I’ve heard it said that children have a remarkable capacity to learn new languages, well I’m kind of a strange case in point. My father is Australian and my mother is Finnish and I was born in Toronto Canada so the first language I spoke was English, after my parents separated I was about 3 or 4 years old and my mother took me to live in Finland and I learned to speak Finnish within a matter of a few months. I totally forgot English except for a few words that my mother still used when speaking to me. When I was 4 going on five my Finnish grandmother died and my mother remarried, I didn’t get along with my stepfather so it was arranged for me to fly to England where my father was living and I was to live with him. I had no one to speak Finnish with so I quickly reverted to speaking English and forgot almost all of my Finnish which I was fluent at a child’s level. Now here the strange thing when I was living in Finland before my grandmother died, I remember the house being full of young women whom she was interviewing as house keepers / nannies, I remember overhearing the conversation she had with one of the girls and it went thus: Grandmother –“Can you bake bread?” Girl –“ I know how to make Sugar Cake." Grandmother–“No No, Bread!” Now the thing that’s strange about this conversation is that these were two people who didn’t speak English, the interview was conducted it in Finnish but I remember it word for word in English. Now saying that I do remember one key word was spoken in Finnish and that was the word “Bread” which in Finnish is called “Leipặ” I heard “Leipặ” in the place of bread but every other word in that conversation was remembered in English. Are there any studies that can explain this sort of Language / memory transference?
Interesting post. Thank you. It seems that since your long term memory holds dual language comprehension, the time duration between the Finnish interview event and the English learning event (into long term memory), an "adjustment" was still furthered in that former long term memory, perhaps first by the information returning to short term memory, so that it could be updated, and returned to long term memory. Probably happens on a daily basis, in some small "adjustments" of the "saved" data.
good day, there is something so fundamental and universal in this that peole get confused and confuse others with modern day science and "scientific jargon" that is still in its infancy. Ancient Hindus studied and implemented this by observing the divine nature of j~jnAna or knowledge including wisdom. (1) The child already knows what there is to know when it is born having been taught in the womb by its mother. The language of communication may be called English by or Finnish or Hindi or whatever by "professors" or for that matter anybody that is a witness to the communication - and is only hearing and not participating in the totality of communication between mother and child. The Hndu way of expressing this is (1) para - the divine seed of thought - (2) pashyanti - the witnessing of the conscious mind to the fructified thought (3) mAdhyama - the medium - the mind searching through its database of what it has learnt for the best fit of "vocabulary" to what is indeed its perception of the thought - choice and then after a number of voulantary steps resulting in (4) vAk or speech. The child is already taught and knows the language of the universe - having been taught that by the greatest teacher there is on this planet - its mother - All the others that think they are teaching the child are actually working furiously on how to communicate their whatever to the child... and hence are actually learners and earners of their own bread. The immortal child and its everything its creator is the essence - On this planet the child learns about the mortality of its mother and father and the human ness in them as they grow and the human ness and mortality in its own self as it grows - This is only the rules of grammar taking over for continuity of life - But at no time is there a lack of communication between mother and child - even if they arenot talking to each other.
i moved to Australia from Slovakia, speaking no english at all. my parents threw me in a French school, so i had to learn both English and French at once. somehow kids just manage.. i think it's quite amazing.. unlike my parents..who i reckon were jerks for putting all that stress on me
I have wondered why I retained one word in Finnish out of that interview event, and I realized that when I went to lived with my father who basically didn't know any Finnish except for a few words repeated these few words to me often. One of the words he did know was "Leipặ" i.e. Bread which I sure he did repeat to me along with a few others which I still remember. My conclusion on this is that if the language of the child is not reenforced at least till they're over 6 years old then it's replaced by the language that is heard spoken more often and it also seems that that goes for memories of overheard conversations in the forgotten language. Thinking back on it really does fell like I had some sort of translation devise on my head that automatic changed most of the words into English.
It's been well-established that language learning ability attenuates markedly as we grow older. It starts with phonetics. Babies babble literally every phoneme in every language on earth. As their brains grow and they begin to organize the world around them, they concentrate on mimicking the phonemes they hear from the people in their home. Eventually people reach a point where they don't have the muscle tone needed to articulate phonemes that are considerably different from the ones in their native language. By late adolescence or early adulthood, few anglophones can master the palatalized T' at the end of Russian infinitives, or the vowel-less consonant clusters in Czech words like vstup. Whereas Italians and Germans can't make the hard and soft TH sounds of English, Greek and European Spanish. I can't pronounce the BH sound at the beginning of Indian words, although I do better with DH. Not all of this is physical, some is purely psychological. Many Americans absolutely cannot make the flapped Spanish R of pero, even though it is identical to the way we pronounce the T in "ghetto," with which it precisely rhymes. Grammar works the same way. After you become immersed in a language with subject-verb-object syntax and very few inflections, it's almost impossible to retrain yourself to put the words in a different sequence, or to denote tense, person, case and gender by changing the endings on the verbs, nouns and adjectives. Parents are customarily advised to make sure their children study a second language by approximately age 13. After that each year makes it much more difficult. Obviously that tipping point varies widely among people: some eight-year-olds have trouble picking up a second language, and some adults learn to speak like natives at 25. Scary's experience typifies this phenomenon. He (she?) learned his second language when his brain was still growing rapidly, and new synapses formed easily. The old synapses fell into disuse but never deteriorated, and when he needed them they sprang into action rather quickly. My mother spoke fluent Bohemian. (We call it "Czech" today because it's so much easier to spell and pronounce that way.) Unfortunately in the 1940s parents were told that it was a disadvantage for a child to grow up bilingual--I suspect this was a manifestation of America's characteristic xenophobia rather than the result of any scientific study. So she never taught me the language. Still, I heard her speaking it with her family. When I took a class in Russian in college, I was the only student who could correctly pronounce all of the difficult Slavic sounds--they were in my head. Fortunately in Arizona in the 1950s Spanish was a mandatory class in the 7th grade, so I was able to begin learning a second language when I was still barely young enough to do it easily. I am still complimented on my pronunciation, even though my vocabulary leaves much to be desired. Having two languages in your head makes the third and fourth much easier. When I studied German, Chinese and other languages I had very little trouble picking up the phonetics, grammar or vocabulary. Many of you have heard me say this before, but it can't be said too often: Knowing two languages is a tremendous advantage. For our species, in the age of civilization, the vast majority of our thoughts are formed in words. It stands to reason, therefore, that the language in which we think guides and limits our thoughts. Having two languages up there gives us an automatic ability to reality-test the thoughts of one language against the paradigms of the other. The more different and unrelated the languages are, the better. Chinese has no gender, number or tense, no articles or prepositions. (Some linguists argue about the prepositions.) When I let the Chinese part of my brain examine an English sentence, it keeps saying, "Why bother with all those extra words and syllables? They just clutter up your sentence and don't add anything to the meaning."
Prem, that is largely due to Panini, and enlarged by Gangesh. Gangesh was a grammarian and logician, so took a very close look at the logic of languages too. ** Babies soak information like sponge soaks water. That happens almost immidiately after birth. I saw my g'daughter when she was 3-4 months trying to form lips as if trying to speak. When you talk to a baby, it observes your lip movements closely in addition to listening. Hence a bay picks the language spoken in the home.
It's "He" the way! I've always wondered if I could dig a lot more Finnish language out of my subconscious? Maybe under Hypnosis, I understand that we never really forget anything or is that just an old wives tale? Anyway I think it would be an interesting experiment, now I only need to find a Finnish speaking Hypnotherapist living in Australia!
It's easier than that. Just go to Finland. I took one year of German in college, and it was scientific German at that. I could rattle off sentences like, "The researcher boiled the acid in a flask with his Bunsen burner." Without having anyone to speak it with for more than ten years (in Los Angeles we speak English, Spanish and Chinese), I finally took a trip to Europe, landing first in Munich to pick up my BMW motorcycle. After one hour breathing the atmosphere full of German conversations in the airport, the streets, the bus and the BMW factory, when the representative called me up to the desk, I automatically lapsed into more-or-less fluent German. All of that knowledge was in there. It just needed a little coaxing. The same will happen with you and Finnish.
I took a 3 month course in Technical & Sceintific German enough for me. i wanted to read Einsteins'S paper in ORIGINAL.
That's interesting, I noticed that about myself as well. I grew up only speaking English, but in preschool my teacher was from Puerto Rico and she taught my class a little Spanish like counting and greetings. Later in 1st grade my P.E. teacher was from Austria and she would only let us count in German and she greeted us every class in German as well. Now as an adult I took classes in both Spanish and German and find that I pronounce the foreign words like learned then with an almost native-like accent, but only those few words. Everything else...not so much. Like I only learned to count to 10 in German so those numbers I say nearly perfect, but once I get to 11 it all falls apart. But don't you find all of the Chinese measure words extra nonsense? I do. They seem kind of useless like many of English's prepositions.
I totally agree with this. As a kid, my mother's husband (won't even bother saying the father word in regards to him, piece of worthless sh&*^&t!) was mexican. I know I learned and spoke some spanish. Then in CA, we had to learn spanish in elementary school. I picked it up quickly and remembered things from when I was younger. Then after a few years, my family moved to NY. Never spoke it again. Took it in highschool. Amazing how little I remembered. But was able to pick it up quickly. After not using it for many years, became engaged to a hispanic man. Realized I couldn't speak it, but could understand most of what was being said. Still can't speak it well, but have gotten some it back. It is definitly a practising on a regular basis thing.
I only know about five of them, so it isn't much of a strain. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You can use ge for practically anything. I usually remember ben for books, but rarely jang for tables, tiao for animals and wei for honored guests, and I'm out of luck with anything else. I regard it as more of a parsing particle, like de. It doesn't really have any meaning, but tells you how to group the words in the sentence so they make sense. If you say wo de san ge mei mei it means "my three (younger) sisters." But if you leave out the ge and say wo de san mei it means "my number three sister." Si ge chuan means "four rivers," but si chuan means "the place with four rivers," Sichuan province. Most of the time prepositions serve the same purpose, as parsing particles. You can't usually leave them out or the sentence becomes unfathomable, but more often than not you can use almost any preposition and the meaning is clear. If you've ever heard Indians speak English, you know what I mean. Their English teachers give them each a dartboard with all the prepositions on it, and they pick one at random by throwing a dart. And we never have any trouble understanding them.
