comes about. Yeah, because my granddad, when I was little, he had a stroke and he could understand what you were saying

and he would talk at you using, you know, walking walk in Seagamore, walking racquet, and they weren't even words. It was just stuff like that. But they were like enunciated and like, in a bit like you could see that these are distinct things that you say. They're just non-sensical, right? Yeah, yeah. And it was very frustrating for him, which is. Oh, man, I'll be.

Imagine. Especially if he knew what he was trying to say, and people would understand, you know? Yeah, oh man, I'll bet. I'll bet. Especially if he knew what he was trying to say and people would have seen it, you know? Yeah, I think that's the thing. It always reminds me of that newscaster outside of the Emmys or the Oscars or whatever who had like, said later, it was a migraine, but she's like a very, very heavy

and I have never seen anybody say like, this is what she was trying to say. I have no idea, like a anybody say like this is what she was trying to say. I have no idea like a translation Yeah, I know and at the time I remember people were like shaming people are like that she had a mini-stroke and like how dare you laugh But it I don't think that was the case right no she has just my green heavy. She had heavy British a very very heavy Beirutation I'm not sure that's gonna survive the final at Um, I'm not sure that's going to survive the final at it. I'm not sure.

We'll see. I saw that video not like sometime within the past year, again, somehow. Yeah. It holds up. You know what else holds up is Arthur the weatherman. Say pretty much everywhere. It's going to be hot. And then I don't know if I know that one.

Oh, you do too. We talked about Arthur the weatherman. And then the news anchor goes, then I don't need a jacket. And then he just starts laughing like maniacally. He's a, I guess, one of the weather people in Haiti. If that was his forecast pretty much everywhere, it's going to be hot. I think, okay, maybe I have seen that. You have now that that was like 2007 or something. Yeah, I think when you said Haiti, it kind of zeroed in on it. I pulled it up from my Haitian file.

So as far as those language areas of the brain, though, one thing that's sort of interesting is two out of the three of those are on the left side of the brain, on the left hemisphere. And so for like an adult human, language generally is on the left, but when your kid, your brain is, it's firing all over. So they've done FMRI scans that shows that both hemispheres are going wild when kids are learning their language, which is interesting. Yeah, it's pretty cool. What also strikes me as interesting is that kids learn in a general pattern that you can predict. People basically make charts, like I was saying, like is it,

is reading in first grade, okay, like these milestone charts, the idea that you can be like, oh, your kids are going to be saying this at age, you know, 18 months. Or, you know, by 24 months, they'll be putting two words together to make a sentence or something. Like, I just think that's really neat. And I think it kind of underscores the idea that there is some sort of innate ability,

or yeah, desire to learn languages. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like it's gotta be evolutionary because it's a survival thing. Like you have to learn that language to know how to survive the world that you're born into. But then that supports behaviorism. You can be like, this is so important that you're born with a blank slate.

No language acquisition skills or anything, but it is so important that you're born with a blank slate no Language acquisition skills or anything, but it's so important that you learn it just by observing and everything because you know that this is how you're gonna survive Or that it is innate and That you are born with a ability because it's you know passed down to you Through natural selection. Yeah? Or am I thinking of it wrong? I think the only way to settle this is for us to get in a Skinner box and debate

between electric joltz. That sounds good. We'll take a break in a sec, but before we do, like you were talking about that sort of process for kids, their vocabulary grows very quickly from the time they start learning up until about the age of eight and their vocabulary still grows for sure. Like it never

stops. I still learn New Words all the time. But by the age of eight, supposedly by that time, if everything is on track, then a kid has basically mastered how to speak at least and understands basic grammar and basic concepts. Sometimes even complex topics, concepts. But I think the vocabular is the outlier where you will always be learning words. Yeah, I mean, you're just not exposed to as many. I think there's like 300 main words used in English

more than, you know, for like the vast majority of English is just a few hundred words, a couple hundred words. Yeah, I tell you the true sort of check yourself moment as apparent as when your kid is constantly asking what a word means when they're like Ruby's age, she's about to turn eight. What's the definition of is? Well, yeah. It really, because it's hard to define a lot of words. So as you know, you know, what does this mean? I'll be like, oh, well, it means, well, I don't know what it mean, like how to define it. So I'll either look it up, or I'll do my best and

then look it up. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? What's your score? How often are you like, oh, right. Oh, I mean, I'm, it's tough though, because some words are just hard to define in words. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, well, I know what you're saying.

I'm even having trouble putting this in words. So let's take that break and we'll be right back. ["Piano music"] From I Heart Podcasts. Whitney, hell is going on in here. Everyone has their limits. I had never confronted a situation like this. I just thought it was just a really terrible moral thing. A line they won't cross.

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We decided to launch this podcast separation anxiety. We can't live without each other. We can't. And I think we go through separation anxiety when we're not together. We kind of want to share stories. We're going to talk about everything and be brutally honest as far as relationships, whether it's your boyfriend, kids, even at work.

There's no subject that we won't tackle in this podcast. Telling you everything. Listen to separation anxiety with Larsa and Marcus whether it's your boyfriend, kids, even at work. There's no subject that we won't tackle in this podcast. Telling you everything. Listen to separation anxiety with Larson Marcus on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["Large of the World"] By the way, I think the reason I was struggling

was I was trying to think of an example recently where she said, what does this mean? And I couldn't think of how to define it. Yeah, it happens all the time. Chewing gum and tap dancing at the same time. That's hard to do. You were talking while trying to recall some incident at the same time. Yeah.

Or it's just, you know, some words are just conceptually hard to really just sort of say in a few words that a kid would understand, you know. Sure. Like what? irony. It's a great example. Here are some tips. Well, I guess we should talk a little bit about

your expectation as an adult to learn L2. There was a paper in 2018 that basically said, up to about 17 or 18, you're gonna have a much easier time. After that, it is much more difficult to obtain what they call native like fluency. But like we've been saying the whole time, it's not like it's impossible.

It's just something that you're gonna have to work at harder than when you would have when you were 16 or 17 or 10. Yeah, because you're overcoming those inhibitory neurons. And apparently the way you do that is by making a concerted intellectual effort to study and learn this language. Yeah. There are lots of different ways. The immersion technique, as Ed points out. There's nothing magic about it immersion Just means you're just exposed more and more and you're repeating

A foreign language more and more and hearing a foreign language more and more right so like we said earlier watching that that foreign language TV show That could be a nice little training tool But one thing Ed points out which I never really thought about, is the second part, which is input and output, like just watching that movie and saying like, oh, I'm understanding this, like, that's great, but you got to be able to say it, you got to be able to write it. So maybe you watched that movie and then like write a little summation of the movie in that language.

Yeah, pretty neat. You also need to know vocabulary. It's just, it's important. I got to do it. Yeah, I mean, if you, if you can point to something, it's almost like having broken as aphasia. You can point to something in generally kind of say the word people get what you mean. And you can build from that and learn grammatical rules over time. But the vocabulary is the basis of speech for sure. Yeah, there's no way around it. You are going to be looking in memorizing lists.

But that's cool. I mean, the key here that I think people who teach languages have found in last few decades, you do not do this in any kind of marathon cramming way. You break it into manageable pieces, lessons that are short enough and interesting enough to keep the person's attention who's learning this extra language. Yeah, I saw another thing too where it's easier, they found in studies, if they do it in a non-threatening environment. And I knew you were gonna laugh,

it sounds funny, because threatening means, you get the idea of someone's like yelling at you to learn a language. Or like you're learning a language in like a dark alley. Yeah, exactly. But what that really just means is like, like they did the study of Malaysian kids learning English and they found that they did better when it was done through like children's stories rather than like grammar lessons. I see. And like the grammar lessons would be like a threatening thing. And it's probably not a great use of the word,

but like threatening meaning just sort of intimidating, I think, maybe is the better word? No, for sure, but if you hadn't used that word, this would not be the classic episode that it is. That's right. Because I did see to go to kind of tie in with that is native speakers, like when they come across someone who is maybe in their country and someone

is trying to speak their language in a rudimentary way, then you will often go into what's called like Foreigner Speak or Teacher Talk, and it's akin to that baby talk where they will sort of dumb down and slow down their speech a little bit, and what they're really doing is making a non-threatening environment. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Yeah. Another thing you want to do that I found very difficult is mimicking the sounds that you're hearing.

And apparently, even if you're not getting it quite right, you're still getting your mouth used to saying, making the sounds, the phonemes of that language. And then you'll just get better and better, or you'll get better and better at it over time with practice. But it's not something you just jump into necessarily. You can learn by imitating like a kid. Is this the same thing as like when my mom would speak a little like a British person when she would meet

someone who was British. Oh, did she do that? Is she like Madonna? Yeah, she did that occasionally. A couple of times that I remember. We didn't know a lot of British people growing up, but I remember on vacation a couple of times meeting people and my mom was like all of a sudden saying words that they were saying that she's never said before and I was like, what's going on? She's like, freshly drink, Kauffna. Yeah, sort of. It's trying to fit in. But with the imitation, and I'm not trusting me, my impressions are not great. But I've always been able to mimic a sound pretty well since I was a kid.

And so when I was taking German, I always got complimented on my pronunciation and my diction, because I could just roll the R and I could make it sound like my teachers are always like, hey listen, you're not the best German speaker, but you sound fairly German when you're speaking it. And other kids in there, I remember especially in the South, you would get these people to speak German with like a Southern accent. I remember that too in French class. And yeah, and just couldn't make that separation. And I think I always had a little bit of a leg up because I was always trying to mimic or impersonate or do impressions and stuff like that since I was a kid.

Did you end up wearing one of those kind of alpine caps with the feather in it in high school? You take it to that extreme? I was not the St. Paulie girl or boy. I didn't have later, Hosen. But a pretty good pronunciation. That's impressive. Nice work, Chuck. But that kind of goes to what you're saying. It's just like practice the sounds of that language because the sounds of German can be very different than English. Exactly. And then there's so many apps out there. It's crazy to just learn that have figured out how to break these down into like digestible sections. And if you want to learn a language as an adult,

there's never been a better time to do it. Or an easier time even, I would say. But there are some reasons you might want to learn a language as an adult. If you're not traveling, if you don't have a significant other who speaks another language, if you stop and think about it, there's not that many reasons you would think of to learn

another language other than to show off. But in showing off, I'm sure, is one reason some people learn languages, but there's other things that studies have shown people who learn additional languages exhibit more than others who are monolingual. And one of them is empathy apparently Yeah, that makes sense. They've done studies and it's proven if you're bilingual you are more empathetic Then if you then if you speak one language. Yeah, try to dispute that you can't do it Try it into languages that sounds to me just it just smells like one of those social psychology studies

for sure but I like to think that it's true. It makes sense. It also said supposedly that if you're bilingual you're better at conflict management. I said before problem solving and that kind of ties in with the next on the list your cognitive abilities. There are a variety of things cognitively that you supposedly perform better on if you're bilingual. Yeah, like semantic conflict tests where they show you the word red, but it's colored in blue and they ask you what color it is

and your brain's like does not compute. If you're bilingual or multilingual, apparently you score better on tests like that. It's not entirely clear why, but that kind of goes to show that it supports that showing off idea. People just inherently know that you're smarter and superior to them if you know more languages than they do. Yeah. And like you were talking about earlier with Alzheimer's, if you, it's a workout for your brain. So any time you're doing something so sort of intimidating and drastic is learning a completely new language a little later in life, you are giving your brain a real, really solid workout.

Yeah. Supposedly, by lingual Alzheimer's patients had onset five years later on average than monolingual Alzheimer's patients. Man, that's that's a lot of years. Yeah. Yeah. You got anything else about learning a language, Chuck? Uh, nine. Good pick, by the way, nice work. Thanks. If you want to learn more about learning a language, go learn another language, and you can figure it out first hand. And since I said that, of course, it's time for a listener mail.

I'm going to call this Josh Beaus trucking apology. Is that what the term boy, the sense familiar? Yeah. Again. Hey guys, this is from a trucker. We heard from a lot of truckers, which I knew we would, which is crazy. Hey guys, really enjoyed the trucker episode. I thought it was funny and ironic when you two had a disagreement of the pronunciation of Steve Adore. During listener mail, Chuck confessed that not questioning Josh when he used it earlier in the show, thinking it was better to not appear ignorant, then Josh pontificated about how's pronounced exactly like it's

spelled. Steve Dork, but I got news for you guys. It's most assuredly, Steve Dork. So Josh, please apologize to Josh. Sorry, Josh. No problem. Thanks for the fun, guys. Yours knowingly, that's a great sign off.

Steve Der. Oh man, I wish. Tom Hubert in Seattle, Washington. Tom Hubert's another name for a long short name. Tom Hubert. No, I think it's Tom Hubert. Yeah, thanks Tom. We appreciate you big time.

And keep on trucking. Tom was a trucker, right? I don't know. I think it is in the industry somehow. Okay. Well if you want to be like Tom and you're in some sort of industry that we've touched upon, you want to correct us. That's cool. We're always open to that. You can be like Tom and be very nice about it. We appreciate those the most, but either way you can send us an email. To stuffpodcast.com, IHARTRadio.com StepHeeShinNo is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Carol Fisher and I'm hosting a podcast called The Girl Friends.

It's Las Vegas, it's the 1990s, and it is time to find a husband. There were four Jewish doctors who were felt to be eligible bachelor's. One of them was Bob Baramatt. On paper he was perfect, but in reality, this guy is a wacko. He choked into the point she went unconscious. I would call him and I would say, I know you killed my sister.

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