Chapter 1: Why is learning a second language still important in the age of translation technology?
I want you to show up at the airport in Puerto Rico on Christmas and Bad Bunny is there. And he's like, in Spanish, which I don't know how to say. Brittany, I've been waiting for you. Oh, my God. I'm like, if my tutor hears this, he's going to be like, girl, you should actually know exactly how to say that phrase. Hello, hello.
I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Today, I have a very special guest here with me, Emily Kwong. Welcome to It's Been a Minute. Hi. Hi. It's so good to be here, Brittany. It's so good to have you. It's so good to have you.
So for those of you who don't know, Emily is one of the hosts of NPR's Shortwave, our science podcast. But we are hanging out today because we have something in common. Is it that we both love Mariah Carey? That is true. I'll say that's true. Yes. We might both be lambs, but it's not just that. It's that we are both second language learners. I am learning Spanish. And I'm learning Mandarin.
Can I tell you something, though? Yeah. It's really hard work. Oh, Brittany. I hate having so much homework as an adult. I honestly, I didn't even do my homework like that when I was a kid. Yeah, it is homework. It's flashcards. It's studying. I honestly think, Brittany, that's why the Mandarin language has been a slow burn for me.
I've been kind of flirting with the language, you know, will she, won't she? And I have decided this is the year I think I'm going to commit and just call upon my ancestors to get me through and learn more than just like ni hao. That would be really nice. I'm in a similar place. I'm locking in. Oh, nice. Whenever it gets to feel hard, though, I try to think about like why I've decided to do this.
My husband's family lives in Puerto Rico. And, you know, his parents, usually they will talk to each other in Spanish. But whenever I'm there, you know, his family and friends switch to English for me. It just feels like I'm inconveniencing them in a way as a guest. And I don't want them to have to do that. You're describing my whole family dynamic. Yeah.
Just picture young Emily in Flushing, Queens at these family reunions. Everyone's eating. The bowls of rice are flying. And everybody's talking in Mandarin except for me, my sister, and my mom, my white mom. Love her. But my family's just translating for us and, like, accommodating us in English. And I think it stunk. It stunk that I couldn't connect with my family in their own terms.
And I want to learn for that reason. I want to connect with them and I want to be able to communicate to my father because Mandarin was his first language. And even though he's forgotten a lot of it, it's still a language that I think gives him a lot of comfort. Well, as we said, learning a second language is a hobby that asks a lot of you, not just time and sometimes money, but also like pride.
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: What personal experiences motivate language learners?
I remember back in high school, okay, I was at my cousin's Chinese school. I just sidled up to his teacher and was like, hey, I know I'm like, old. I know I'm 16, but can I pick up Chinese? And he looked me up and down and was like, ma'am, it's far too late for you. You are a lost cause. No. No, no, no. It's not true.
You can learn a second language and become like what's called a sequential bilingual. But this idea that you can only learn a language as a child has been kicking around for a long time. And it bothered me. Like I wanted to know, is it true? And where did it come from? And I traced it to something called The Critical Period Hypothesis. We reported it in a shortwave episode.
And it basically came out of the 50s and 60s and argues that there is this almost magical window for learning a second language that is somewhere between the age of two and puberty. How much of that is actually true? The part that's true is that there is a biological window where language learning is the most automatic. It's just easier.
And that's because in the first three years of life, your brain is developing one million new neural connections per second. Yeah. According to researchers at the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University. Dang. Okay. So babies are going like big brain mode, basically. Yes. Yes. Their brains are very elastic and it makes it easier for them to learn new languages.
But listen, just because it's harder for us olds does not mean it is impossible. We are still forming a ton of new neural connections. After puberty, you never stop learning, right? I mean, you know, we might be, you know, 30-something-year-old dogs, but we can still learn new tricks. Yes, I agree.
So the person who taught me this, by the way, is a neurolinguist whose name is Sarah Francis Phillips. She's based at the University of Arizona, and she said that researchers maybe shouldn't call it the critical window.
Maybe it's more like the sensitive window. If we think about language, like it's not just our brains involved, right? We also have to use our eyes to perceive what we see. And we use our mouths if we're oral producers of language. And these are all habits that we've developed during our early childhood years. So once you become an adult, now you have to learn how to break those habits.
So it's a little harder, but it's not impossible.
Can I jump in? Yes. Okay, I have another little reframe of how we can think about language learning as adults. This is courtesy of Nicole Ziegler, Associate Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii. My producer Liam spoke to her.
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Chapter 3: What cultural barriers hinder language learning?
The key is finding what works for each person.
That's Viorica again. She also said having a goal in mind for the level you want to be at can help take the pressure off.
What does it mean to learn a language? What does it mean to be fluent in the language? There are so many different levels. So knowing what your goal is and then having a plan for how to reach that goal, just like with anything else, if you break it into smaller, meaningful units that mean something to you, then it's much easier to accomplish.
Oh, you know who had a really interesting language goal? Connor Story, right? Yes. One of the leads of the show Heated Rivalry because he had to take essentially a crash course in Russian for his character to speak in the accent convincingly and deliver that very powerful monologue. I mean, that is a very concrete language goal. That is a very good language goal.
Okay, so Emily, what's your language goal and what methods are working for you as you're learning? Short term, I'm going to London with my auntie Linda. And if I could speak Mandarin to her there, she would be so surprised.
And I think it would just delight her if I showed up able to have brief conversations or say a few more things and we could talk because she has been poking me to study it for a long time. And then long term, I want to be able to speak to my dad when he's much older. He's told me that he thinks his brain is going to revert back to his first language.
And I want to be able to talk to him in those final moments when he maybe needs the comfort of his of his mother tongue. That is so beautiful. Wait, what methods of learning, though, are you using to to be able to achieve those? Yeah, so I had originally signed up for classes over Zoom and they could be kind of chaotic. I don't think I made a ton of progress.
So I'm really looking for in-person opportunities like conversation meetups or conferences. Mahjong Game Nights. Mahjong is a very popular game across the Asian diaspora. It's also played in America. There's an American version. But there's Mahjong Nights at a library in the city where I live. And it's a place I could go and practice language. What are your goals for Spanish this year?
Okay, well, short term, I am going to be in Puerto Rico for Christmas time again this year because I go every other year to visit my in-laws. And I just want to stunt. I really want to be able to, like, join into conversation without people feeling like they have to accommodate me. And in the long term, I want to be able to interview in Spanish. Oh. I want to be able to talk to more people. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does the Critical Period Hypothesis affect language acquisition?
I want to interview Bad Bunny just like everybody else. Just like everybody else. I would love to be able to do it in Spanish confidently. That's like my dream. I want you to show up at the airport in Puerto Rico on Christmas and Bad Bunny is there. And he's like in Spanish, which I don't know how to say. Brittany, I've been waiting for you. Oh, my God.
I'm like, if my tutor hears this, he's going to be like, girl, you should actually know exactly how to say that phrase. Oh, it'd be Brittany. How are you going to get there? I've been getting tutoring online with my wonderful tutor in Colombia. His name is Santiago. Shout out, Santiago. We love you. But I don't know. I feel like I need to practice with people out in the real world.
I saw there's a Spanish conversational hour at the 53rd Street Library near the New York office. And so since this episode is about taking the difficult path, I kind of think we both just need to get out there and do it. If you say so. I'll do it for you. Okay, I am at MLK Jr. Library in D.C.
They have Mahjong every Tuesday night from 5 to 7, and I literally gasped when I turned the corner and saw how many people were playing Mahjong. 140 people, Brittany, were playing with game tiles with Chinese characters on them. The fact that they're willing to learn these numbers, amazing. And at some of the tables, people were practicing their language skills. Here's the organizer, Jenny Mack.
It's an informal setting, which is the best because you're not under the pressure of, okay, what's the correct grammar for something, right? So counting the tiles, how do we say this in Chinese? Yeah.
I met up with a regular, Noah Davis, who is teaching himself Mandarin, and we tried a little bit together. Okay, let's try this. Okay. 你好。 你好。 你叫什么名字?
我叫Noah. 你呢?
我叫Emily.
很好。 很好。
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