Is it harder for adults?

Learning Japanese- Is it really harder for adults?

One of the biggest myths I hear is that it’s easier for children to learn a new language than adults because children have this special cognitive ability that somehow vanishes by the time they’re around ten.

This is the worst self-fulfilling prophesy ever, and it is so common! If I believed it, I’d be sunk, since I am an adult learning Japanese, which is supposed to be one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. If it were true, all those excellent, cutting-edge Japanese programs would be utterly useless and full of bad customer reports, right? Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur should have gone out of business years ago. But the opposite is true. The programs have repeated excellent success, and their students range in age from 20-90!

I think learning Japanese is harder because we believe it’s harder. Children usually have no choice but to learn–they are uprooted to the new country, dropped in school, taught only in the new language, and they have no preconceived notions of how easy or hard it is supposed to be. They’re open and receptive, and they don’t think about learning the language: it’s just a tool to help them communicate and socialize, and annoyance that they get out of the way so that they can talk to their new friends.

I believe that this accepting attitude is the real advantage that children have over adults. Adults with enough life experience have preconceived ideas about how hard something “should be” or how long something “should take”. Added to that is our bad experiences of French or Spanish class in school. It seems perfectly logical that ten years is the supposed cognitive cutoff age–how good was your own middle school instruction? That’s when most people start learning to hate school!

The truth is, no one really knows how much about the brain because it’s so flexible. Humans are the ultimate in adaptation and survival. If you were exiled to a new country where they shot anyone who spoke English after six months, you’d be able to learn the new language, no problem. Yes, Japanese does have its specific challenges, such as the unfamiliar alphabet and those complex characters, but that has nothing to do with your ability to speak it.

Instead of thinking how hard it is going to be, and how easy little kids have it, focus instead on your own strengths. Why do you believe you can learn Japanese? There must be a reason, otherwise you wouldn’t have the interest in the first place.

It’s my experience that if you focus on reasons for wanting to learn it, and the reasons you think that you can learn it, you will act more like a child in a new country. The language will be a minor annoyance that you expect to get out of the way so that you can accomplish your goals, whether it’s doing business in Japan, watching movies without the subtitles, doing a homestay with your Japanese friends, or just immersing yourself in a new culture.

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