Language (Duolingo) Blues
Sometime in May, I sat in my room taking my daily French lesson on Duolingo. I had just discovered that je mangerais has a different meaning from je mangerai, and that their tenses are different. One means “I would eat” — the conditional, and the other, “I will eat” — the future tense. It felt like the disks in my head were spinning so fast that they hurt; why the heck is French so complex? Do I actually think I can master this language? That doubt seemed to grow bigger as I trudged on, until I decided that before giving up, I’d look into the science behind learning a new language as an adult, and if I realistically stood a chance.
I did my NYSC in Zaria, Kaduna State where Hausa, a language I did not speak, or understand was the lingua franca. A year later, I returned to Lagos with only a few scattered words and phrases — enough to communicate at a market and navigate public transport (with the help of some Nigerian pidgin) and not much more. My dad, who speaks Hausa fluently as he spent part of his childhood in Zungeru, Niger State and went on to attend ABU Zaria was slightly disappointed.My mum, on the other hand, spent over 10 years in Hausa speaking states, and like me, her Hausa isn’t great.
I had a couple of hypotheses (read: excuses) for why my Hausa is poor:
- During my NYSC year, I lived in a household where everyone spoke Yoruba. At work, everyone mostly spoke in English, so I didn’t exactly enjoy a great cultural immersion experience. Like me, my aunt who had spent more than sixteen years in Zaria at the time, couldn’t speak Hausa well. To communicate properly, she so often relied on her eldest daughter who was grew up in Zaria and speaks Hausa like a native.
- Adults are at a disadvantage when compared to kids because in order to learn a language, one needs to make mistakes. As adults, we are less willing to make mistakes and get corrected, especially in public — something about a sense of shame we acquire as we shed our childhood innocence when growing up.
These two theories were my go-to whenever the topic of my poor Hausa came up. Now, with more information, I discovered that I wasn’t entirely wrong. Immersion is a big part of how children learn languages, and practice (and corrections) is the feedback loop that improves understanding of languages. But, I wasn’t entirely right either.
The brain, like any part of the human body is a collection of cells but unlike cells outside of the nervous system, they’re called neurons. A neuron has three main parts — the soma, the dendrites and the axon. The soma is the “normal” part of the neuron that contains the regular things expected of a cell — as per high school biology — nucleus, mitochondria etc. The other two parts are used for something unique to the nervous system; an electrochemical process for working and communicating with other neurons. When a neural event occurs, the activated neuron generates an electrical pulse that travels down the axon to its tip, where chemicals called neurotransmitters are released. This chemical travels across the space between neurons — the synapse — and attach to the dendrites of a neighboring neuron, which in turn (depending on the signal) generates its own pulse towards another neuron, or does nothing.
This connection, replicated across millions of different neurons in billions of patterns are how the brain encodes information into memory. This recursive connection between individual neurons is the principle behind neural networks — a technique for machine learning applications.
Every bit of memory we have — the multiplication table, the outfit combination we intend to wear tomorrow, the annoying facts we memorize before an academic test — is a connection path between specific neurons in the brain. This means that every new bit of information forms a new path in our brains and the strength of the memory is dependent on how strong that path is; stronger connections between the neurons means a reduced likelihood of forgetting said information.
When I started learning French using Duolingo, the first few exercises (called skills) felt like trivia games. It felt like trying to remember the one-to-one translations of common words — cow; vache, son; fils, woman; femme, garden; jardin. This was something I could live with; it seemed like a game of raw brainpower and I was confident I was not lacking too much in that department. As time went on, things got more complex; gendered nouns, conjugated verbs in what seemed like a million tenses, annoying exceptions to rules and what felt like silly figures of speech. I kept trying to treat it like trivia using the one-to-one mapping of words in my head and I physically felt a headache; I felt like I was hitting my head against an internal wall and I knew that I had to figure out a new approach.
On average, adults have cognitive advantages over children. This is why schoolteachers are almost always adults. As adults, we’ve had the opportunity to store extensive bits of information in our heads over time. Compared to children whose brains are still growing to their full sizes, as adults, we have much bigger brains.
When learning a new language, what we’re trying to do is form reliable memories between words and their sounds (phonetics and phonology), speech (grammar) and their meanings (semantics). Why then, considering our bigger brains, do we find it difficult to learn languages as adults?
One key physiological advantage that children have over adults is their ability to form new memories. Children can form new neural paths in their brains a lot easier and faster than adults typically can. The people of old weren’t wrong after all, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. This property — the ability to form new neural paths quickly is commonly called neuroplasticity and its constraint is the biggest handicap adults have when learning new languages. Does this mean that adults should kiss their hope for new language skills goodbye?
While I was in Zaria, my aunt had a baby and one of her husband’s relatives — let’s call her Mama — came to stay with us for a few months to help out with the stress that comes with having a baby. As it turned out, she didn’t only help out with taking care of the new born, she also helped in the translation duties that, before then, was the exclusive preserve of the first daughter. I was curious to know where in the North she grew up to learn how to speak Hausa so fluently, so I asked her. Her answer? She was born and raised in Ghana. She came to Nigeria as an adult and lived in Bida, Niger state for a few years where she picked up Hausa. She later settled in Ilorin where she perfected her Yoruba, complete with the Ilorin accent.
When I hit my headache-inducing roadblock, I remembered Mama and was reminded that one can learn a new language as an adult and attain fluency. This was confirmed by a study by Dutch researchers to determine if people who start learning a new language after they turn 12 can attain native-like levels of pronunciation (speaking) proficiency. It is possible. Here are some of the factors which lead to this outcome, according to the Dutch research team:
- Some people do not experience the sharp decline in neuroplasticity that comes with age. This means that their brains retain an “exceptional organization for language” well into adulthood. According to the researchers, people who fit this description tend to have certain features such as being left-handed, having an auto-immune disorder, or being a twin. This may explain why some individuals simply find it easy to learn new languages as adults.
- Adults who have a high motivation to learn tend to learn new languages better. This is perhaps the most self-explanatory as the frustration that comes with the seeming lack of progress in language learning means that a lot of adults give up without even getting anywhere, like I almost did myself.
- They have continuous access to input in the target language. This suggests that immersion continues to be a big factor affecting language learning.
- They found that instruction-enhanced learning improved outcomes. This may be why students who study languages in universities and formal institutes come out with a deeper understanding of the language than those who learn informally in the same time frame.
I’m about eight months into my French learning journey, and while Duolingo has been my primary tool (because it’s free), I have supplemented with podcasts (including Duolingo podcasts). I have also been getting into French twitter and reading French-language news while resisting the urge to have it auto-translated for me. Duolingo says my vocabulary is about four thousand words wide; but this count includes all of the different conjugations and tenses of verbs, along with plurals of adjectives and nouns. I reckon that the true unique word count is closer to about three to five hundred. That feels like slow progress, but I have reminded myself that I spent fifteen-odd years in school — from pre-primary level up to the first year of university — learning English full time, so I am not doing badly given the amount of time I’ve dedicated to it. A true comparison may only be gotten after I’ve spent a comparable amount of time learning French.
Now, I ensure that I take a lesson with tests at least once a day, and ensure I get a good night’s sleep. I found that we have two types of memory : a “working” volatile memory, and a more resilient “permanent” one. When we learn something, it stays in the working memory where it is easily forgotten until a consolidation process moves it into the permanent memory; this process has different durations for different classes of inputs, but it accelerates when we sleep. An impairment of long-term memory or the consolidation process is a cause of amnesia. I’m also looking to read more French language content. A study from University of Indiana Bloomington found extracurricular reading to be the biggest factor explaining the difference in TOEFL scores of their incoming international students, followed by having native speaking teachers. Another study of Fijian schools teaching English as a second language also found that students given story books as part of their learning progressed in listening and reading comprehension at twice the rate of the control group.
For all of the science I immersed myself in, my biggest takeaway has been to stop treating language learning as a problem solving exercise and rather as trying to understand an incredibly complex, multi-texture universe. My comfort and speed will fluctuate, but the more time I spend inside that universe, the better I’ll understand it.
