On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Jesse Johnson
<garand555@comcast.net> wrote:
Hi,
My first post on the list. I decided to learn a little Lojban about 2 weeks ago. The idea of a language with grammar based on predicate logic intrigues me.
To address what you are talking about, one of my coworkers in the past moved to the US from Italy when he was 8 or 9 years old. He did not speak one word of English when he arrived. He has no accent so most native speakers do not realize that English is not his native tongue. What gets him are some of the idioms. There were a few times when I used some slang or some idiom and I'd get a blank stare, then a question about what it meant. Those were the only times that his command of the English language would indicate that he wasn't born here. His grammar is better than mine.
Jesse Johnson
Yoav Nir wrote:
I may be wrongly picking up on your name, and maybe it's just a handle, but it sounds decidedly non-English speaking.
So at what age did you start learning English? I did after age 8, and yet both you and I are fluent enough. At least in this and other messages to the list, you show evidence of both a rich vocabulary and good command of the complex English tense system. I believe that my English is similarly up to the standards of a native English speaker, though maybe with a somewhat poorer vocabulary than that of an educated English speaker.
Talking face to face, it takes Americans some time to recognize a foreign accent, but I can attribute that to the variety of accents you can find within the US itself.
With people who learn a foreign language by immersion later in life, I've seen them get to a very good command of the new language in a short time, reaching the level of a 6-year-old kid within 1 year. Russians, for example, can learn to use articles if they want to.
With all that, I don't see how you could say that the brain can't learn new patterns.