Learning a Second Language

Learning a Second Language

By Tamara Valencia (Feb 10, 2014)

Though I am full Mexican American, I am unfortunately not bilingual. Growing up I was around a foreign language on a daily basis and somehow it did not stick with me. The article “Speech Perception in first and second language learning” from Leaky Grammar, gave me insight on why Spanish did not stick with me. This sparked my interest and I was curious as to how exactly an adult would go about becoming fluent in a foreign language when the odds are not in their favor. Learning a new language is very difficult for an adult when they have very little ability to distinguish phonetic contrast.

Through the Leaky Grammar article we learned that babies are naturally gifted and can “attuned their perception to the phonetic contrasts in the language(s) in their environment, and ignore all other contrasts”. In other words, infants do not have any prior knowledge of languages and can hear every phonetic segment that is recited to them. That fades away as we grow into adults and makes it very difficult for us to distinguish phonetic contrast. We basically are so accustomed to our language and everything comes natural that we no longer have the ability to learn others. I learned that is not impossible, but a great amount of effort must be put into learning a foreign language one maturity has been reached.

We all know of many mechanisms advertised today that claim to be able to teach someone a foreign language in a matter of weeks. It is not likely for an adult to retain information of this sort in a matter of days or even weeks. As explained in Forbes article “How to Learn a Second Language” by Laura Keen, it is something that must be practiced on a daily basis and for the rest of your life once mastered. The battle of mastering the language is only the first part; you must incorporate it on a daily basis if it is something you wish to retain for the rest of your life. That is, of course, after you have actually...