"Senior" adults can learn a new foreign language

When we discuss our interest in languages with friends who are older, we sometimes hear comments such as: "I'm too old for learning a new language" or "I was never good at language learning" or "I've tried, but it's hard and I quickly forget the words I've learned."

Yes, learning a new language for an older adult is clearly not as easy as it is for children who learn their first language.

My wife, Ulrike and I started learning Italian in our sixties and Spanish a few years later. Just last year, now well into our seventies, we started with Danish in preparation for a trip to Denmark.
And if you read Ulrike's latest Blog post, you'll also know why stories and language learning go well together.

Seniors have a lot of stories to tell!

Yesterday as we were walking around Fresh Pond, we passed a family with a couple of preschoolers who were happily chatting away in French.

And while we speak French quite fluently, we were still envious of how these young children were speaking French so effortlessly. If we could just learn a new language as easily as we picked up our first one so many years ago!

There are several reasons why can't:

For one, as we get older - already by the age of seven or eight - we are beginning to lose our ability to HEAR the different sounds of other languages. (We wrote a Blog Post about that some time ago: Beyond "Learning a Language Like a Child")

And therefore, obviously, we also have to practice much more the pronunciation of foreign words, especially if our native language does not even have these sounds.

Children have a big advantage here, as they can imitate sounds and words much better than older adults.

And while it is true that the short-term memory of older adults can often not compete with that of children or younger adults - it is for that very reason that you should consider learning another language.

This recent article summarizes well some of the benefits and research findings.

But more than just medical benefits, both learning and speaking another language lets you also access another network for social contact, either online or in person.

In the Boston area we are lucky to have many meetup opportunities, just check out the language meetups within a 25 mile radius.

Watertown-based GamesforLanguage offers 4 languages online - completely free: French, German, Italian, and Spanish. There are other online programs, such as Lingohut, Duolingo, Lingualia, Mosalingua, Language Zen, LingQ, etc. which are also free or at least have free versions.

Drop us a line at contact, if you, or your group, would like some help to get started.