Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
He means for language in general. Google for "wild child" cases to see what happens.
But there's generally a point of no return for attaining native fluency in an L2 as well. You can get good, but not perfect. And eventually it will become pretty unrealistic to acquire it with any decent level as you age.
An 80 year old is not going to be able to attain fluency in a totally foreign language no matter how hard he tries.
I think you all just have had terrible classroom experiences. My university traditionally produces very skilled speakers of Japanese. However, to be fair, there are some outside-the-classroom opportunities to move from conversant to fluent. The students who end up majoring in Japanese have traditionally tended to participate in these extracurricular opportunities.
Regardless, if you get As in my alma mater's Japanese classes, after four years you will be conversant.
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Haha, people always used to call me "Wild Child" when I was little. I think that had to do with too much language rather than a language deficiency unfortunately
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I will admit that my high school's Japanese program was a mess. The book was bad and the teachers were bad. Once I got to college, however, things were looking up, but the gaps between the levels were huge. I remember many people complaining about it and a very distinct reason given for this: second+ generation Japanese. It's almost like taking a course for native speakers (they pretty much are native... just without some cultural stuff). Getting A's in those courses would definitely make you fluent! Beign fluent to begin with was almost a prerequisite though (which is an interesting prerequisite when you'd think the
course would go in some kind of linear stages). On the bright side, though, I think I got a lot more focused study on culture, which I am very thankful for. I had plenty of opportunities to interact with study abroad students (extracuricular activities included) and it was when I started doing that that I decided to just "immerse" myself, which was a concept given to me by my first college level Japanese teacher. I'll admit that I was completely ignorant of all things language-learning before I decided to study Japanese. So some of the most basic concepts really resonated with me when I first heard them in college.
At any rate, that "Wild Child" thing your talking about is fascinating. I am going to do some studying on that. A lot of the research I've read seems to come from the 60's-80's (with the occasional early 90's material). That's just what I had access to in terms of books.. recently I've been trying to find stuf on the internet to make up for this deficit though.
Can you show me some actual sources of these cases? This is the only one that I have found (after a very brief search of course):
Oxana Malaya - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia