January 10, 2010 

There was a recent excellent article in the New York Times (How to Train the Aging Brain, 1/3/10)  “… stretching is exactly what scientists say keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain.  Do anything from learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work.”  Well I don’t equate learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work.  I immediately sent off e-mail to one of the professors quoted in the article outlining my frustrations with learning Armenian.  She responded, saying that I was not the only person to e-mail her on this subject, with some suggestions of places to get resources.  (Google: adult second-language acquisition.)

The news was all “bad.”  There is absolutely no empirical evidence that older adult learners cannot learn a language as well as a college student.  It is NOT true that the ability to learn declines, as we get older.   (The aging brain does not lose 40% of brain cells!)  It is true that young children can achieve near native language tonal sounds while adults have difficulty because they often don’t hear as well, but aside from this, adults learn and understand languages faster than children.  But there are three factors that seriously impact older adult learning.  If these factors are adjusted for, the older adult is able to learn just as well as younger persons.

These factors are motivation, self-confidence (fear of failure), and anxiety.  We are all motivated to learn Armenian.  This is not a factor for us.  “Self-confidence” plays a part in that I want to get it right, and will hesitate to say something if I’m unsure of the grammar.  “Anxiety” (stress) is a factor in that often I can’t pull the right word out of my brain, though I often know it, so the frustration level is high.  So one helpful suggestion is to reduce the focus on error correction.  (I often go back and correct myself immediately after I’ve said something.)  Memorizing long lists of verbs is not helpful as my short-term (rote) memory skills are not as good as my long-term skills.  (I find that I can remember that a word is the 4^th one down on a list and the corresponding English equivalent is the 4^th down, and so I put them together.  Off the list, I can’t remember.) Carrying around a notebook and writing down new words or phrases I hear, and then looking them up or getting help understanding them is most helpful, because these are the words and phrases I hear daily. 

I was half-panicked all summer with 4.5 hours of Armenian classes six days a week for eleven weeks, and at least an equivalent amount of homework each day.  We had drills, oral conversation where we had to speak about specific topics, tons to memorize, etc.  Adults learn best in a less stressful environment where they are not put on the spot and where they are allowed to absorb the material.   Speed is not my forte.

So I am trying to relax and focus on communicating and not on “getting it right.”  I’m working on vocabulary lists I’ve created from what I hear, not those strictly from the book, and I’m listening harder for the meaning of conversations instead of for specific words.  And life is better.

But I still wonder if the empirical data is correct.  I’m amazed at how fluent some of the “just out of college” kids are!