When Is Learning a Language Not Enough?

I teach Japanese to foreign people. I am, of course, a foreign person. I used to teach English to Japanese.

My father spoke three languages: English, French and German. I also speak three languages, English, Japanese and French, probably in that order of comfortability.

But when does learning another language become counterproductive, even useless? I gauge it at when the speaker of that foreign language needs additional subtitles in the foreign language he's speaking in order to be understood.

In other words, kind of like the Japanese professor-type in this video. To him I say: well done, old fellow, well done. You have learned a substantial amount of English. No doubt you understand it very well; even technical conversations are fairly easy to understand. But to him I also say: but don't bother speaking it to any speakers of English. Because it borders on the incomprehensible. His accent in English is so appallingly bad that it may as well not be English at all.

Which brings things back to my father. He could SPEAK French and German; this much is true. But his accent was so appalling that he may have well just not have bothered, although his grammar and vocabulary levels were impressive. Unfortunately, while he was speaking those languages, it wasn't very practical to have subtitles floating above his head that actually explained what he was trying to say in the foreign language.

I think you're most often just a victim of your childhood. If you grow to age 18 or so never having learned another language as a child, it is unlikely that the pathways in your brain will be malleable enough to truly be able to learn how to speak a foreign language. Indeed, any language but your own.

As an experiment, find someone you know who speaks English as a second language. Assess (in your own mind!) how well they actually speak -- in other words, how close their accent is to true English. Do they speak almost flawlessly, with a better than 75% rate of immediate understandability, or with less than 50% of understandability, in which case you spend a lot of time wondering what it is that they are trying to say?

I'm willing to bet that those whose accents are very good learned a second language to some degree or another before the age of ten. Those whose accents are appalling, like the Japanese gentleman's in the video, probably never started learning a second language natively, that is, among the target speakers of the language, before they were 18.

I, luckily, as a child, was from infanthood raised in a milieu of a constantly-spoken foreign language. In my case, it was Hindustani, with a lot of Bengali and perhaps also a sprinkling of Tamil and Urdu thrown in.

Apparently, although I've completely forgotten it all now, by age five I was speaking Hindustani as well as I spoke English. I even have faint memories of being able to understand the local people around me in Calcutta, were I was born, and being able to talk to them without using English.

After that, at age 13 or so, I was thrust into learning French with Belgians in what is now the Congo, which continued with French with the French in Senegal a couple of years later. So by the time I was 18, I had already been almost 100% fluent in TWO completely different foreign languages.

Which made it fifty times easier to learn German in my 20s and Japanese when I was in my early 30s. My German teacher in community college was "shocked" at how good my accent in German was, although I'd never learned the language before. She told me that when I parroted certain phrases that she uttered, she could tell that I was speaking in her accent of Stuttgart, even though I had no idea what that was. My parroting was that good.

Later, French people would tell me they could tell that I'd learned French from the Belgians. Now, when I speak Japanese, Japanese people can instantly tell that I learned Japanese in Osaka. Not Nagasaki or Fukuoka or Sapporo -- Osaka.

So even though my Japanese is not great from a vocabulary standpoint, the words I do know are spoken without an English accent and in the exact intonation in which I learned them.

I feel sorry for this Japanese fellow in the video. Even though he has put in many, many hours of learning English, he would be among the first to qualify for a new technology of projecting subtitles out of one's mouth. Then at least what he was saying wouldn't get in the way of how it was being said.