Anything to learn from children?

Attention! Lots of letters and hardly any pictures.

Ever wondered why you nailed English easily at the tender age of 0-5 but struggle with other languages now? If so, it feels like our brains actually get worse and worse for languages. Children have 2 basic advantages over adults in this matter:

1) Motivation. In attempt to learn something new, they are ready to sacrifice their mum (yea, let’s drag her by her shiny hair!), dad (yea, he does not need to sleep, so he can read me this book again for the 45736th time) and even own life (let’s try and see what it tastes like – never mind mum shouted “don’t touch it!”).

To make this post a bit more serious, I will add three smart words – hippocampus, amygdala and dopamine, all about brains. The first one, hippocampus, is responsible for collecting information from all sources (visual, auditory, etc) and transferring short-term memory into long-term memory. If you are truly enjoying something (let’s refer to languages again as an example), this changes much how your memory works, as you involve amygdala as well. Amygdala is a little part of the brain which influences the strength of the memory if strong emotions are added to an event. Emotional memory is viewed as an implicit or unconscious form of memory and contrasts with explicit or declarative memory mediated by the hippocampus. Also, if you are really motivated about something (let’s say to learn a language), amygdala releases dopamine (a chemical) which improves your concentration and abilities. Dopamine is like ketchup on your hot dog – a little thing but changes so much.

And now a question: how much motivation to study English did people have before they put this sign in a public place:

Thanks to my student Jim who sent it to me! Word for word, it is all correct (the top line is in Ukrainian but source language does not matter here). This is probably what happens if you assign the job to Google translate or have no interest in what you are doing (have you done your homework?=).

2) Special “mechanism” in their brains. How do actually children learn a language if they can’t read? How do they know this is one word and this is another? The first thought is probably that they listen and try to make sense of words between pauses. But if we look at oscillogramme (visual representation of speech – the last smart word here, I promise!), we will see that there are actually no pauses between words and sometimes there are pauses between parts of one word:

Recoding of “Where are the silences between words?”. University of California.

What children do is, as they are highly sensitive to repeated segments, they look for repetitions. Once they heard same syllables or their combination in different contexts, they can think it is a separate word. Such a complicated work they do! While we normally say that it is so easy for them and so hard for us poor. Neuroscientists say we loose this great decoding ability as we grow older but maybe we just get lazier and lazier with every year=) Plus children love repetitions while we hate. Children want the same book with the same story again and again until they make sense of every atom in it while we want something new every day and hop from one thing to another.

So, to be successful in leaning, we need to have a stubborn baby-like motivation (not something abstract) + enjoy what we are doing (then it is physically easier to remember stuff and do it really well) + study regularly + work hard, and all at the same time. An old truth many forget!

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