White Matter
Although I am somehow now functioning in a Chinese language working environment, I know myself to be a very slow language learner. While many people study languages because they have a natural facility for doing so, I study languages for the opposite reason: because it is so damn hard.
Although I normally wouldn’t touch BBC science reporting with a ten foot pole, I’m happy to link to this story which gives me a neat biological explanation for my own struggles.
People with a gift for other languages could have different brains from those of other people, a study suggests.
Neuroscientists at University College London say they have more “white brain matter” in a part of the brain which processes sound.
You see, I’m just lacking “white matter” in my brain. Interestingly, for the experiment they picked as an example a sound that I’ve been struggling with in my own attempts to learn Hindi:
Those involved in the trial - all native French speakers - were asked to distinguish between two similar sounds from different languages.
The first was the “d” sound found in their own language which is made by placing the tip of the tongue against the top teeth.
The second was a “d” found in Hindi, which is pronounced by curling the tongue upwards towards the roof of the mouth.
… Some of the fastest learners were able to tell these apart within a few minutes, while the slowest learners were only able to make random guesses at the less difficult stage after 20 minutes of training.
Based on my own experience with this test I can make an educated guess at which of the two pictures below represents my brain!
UPDATE: Thanks to the ever-vigilant Tim May, a link to a Language Log post that discusses the research in more detail.
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Comments
Thanks, somehow I’d missed that post. But I’m not surprised to find that the actual data is much more complex than the BBC’s notoriously awful science reporting makes it out to be. But I’m still going to blame my lack of “white matter” for my poor skills at distinguishing unfamiliar phonemes. It is about as good as any other excuse I can think of!
language working environment, I know myself to be a very slow language learner. While many people study languages because they have a natural facility for doing so, I study languages for the opposite reason: because it is so damn hard. Keywords:White Matter
Kerim Friedman:
>White Matter
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I’ve read that language sounds were taught to young schoolchildren in 1930s Czechoslovakia. Czech people that I have met were educated under the Communist dispensation, when the practice was unknown.
In much of the world, pronunciation is the neglected component of English language teaching in formal schools. This contrasts with the teaching of French under French government guidance, which is better in every respect.
Most teachers of English to foreign immigrants that I’ve worked with respond with delight to practising performance phonetics.
Schoolchildren could be taught original-language pronunciation of imported words and of proper nouns like pizza and Ferrari, shao mai and Beijing.
Pronunciation, once adequately approximated, never fades. Where the tongue once went, it easily recalls the way. This is unlike our vocabulary, which dwindles out of reach, and our syntax, which is easily confounded.
Chester,
That’s an interesting observation. I never thought about this as a skill that can be taught, but of course it is. There is no reason one couldn’t develop a better appreciation for phonetic distinctions through proper training. The problem may be that teachers don’t know how to teach it and so treat it as a biological trait.
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
Some coverage of this research at Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003032.html