If we struggle with our mother tongue despite years in school, do we lack innate talent for languages? Most of us won’t end up speaking 11 languages like Oxford student Jonas Fine Tan, but his story should inspire us to try, says NUS Centre for Language Studies’ Daniel Chan.
despite formal classes and some level of daily exposure, might this suggest we simply lack innate linguistic talent and shouldn’t try picking up another language?
There is no scientific basis, however, for why languages should be learned sequentially. Our brains can segregate different languages and access them efficiently as needed, so humans are naturally equipped to manage multiple languages concurrently.There are countless examples of children growing up multilingual, such as with the One Parent One Language method where each parent speaks exclusively in one language to the child.
Jonas Fine Tan, for instance, learnt Thai not just from textbooks but by interacting with native speakers, hanging out at a Thai restaurant near his mother’s workplace over the years. Such real-world practice can help not only to improve speaking proficiency but also to understand the nuances, colloquialisms, and cultural contexts over a detached set of grammar rules and vocabulary.
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