ANY adult who sets out to learn a foreign language knows how frustrating it can be to make sense of the rules of semantics and syntax.
As more immigrants in the US enroll in publicly financed English classes, they are discovering that the frustrations of long waiting lists, crowded classrooms and missing textbooks are often dwarfed by the challenge of learning a new language, New York Times has reported.
The US Department of Education counted 1.2 million adults enrolled in public English programmes in 2005 ? about 1 in 10 of the 10.3 million foreign-born residents 16 years and older who speak English “less than very well,” or not at all, according to census figures.
The fact is that it is hard for adults to learn a new language, much harder than it is for their children.
Children who must learn a new language have certain advantages over adults beyond biology, researchers say, starting with the fact that they are not preoccupied with paying the bills or figuring out what’s for dinner. Their minds are clear and relaxed.
By contrast, said D. Bradford Marshall, an expert in language acquisition at Harvard University, “adult immigrants are thrust into a society they don’t understand, which only compounds their anxiety.”
Another advantage immigrant children enjoy is that they are often surrounded by native speakers in schools, while adults tend to gravitate toward people who speak the same language. That safety net becomes their greatest barrier to full exposure to the new language, according to Dr Michael Merzenich, professor at University of California, San Francisco.
Merzenich has also theorized that the brains of people who speak but one language become progressively preoccupied with that language as they grow older, making it harder for them to absorb a new language.
