成年人学外语完全是吃力不讨好吗？纽约时报的这篇文章幽默地向我们展示了一位57岁的法语学生在语言学习中遇到的麻烦和困惑。他自嘲地说，原来觉得自己的法语只有3岁小孩的水平，直到真刀真枪和一个法国3岁小孩交谈，才发现自己的法语连3岁的水平都不到。文中介绍了语言习得的几个关键时期，特别是3岁孩子学习语言的天然优势。从沮丧释然，从无奈到释放，老爷爷非常enjoy自己的语言学习，甚至还提到语言学习有返老还童的功效。

I USED to joke that I spoke French like a 3-year-old. Until I met a French 3-year-old and couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation. This was after ayear of intense study, including at least two hours a day with Rosetta Stone, Fluenz and other self-instruction software, Meetup groups, an intensive weekend class and a steady diet of French movies, television and radio, followed by what I’d hoped would be the coup de grâce: two weeks of immersion at one of thetop language schools in France.

“French resistance” took on an entirely new meaning as my brain repelled every strategy I employed. Yet my failure was in fact quite unremarkable. Advertising claims notwithstanding, few adults who tackle a foreign language achieve anything resembling proficiency. In the end, though, it turns out that spending a year not learning French may have been the best thing I could’ve done for my 57-year-old brain.

In the last few years, unable to hold alist of just four grocery items in my head, I’d begun to fret a bit over my literal state of mind. So to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on the visual memory test.

This, obviously,did not bode well for my nascent language project, but I forged ahead. To be sure, learning a foreign language is a daunting task for any adult. How can something that a toddler accomplishes before learningto tie his shoes be so difficult for grown-ups?

Psycholinguists are divided on the answer, but they agree on several points. For starters, a 2-year-old’s brain has a substantial neurologicaladvantage, with 50 percent more synapses — the connections between neurons —than an adult brain, way more than it needs. This excess,which is an insurance policy against early trauma, is also crucial to childhoodlanguage acquisition, as is the plasticity, or adaptability, of the youngbrain.

Once the“critical period” — the roughly six years of life during which the brain is wired for learning language — is over, the ability to acquire a first language is lost, as your brain frees up room for the other skills you’ll need as you mature, such as the ability to kill a wild boar, or learn math, or operate your iPad.

Another advantage a toddler holds is his very lack of experience. After speaking our native language for decades, we adults can’t help but hear the second language through the filter of the first. And this filter doesn’t take decades todevelop. Researchers have found that newborn Japanese babies can distinguish between the English “L” and “R” sounds, but if not exposed to Western languages, they begin to lose that ability — not by the age of 6 or even 3 —but by eight months.

Adult language learners are, to borrow a phrase used by some psycholinguists, too smart for our own good. We process too much data at once, try toget everything right from the get-go and are self-conscious about our efforts. But toddlers instinctively grasp what’s important and are quite content to say, “Tommy hitted me,” as long as Tommy gets what’s coming to him.

All this means that we adults have to work our brains hard to learn a second language. But that may be all the more reason to try, for my failed French quest yielded an unexpected benefit. After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in seven of 10 categories, andaverage in the other three. My verbal memory score leapt from thebottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual memory test shotfrom the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth.

What might explain such an improvement?

Last year researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Northwestern University in Illinois hypothesized that language study should prove beneficial for older adults, noting that the cognitive tasks involved — including working memory, inductive reasoning, sound discriminationand task switching — map closely to the areas of the brain that are most associated with declines due to aging. In other words, the things that make second-language acquisition so maddening for grown-ups are the very things that may make the effort so beneficial.

The quest for a mental fountain of youth, pursued by baby boomers who fear that their bodies will outlive their brains, and who have deeper pockets than Juan Ponce de León, has created a billion-dollar industry. There is some evidence that brain exercise programs like Lumosity and Nintendo’s Brain Age can be beneficial, but if my admittedly unscientific experience is any indication, you might be better off studying a language instead. Not only is that a far more useful and enjoyable activity than an abstract brain game, but as a reward for your efforts, you can treat yourself to a trip abroad. Which is why I plan to spend the next year not learning Italian. Ciao!

转自NY times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/opinion/16alexander.html

【智梦简介】

智梦是一家专注美国本科留学的教育咨询机构。

我们的使命：

“智梦教育团队深知留学申请关系到学生及其家长的前途和未来，我们将竭尽所能帮助每一位智梦学员发掘其潜在的特质，以开放透明的申请方式，让他们能不留遗憾的争取到自己的理想学校。与此同时，培养他们成为诚实守信、独立思考、德才兼备的国际化人才。”
我们的愿景：
“智梦教育将成为一所发掘学术兴趣，培养学术能力，塑造具有公民意识的新时代留学生的学校。”