By Professor Joseph Lo Bianco*
This question has come in from a reader of The Greek Herald who struggled with Greek as a child and wonders now if it’s still possible to learn the language as an adult.
Kicking off
There are questions in language research that are ambiguous, difficult or complicated, and academics end up giving unhelpful advice to people. But this isn’t one of them. The research on age and language study is clear. You can learn a language at any age, and, although young people have some advantages over older people in some aspects of language study, there are many, and important, areas where, believe it or not, adults are better learners than young people. In general, adults and children, especially young children, learn languages differently, because they are cognitively different.
So, the simple answer is that no one is ever too old to learn a second language and you definitely can learn fluent Greek as an adult. Success in language study is closely tied to motivation, opportunity, desire, cognitive maturity, quality of teaching, and experience with language study, even if it wasn’t successful, should not hold you back.
I will unpack many of these points below but before I launch into that I should say: the best time to start learning Greek is ‘as soon as possible’.
Children and adults
Because there are individual differences, (and a small percentage of lucky people seem to have a special talent or aptitude for language that others don’t share), we must speak in averages or tendencies, rather than in absolutes. When it comes to second languages, we know that the first language, and the kind of facility we have with it, influences how we approach the second language and how well we learn it. This means that children and adults approach language study differently because children are still learning their main language, and adults, mostly, have achieved full knowledge of their main language.
When we look at how well children perform in language study and which kinds of programs are best, we find that children tend to shine in more naturalistic settings, where they ‘absorb’ the new language using their intuition. Many adults find this difficult or too slow and tend to benefit when language teaching is more strategic, or explicit. There are interesting reasons which make this the case, and I will mention some of them below. However, some people, both adults and children, like a mixture of the formal and the informal, the implicit and the explicit at any age, and each has advantages and disadvantages.
I will set these out for THE KIDS and THE GROWN UPS.
THE KIDS
Children’s brains tend to have more ‘neuroplasticity’, which means they adapt easily, and tend to be more flexible. Because of this they can learn ‘implicitly’ meaning they ‘pick up’ language while doing other things, such as team sport or art. In such activities Greek would be the language used to play the sport and follow the rules and strategies of the game. If you have to coordinate with others to win a game of soccer and you are only allowed to use Greek, then the need to communicate is high. This need to communicate, N2C, is maximised because you are trying to achieve another goal that you share with others and which is the focus of the activity, rather than the communication itself. In this way, implicit language learning reproduces first language learning, the learning of our mother tongue, in which our parents do not set out to instruct us in language, but to communicate with us in that language, adapted to our age, but focused on activity and practical needs.
Everyone learns their first language, their ‘mother tongue’, successfully. Unless there is a serious disability, no one fails their mother tongue. By contrast, many people who try to learn a second language are not so successful. A key difference is whether there is a N2C, and if the N2C is missing in the real world, whether the classroom, or home, can create a substitute N2C.
Children should still be taught explicit language: the sounds (phonics and phonetics) of Greek, the rules of its grammar, and of course Greek vocabulary, but this should not dominate the curriculum for small children, and should always be done in a way that is linked to meaning and communication. Many adults (not all) prefer to have explicit teaching, they want to know the rules and sounds and words of Greek so they can speak accurately. When you learn in an immersion setting, you are learning to become fluent, and you may not always be accurate. Language teaching should try to achieve both fluency and accuracy, but how we go about it will vary.
Another way to talk about these differences, which I repeat are broad and not every young child and every adult neatly fits into one or other group, is to distinguish between implicit learning (unconsciously picking up language through exposure to it in activities and interactions with people using only Greek to them), and explicit teaching (direct instruction through rules, memorisation, practice, etc).
I have expressed this difference in a very general way, but I hope the point is clear that listening, imitating, participating, with small amounts or none of formal instruction is a way to learn that young children accept more readily than adults. There is an important psychological reason for this, which I will call ego-permeability, and this can be different between boys and girls, men and women. Perhaps we can talk about gender on another occasion, because like age it is an important issue in language study.
A high ego permeability allows younger learners to not stress too much about making mistakes, to adopt new roles and sounds and not feel too embarrassed when doing so. I am sure we all know shy young children for whom the opposite is true, but it remains true that this is a key difference between children and adults in language learning outcomes. Many adults have trouble adopting the new personality and perspectives that you need to learn a new language. If you get too attached to your self-image as it is now, then you might find it hard to adopt a new identity that will come from speaking and participating in a new language community. This is one of the explanations for why children do better than adults with ‘native like accents’ (intonation and pronunciation), where children’s superiority over adults seems to be clearest. Teachers find that children are more open to activities where it is ok to make mistakes or to hear yourself sound ‘funny’ as you try to master the new sounds of the language you are studying, while many adults aren’t so open to this.
Other reasons why children do better than adults are more pragmatic. The most important one is that they are, obviously, younger. They have more time than us.
THE GROWN UPS
The advantages we adults have over children in second language study tend to be the mirror image of the advantages children have over us. We have stronger cognitive abilities (we know more), and we can work out strategies for learning that suit us better and focus on specific parts of language learning that interest us or which we know we need or desire.
Allied to this is that we are likely to have a specific goal or aim in our language study, and usually children don’t get consulted about why they are learning the language and what they want to get out of it (something I recommend we do with children learning Greek whether in the home or at school).
Adults have more awareness of language (metalinguistic awareness), and this sharper awareness of language and how it works allows adults to analyse the rules of language, the parts of speech and writing and work out complex expression, vocabulary and grammar. It is easy to see how language awareness helps the learner because it can personalise the program of study and assist in language tasks that are based on writing rather than speech, or in which complex topics are being discussed.
This also means that adults are less dependent on the teacher for language input, and this greater autonomy can help in supplementing the program they are enrolled in or making it more attuned to the specific goals the individual learner has. So, we grown-ups can learn second languages perfectly well.
So, back to the question: I failed Greek as a kid, can I learn Greek as an adult?
Yes, you certainly can.
There are many providers offering Greek courses at different levels of proficiency. You can extend and enrich these with the myriads of online courses and apps, software and aids to personalise the learning you do in class. You can engage in immersion (I will do a ‘tips’ article on immersion soon). There are practice opportunities like the one Pharos supports at present during Speak Greek in March (though we think you should extend well beyond March), the conversation café.
What I recommend you do is to write down a personal learning plan. It is useful to define your purpose (WHY do I want to learn Greek?), list all the reasons, situations and people you would like to use Greek with and in and what you would like to accomplish in these settings.
Set out a time goal for each week in addition to the total lesson time. If you are doing a weekly 90-minute class, for the first month you triple the hours per week in personalised listen/read time. Call this Greek beyond class time, then try to increase it steadily each month after that.
Build a network of friends/family that you call on to assist you. Call them your team or your support base, a Greek Ginger Group (support group). It is useful to help them to understand what you need from them. It would be helpful if some of them are more fluent than you. Starting small, with clear aims, in a program that you discuss with the teacher and your Ginger Group, what your goals are rather than an ‘off the shelf’ course, you can take control of your learning and write your own learning plan.
As in all language study it is important to interact with Greek frequently, and regularly, to mix formal study with actual communication, to be consistent and to set realistic goals. These can be vocab gains (X number of new words each week) or topics you want to specialise in. You might say, “next month I want to become more confident discussing ideas about Greek politics”. An aim such as this is very practical and immediately tells us what kind of language you need to achieve this aim and the activities you need to follow to access this language. So, once you have the aim set out you need to research as follows: 1) what are the main political parties? (their names, slogans), 2) who are their key leaders, heroes, significant ideas? 3) what policies do they have? 4) what alliances and differences are there between them all? 5) what is their representation in the «Ελληνικό Κοινοβούλιο»? etc. Once this map is outlined you could record online discussions of a sitting of parliament, or a radio/tv/newspaper debate, and work with your teacher to help you make sense of complicated language, listing all the difficult or problematic areas. A similar exercise could be around transport around Greece, or Greece’s membership of the EU, sports facilities or cooking or Greek folk music, whatever topic will push you beyond ordinary or comfort zone language. Your Ginger Group comes in handy in doing this task together, depending on people’s interest.
In this way you can immerse yourself in specific contemporary Greek language, including idioms and colloquial expression, and this leads to opportunities for practice and utilising diverse learning methods. These methods extend you beyond the lessons and classes; to include the vast array of apps and aids we have access to these days, including local media (SBS Greek, etc). In all of this the aim is to build an N2C, a need to communicate.
Some small things tips that you can do right away and can help are:
- Make Greek your phone and computer language
- It’s something we do with children, but you can adopt an ‘ego permeable’ attitude and label your house with Greek names. Names might be too simple so, move from single words (vase, vacuum cleaner) to expressions (put flowers in the vase, change the water in the vase, check the battery is charged on the vacuum cleaner).
- Make sure you listen to Greek news every day or at least a few times per week. Have a notebook near the TV or radio for writing down words, expressions, topics or grammar that you find confusing or opaque and label these “learning challenges”. Select these to support the topic I mentioned above.
- Every week summarise these learning challenges and talk to a teacher/tutor/friend who can help you work through these, or the Group.
- If a group is too difficult you could limit the support to a Greek buddy, and arrange a weekly meal or coffee get together for exclusive Greek conversation practice.
- Build a positive attitude, pre-warn anyone who you think might be judgmental or negative about mistakes. The best attitude is to see mistakes as information for new learning, fodder for growth or something like that, turning problems into possibilities in a systematic way.
- In the activities it is important to include all the ‘macro skills’ of language: speaking, listening, reading and writing.
With a plan and with routine your knowledge of the language will grow. All language success is worth celebrating, so make sure that is part of your learning journey. If your child is learning Greek then join your efforts and turn your home into a Greek language immersion environment. We had an article with tips on this recently.
In these ways language study, building Greek back into ordinary life, helps build community, identity and connection.
*Joseph Lo Bianco is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. He is also the President of Pharos Alliance, dedicated to preserving Greek language in Australia.
Do you have a question you would like the Pharos Alliance to answer, send your query to editor@foreignlanguage.com.au.
