See if you can keep up with this kid (try it first without reading the subtitles)
Posted Jun 1, 2012, 12:50 AM UTC
4943
NINA~ I feel so creepy but i've watched all her videos. SOOOO kawaiiii.
12
I'm the same i've seen them all and i keep thinking "is this weird" but the dad is cool and nina is really cute - and you get to see some cool places in Japan and learn a little Japanese.
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She is so adorable!
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Interestingly enough, if you watch the "Six Years with Nina" video you can see some of the speaking troubles she had when she was younger. For example, at one point when she's four years-old she starts to say "ごめんねさい" and then switches to "sorry". It also seems like her English isn't as developed as it might be if she were monolingual.
This is no surprise of course as the consequences of raising bilingual children are pretty well-documented, and by the time we see her in the video you've shared here she seems to have gotten the hang of the whole bilingual thing. Also, the slight Japanese accent which I detected when she was younger seems to have lessened as well.
All in all it's a really great video and a fascinating sort of "documentary" on the development of a bilingual child. I wish they hadn't stopped posting videos of her because it'd be awesome to follow her development further, but I can of course understand why they would stop.
Good find and thanks for sharing!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=rmz3QFQ4Rkw
Watch it at 6:40
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Thanks. I didn't need to sleep tonight.
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Oh snap. I hope they weren't asking her what she likes for breakfast.
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I love it when she speaks Japanese. So cute.
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Kept up easily. Was this supposed to be difficult?
-2
This makes me so sad to know I will never truly be bilingual because I started learning Japanese so late in life (started college at 24). Makes me even more frustrated that America doesn't really enforce languages until high school....
Bah, you can be bilingual enough that it doesn't really matter. Don't worry about it, just keep studying. Sure, little kids growing up in a bilingual house have an advantage, but it's not nearly as useful as studying for two hours a day.
Personally, I'm glad I started Japanese late in life, because it taught me discipline and study habits. I took Spanish from the time I was in kindergarten, and never got much further than basic past tense, because all I learned was how to parrot the teacher until she stopped making me say stuff in Spanish, and then I went straight back to talking about Magic cards with my friends in English. I've spent 3 years studying Japanese for a couple of hours a day, and I can read newspapers and talk about economics and stuff. Advantage: grown-up smokeshack.
As someone who teaches English to Japanese kids now, I think the noise made about kids being great language learners is totally overblown. Kids don't have the patience for it, and the only way to get them to learn it is by overwhelming volume of exposure. Adults learn languages a hell of a lot faster than 3-year-olds do, if they put their minds to it.
That is really an interesting take on it. Refreshing even to have a view that says adults are faster than children because all you ever see in the media is that children are better at learning instruments, second languages, etc than adults.
I learned the basic 50 Hiragana during the last 3 for a few hours each day. We shall see how much I remember tomorrow, but I only had trouble with 3 or 4 by the end of today. I think I learned them pretty fast and for 60+% the limiting factor wasn't recollection but how fast I could type.
Try handwriting them out. It was so odd in my case... I didn't really 'learn' my characters really well until I started learning vocabulary words and writing them out.
I agree. I've read in a few places that adults learn languages far faster than children when you count the total hours of actual study and practice. Children are exposed to their new language all day long. Adults leave them in the dust with only an hour or two of studying.
I certainly didn't post this video to show that children have an advantage.
Oh, no worries. It's an adorable video, and I'm sharing it with all my 国際結婚 friends.
Oh no!!! That's not what I was getting at :( The video is precious, just made me have those feels, ya know? :p
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Yes you can.
Note that even children who are native speakers can hardly be called "fluent" in a language. A 5-year old certainly couldn't read Harry Potter, and most certainly not Frankenstein. Could you truly call someone "fluent" in a language if they can't read those novels? In the same way that a 5 year old won't understand words like "bioluminescence", an adult learner must learn how to express these concepts before he is considered "fluent". Thus, adult learners have a longer way to go before they are called "fluent", whether or not that bar of "fluency" is deserved or not.
You can still gain native-level fluency in an foreign language. All you need is to understand what all the words mean, how all the grammar patterns work, how to hear and make all the sounds, and, most importantly, the ability to use this information without significant errors at a fast enough rate to be called "fluent".
If it's pronunciation, you can "easily" gain native-level pronunciation with dedication and accent training. Adult Indian English speakers learn how to adapt native-level American English pronunciation all the time. (Just call up a call-center if you don't believe me.)
If it's vocabulary, then reading difficult novels, and learning what words mean is all that's necessary.
It is possible. It's just that the majority of adult foreign speakers simply don't care to finish through with their last bit of language training to make their accent indistinguishable from a native speaker. And their apathy isn't unwarranted. Who cares if you have an accent? Unless you're an actor, why bother?
We are still talking ~50.000 words to reach a high school vocabulary. Granted, this is a passive vocabulary, but that is still a lot of SRS!
A lot of the grammar details as well as morphological rules needed to be fluent in any language are simply not documented because they are not understood, or are extremely complex.
Fx, Why do English speaker say a house is rat-infested, when a rat doesn't make up an infestation? Because compound words are singular? Then why do we say mice-infestation? Why do we say hip-hop and flip-flop instead of hop-hip and flop-flip and hundreds of similar words follow a special structure that no native speaker would ever reverse when making up words.
Rules like these are well understood by children by the age of 5. I say that is fluency. I don't know what bioluminescence means and I bet only a minority of the native English speaking population knows either. Fact is, any normal child at the age of 10 is fluent in at least one language. You probably need to be in puberty to be able to discuss morality (young children simply can't grasp that the world is not black and white), so let's say any 14 year old.
Any educated adult native English speaker knows what "bioluminescence" is, and even if they didn't already know, they'd immediately pick it up from its construction and context. (FYI It's when a living creature produces light.)
But as words are learned, it becomes easier to create new words. e.g., to teach a non-Japanese speaker what 先 means with no prior knowledge of the Japanese language is quite difficult, and to teach them 取る with no prior knowledge of Japanese is quite difficult. But what if the person knows what 先 and 取る means and knows that ～る can become ～り to make a turn a verb into a noun meaning, "doing X", and that it's common for 濁点 to come in compound words, and if the person knows that all these things? Well in that case, it's incredibly easy to know what 先取り means. Even if he forgets exactly what 先取り means, he'll pick it up whenever it's presented in context. (In the same way any English speaker would pick up "bioluminescence".)
In actuality, you don't need to be know 50,000 words, and in actuality, closer to about 20,000 can be sufficient for fluency in a language, given how easy it becomes to pick up other terms. And of course, if you're reading literature on a daily basis, it's nothing to pick up an additional 30,000 less-common words to the point that you can recognize them in context. When it comes to speaking, even most native speakers of English don't use more than about 10,000 words on a day-to-day basis.
There's nothing stopping non-native speakers from also picking up these rules subconsciously.
I've met multiple ESL speakers who would be mistaken for a native American English speaker (I can think of 3 off the top of my head). None of them even so much as visited an English speaking country until they were in college. Granted, two of them attended "international" (i.e. English-speaking) high schools in their home countries. I don't know about the third.
Taking a language at my school was completely optional. Even if you wanted to learn a language there was not much of a choice in languages to learn. I would have loved to take Japanese back then.
For my school system, in 6th grade we were exposed to French, Spanish, Latin and German for half a semester each. We had the option to take one in 7th and 8th grade. For high school, you HAD to take 2 semesters of a language (my HS was on block aka like college). Our only options were Spanish, French, Latin, German and American Sign Language. If Japanese was an option, I would've been on it in a heartbeat.
Took 3 years of latin and 2 of french. All I remember is that the Romans were dicks to create such a complicated language and the French don't pronounce the last half of their words.
Hahaha. 6 years of Spanish and I remember basically nothing. I didn't care about the language (don't ask why 6 years... It's beyond me honestly). Japanese I care about. It's something I've always wanted to learn so it actually comes to me and stays, which is nice
I had a choice between Spanish, French, and German. After I left, I heard they took out German and French ಠ_ಠ
What.... ಠ_ಠ
German I could understand somewhat but French... Really...
I find Japanese fascinating now, but I'm afraid that I wasn't interested in anything that was presented to me in public school. Until high school, I couldn't shake the mindset that it was all a pointless chore.
Today, if I were taking some part-time degree that included French classes, I would probably love them. When there were given to me in public school, I couldn't see past the whole "we-say-so" environment.
To be "truly bilingual" is a bit overrated notion imho.
If you spend a year (or two) in any country, absorbing their culture and knowing all kinds of people, you can learn any language you want. In the end you'll probably still have a funny accent, but you'll be able to understand and be understood by anyone, which is the whole point.
I think you misunderstand what truly bilingual means.
Your brain structure is actually physically different if you start learning 2 languages before the critical cut off point - you have both denser grey matter in your language centers and more white matter connectivity between certain brain regions than people who speak only one language. Studies have found that "bilingual children were superior on most tests, especially those requiring symbol manipulation and reorganization. This unexpected difference between monolingual and bilingual children was later explored in studies showing a significant advantage for bilingual children in their ability to solve linguistic problems based on understanding such concepts as the difference between form and meaning, that is, metalinguistic awareness and non-verbal problems that required participants to ignore misleading information." They also have better executive brain function, although all of this seems to come at the cost of a slightly reduced vocabulary in both languages. Your ability to distinguish phonemes is also greater, and being truly bilingual also makes it easier to acquire a 3rd language too. Anyway, I say there's nothing overrated about it. Being truly bilingual gives you a better brain.
Haha. You think you can achieve fluency in Japanese just from living in Japan for 2 years?
I didnt use "fluency", but yes, living two years in japan would be enough to be able to have any sort of conversation in their language for a normal adult.
Not only I think that, but I know a lot of people who were able to do it in japan and in other countries, (with some effort of course, since it doesnt happens by osmosis).
I dont understand your surprise.
Because my Kohai moved here 2 years ago and has learned maybe a total of about 15 words. Then again, you did say "want". But if you take desire into the equation, then it's entirely possible to immerse yourself in foreign media even without moving halfway across the world.
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The key phrase there is, "with rigorous self study."
In my experience it doesn't really matter. I started learning Spanish in kindergarten. Lessons twice a week all through elementary school. In Middleschool I took weekly spanish classes for three years. Then I studied Spanish for 4 years of high school. And you know what? I can't speak Spanish worth a shit. It takes more than just exposure at a young age to make somebody bilingual.