or, as an experiment, we could take a babies, isolate them from the start for the first 20 years of their lives. No contact with any language of any sort. And then, we can have them learn all different kinds of languages, etc. They would basically be aliens, right?

some feral humans already exist.

Jarvik7 Wrote:some feral humans already exist.

Yeah. Hasn't research with them shown that they can't learn languages though? That is, if they are feral until a really late age. From what I've heard, several years after being "saved" they still only use one-word sentences.

Tobberoth Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:some feral humans already exist.

Yeah. Hasn't research with them shown that they can't learn languages though? That is, if they are feral until a really late age. From what I've heard, several years after being "saved" they still only use one-word sentences.

I thought that was generally because of the many years of abuse

danieldesu Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:some feral humans already exist.

Yeah. Hasn't research with them shown that they can't learn languages though? That is, if they are feral until a really late age. From what I've heard, several years after being "saved" they still only use one-word sentences.

I thought that was generally because of the many years of abuse

Not all feral children are abused, unless you count their original abandonment as abuse.

kfmfe04 Wrote:What if a language had random grammar and you needed ESP to understand the speaker?

Some Japanese people do claim you need ESP to understand their language, but that's OT.

woodwojr Wrote:Did this study account for the possibility that differing amounts of effort were required? Also, what was the methodology for measuring language proficiency, and what was included in "language profiency" (for example, presumably all native speakers of languages without written forms are illiterate until they learn a second language)?

I'm with woodwojr on this one. It's hard (impossible) enough to assess language ability itself, let alone what has gone into obtaining it. And did this study take into account literacy, which is our bread and butter here on this site? As a native English speaker, I was reading hundred-page novels while I was in Kindergarten, while I believe most Japanese youngsters don't reach that level in their own language until late elementary school due to the kanji barrier. I'd imagine that people with more regular spelling, like Italian or Spanish have it even easier than English speakers.

Jarvik7 Wrote:some feral humans already exist.

I've seen some of them trolling at this forum...

I thought Chinese had no grammar and required aliens to pronounce it correctly, and monkeys could pronounce Japanese correctly but you have to crack a veiled primordial secret to compile a correct Japanese sentence, but I heard it from aliens and monkeys while I was taking an Onsen, so I could be wrong.

gibosi Wrote:So Japanese youngsters, Chinese youngsters and American youngsters of the same age were found to have the same level of language proficiency.

Well that's false unless we are just talking about speaking ability.

A typical 7 year old American child has all of the tools necessary to read/write any material written in the English language. You can hand them an adult level novel at that point and they can read through it. Yes it might be slow and painful and they might not understand a lot of the words but they should be able to read all of it back to you.

Hand a typical 7 year old Japanese child an adult level Japanese novel and ask them to read it back to you and you're going to get a whole lot of silence.

activeaero Wrote:A typical 7 year old American child has all of the tools necessary to read/write any material written in the English language. You can hand them an adult level novel at that point and they can read through it. Yes it might be slow and painful and they might not understand a lot of the words but they should be able to read all of it back to you.

I would like to watch you try that experiment.

At 7, all I could read was "Oui-Oui et le facteur" and "Le vélo de Oui-Oui".

I agree. I was reading at a high school level in second grade; the significance in this context isn't that I was able to do it, but that a "high school level" exists.

Granted, once you get past the first few grade levels we're talking more about facility than ability, but that makes a large difference (semi-literate adults are often formed from those for whom reading was just a bit harder than everyone else, as practice makes perfect and difficulty makes no-practice).

~J

Jarvik7 Wrote:

danieldesu Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Yeah. Hasn't research with them shown that they can't learn languages though? That is, if they are feral until a really late age. From what I've heard, several years after being "saved" they still only use one-word sentences.

I thought that was generally because of the many years of abuse

Not all feral children are abused, unless you count their original abandonment as abuse.

But some of them do learn to speak.
Being abandoned is an abuse on its own but everyone of thes children seem to be linked to abuse cases.
Also, this referst to first language acquisition, not second language.

activeaero Wrote:Hand a typical 7 year old Japanese child an adult level Japanese novel and ask them to read it back to you and you're going to get a whole lot of silence.

I'm a native Japanese and I used to have a lot of Kanji I couldn't read but know or could guess the meaning of them. I don't know if being able to read out while not knowing the meaning is better, or knowing the meaning while not being able to pronounce is better.

QuackingShoe Wrote:I would like to watch you try that experiment.

Do you find it unbelievable? I clearly stated they wouldn't be flying through it and that it would be slow and painful but the point is by about the second grade American children possess the tools to read and write any piece of literature. It's really just vocabulary building after that point. I was reading fairly advanced books in second grade and by the age of 8-9 years old I had thread through Jurassic Park 2-3 times (the movie came out when I was 10 and I had received the book long before I knew it would ever become a movie) and I was no different than plenty of other kids my age that just actually spent time reading.

The major point is that in English as soon as kids get the basics down they can easily acquire not only the meaning of new vocabulary but the pronunciation WITHOUT having to learn any additional information, such as characters they aren't familiar with.

And, as someone else mentioned the rate of time it takes to get to a certain level doesn't exactly relate to acquisition difficulty if the amount of effort is not equivalent. Japanese society has roughly the same literacy level as the United States but they also work on Kanji for approximately 9 years.

mentat_kgs Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:

danieldesu Wrote:I thought that was generally because of the many years of abuse

Not all feral children are abused, unless you count their original abandonment as abuse.

But some of them do learn to speak.
Being abandoned is an abuse on its own but everyone of thes children seem to be linked to abuse cases.
Also, this referst to first language acquisition, not second language.

I thought the ones who were just abandoned were just hearsay stories from the 19th century.

adutrifoy Wrote:At 7, all I could read was "Oui-Oui et le facteur" and "Le vélo de Oui-Oui".

That's pretty good, though! I'm 25 and I still can't even read the titles of those books.

Ha, omgosh people. I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to "troll." I hope anyone didn't take me mentioning the word "babies" as starting another off topic debate. I was just joking. I didn't mean it to be in any way related to previous debates. I'm really sorry. That was a total coincidence. I really didn't mean it that way.

activeaero Wrote:Japanese society has roughly the same literacy level as the United States but they also work on Kanji for approximately 9 years.

This is only half true.

Before learning kanji, I would agree with this, until I was confronted by a taiwanese friend that said it was ridiculous. He stated that he could read almost everything since very young.

I've also met Japanese small children, brought up in Brazil, doing JLPT1 to get almost perfect scores. They were home tutored by their parents.

I believe that It largely depends on the individual. One that wants to read, learns how to read quickly. Alphabet or not, it doesn't matter.

masaman Wrote:I thought Chinese had no grammar and required aliens to pronounce it correctly, and monkeys could pronounce Japanese correctly but you have to crack a veiled primordial secret to compile a correct Japanese sentence, but I heard it from aliens and monkeys while I was taking an Onsen, so I could be wrong.

lol Please tell me where that Onsen is!

It's the famous lysergic acid diethylamide springs.

~J

A Japanese friend of mine told me that she has been reading newspapers in Japnese since 4th grade.

And I seem to remember an article that states that most American don`t reach a decent level of literacy until mid-way through Junior High.

Anecdote fight, START!

~J

Not only Americans. Literacy is on short supply over the whole world.

watashimo Wrote:A Japanese friend of mine told me that she has been reading newspapers in Japnese since 4th grade.

And I seem to remember an article that states that most American don`t reach a decent level of literacy until mid-way through Junior High.

I could easily read a newspaper in 4th grade here in the US. I don't get what the point of your comment is?

liosama Wrote:

kfmfe04 Wrote:http://www.language-learning-advisor.com...other.html
.

This link pretty much kills the whole point of this (stupid) thread. Although he is wrong in some parts (i.e hanzi not being phonetic) he clearly and concisely shows that this argument is useless, just like some other arguments on this forum, which really leads one nowhere.

What i've gathered so far;

Useless information comparing two completely different languages, people bragging about how much they know, and two arguing for no reason.

Why not discuss something more intellectually stimulating. Arguing which language is harder is shit i heard back in primary school and high school, and shit that linguists argued back when linguists was in its elementary orientalist stage. I'd like to think we are all capable of something more complex than that.

hmm... quite a politically correct answer... (j/k)

Well... let me add my two cents worth in this thread as a being subjected to a bilingual experiment being conducted since 40 years ago.

I've studied Chinese as a second language for around 10 years. Like many opinions that were expressed here. There's not so much of "grammar" per say in the traditional sense (at least for the spoken part) The "grammar" portion of Chinese was pretty much settled by grade 2 (first 2 years) I suppose... you'll get a feel of where to put the nouns, adjectives and verbs in a sentence correctly 80% of the time pretty much after 1-2 years of "immersive" study.

The rest of the 8 years were spent on memorizing the usage of various words/phrases/idioms/etc. Of course, there's "Higher Chinese" or "Classical Chinese" for those who are interested but most people will never touch that (at least for my country) unless you're taking Chinese Literature or they have an interest in ancient chinese text. It's pretty much an alien language on its own.

Most of the characters used in Classical Chinese are still the same as now, pronunciation will not be an issue. However, I would have no idea what a particular statement meant or what information it was trying to convey. This is due to the fact that they talked in "references" and more often than not, they talked with a different sentence structure from the Chinese of now and the characters have different meanings. Thus, if you have no idea what event/idiom/moral they are referring to, you will more likely than not, have no idea what a sentence is trying to say.

As for tonal aspect of Chinese language. Based on my past experience, I've not met an American/European with an native accent of a Chinese speaker (e.g. HK, China, TW, MY, SG). Most of them can pronounce almost every word/character correctly but they still sound foreign. Of course, none of the listed countries have similar accents to each other and they even pronounce some of the characters differently but it's not hard for me (or others) to imitate the other countries' accents. However, it appears that natives of English/European language (Chinese descents included) have problem imitating the accents of those five countries.

However, it's really a much smaller issue than you would think. People will still understand you even if your accent is off and as a matter of fact, local girls (of the listed countries) actually dig guys who speak Mandarin with a foreign accent. This is most likely due to the fact that as a native English speaker there is a perceived notion of being "educated" cause you can speak English and even made the effort to learn Chinese/speak Mandarin

As for English, I'll like to argue that acquiring new pronunciations is not as easy as just reading the papers. Most of the time, you need to hear it somewhere or reading up the phonetics in a dictionary due to the fact that English is not a phonetic language. I do not deny that you can pick up new vocab easily with reading but then again, so can you with Chinese after a certain level.

P.S. Didn't expect to write this much... Am too lazy to check my grammar. Treat it as senseless ramblings if you think it does not make sense. Cheers