Denise   January 18, 2012 at 4:31 pm

This may not qualify as my most recent foreign language was acquired for career purposes. I had a handful of one-on-one lessons in Portuguese shortly before leaving for a 4-year assignment in Brazil. These lessons had negligible impact as I was totally preoccupied with packing and preparing for the move. I was 56 at the time. The real learning began when I arrived in Brazil. Initially I spent 9 weeks at a language school in Salvador where I participated in total immersion classes for 4 hours a day with a small group of 4-5 other students. The morning classes were supplemented by daily homework exercises and a weekly excursion outside the city. It was an ideal environment for becoming familiar with the basic elements of the language. I also found it helpful to be “shielded” by the other members of the group and able to learn at my own pace. The others were all younger (eg young professionals working for airlines) and were all from Europe which meant they were much more relaxed about operating in an oral environment where they did not understand everything they heard and accepted they would make mistakes. I saw this as a direct result of their growing up in a multilingual continent where they were frequently exposed to alien languages and not intimidated by having only partial understanding of them. By contrast I grewn up in a monolingual country with no shared borders and had learned French from formal grammar books with minimal oral practice and felt inhibited by having only fragmentary knowledge.) After gaining some basic facility in Portuguese, I then transferred to Sao Paulo where I had one-on-one lessons for 4 hours a day for 5 weeks. This was less fun but corrected some of my egregious faults. In each case, the opportunity to get to know the city and local culture was of immeasurable value and helped develop the confidence I needed to live and work in Brazil. After taking up my assignment in Brasilia, I continued to have weekly one-on-one classes in formal Portuguese for a couple of years. There is no doubt that my familiarity with French, Italian, Spanish and Latin helped me acquire Portuguese. But the greater key to my progress was daily reading of the national newspapers and, most importantly, listening to local public radio whenever I could (to accustom my ear to the variety of accents and intonations of spoken Portuguese). Despite ongoing study, my ability to communicate in Portuguese did not progress in a steady linear fashion over the 4 years but by irregular leaps from plateau to plateau. The secret to advancing seemed to lie in frequent usage of and exposure to the spoken word.

Ginna   October 24, 2011 at 4:40 pm

My uncle who was fluent in Arabic and used it a lot while working in the foreign service has, since retirement, been studying French. I think he has a tutor and does self-study. I know he watches the news in French every night. I believe he has gotten pretty fluent.
We hired a driver to drive us from Paris to Liege who taught himself languages the following way: he would watch a movie in the target language dubbed into French on DVD. Then he would watch it in the target language with French subtitles. Then he would watch it in the target language alone. He learned many languages this way. His English was very fluent. He was in his 40s or 50s, so he wasn’t that old though.
I think the reason the infants only recognize language elements from humans has more to do with them being infants than with the way we acquire language. However, it is my belief that we learn everything better when another human is part of the process.