At high school I dropped French and choose German. After I went for work experience in the UK and I did an Erasmus in Spain. And now at age 41, I am finally learning French. It is not a punishment, it is a beautiful and rich language and I am happy to be in the process of discovering this language of Molière.
A personal journey
The moment we decided to move to France I started a language course from home and I had an online teacher for conversation skills. Starting from zero I got most of the fundamental basics when I left the Netherlands in July last year.
I can be described as a extravert person. My jobs always consisted of a lot of talking and I love to end up in discussions about interesting topics. I am also perfectly capable of handling my own business. This of course, was in the Netherlands. After moving to France, my ability to understand what was said and to talk was mostly gone. I felt lost for a while.
I always felt comfortable around people, but all of a sudden I was not able to engage in small talk. My face turned red when I did not understand or made a mistake. Julien had to help me to open a bank account and when the phone rang I was afraid to pick it up. I got frustrated with my learning abilities, I thought that I was learning way to slow.
Luckily I am not lost anymore and feel more confident every day. I pick up the phone, talk to the neighbour and engage in a discussion when I can. I learned to be patient and see a more realistic learning curve. Diving a bit into the science of learning a language helped.
Critical learning period
A study performed at MIT says that children remain skilled at learning the grammar of a new language up to the age of 18. If you start learning a language at the age of 10, you can still reach the level of a native speaker. When you start as an adult it is nearly impossible to be as fluent as a native.
Children learn more intuitively and playfully. Adults often translate from their mother tongue when they learn a new language. They try to apply the rules they already know to the new language. This does not always match, what makes the process of memorizing less easy. While we learn a new language we use many parts of our brain, and this brain needs time to process it all.
Age is just a number
Research also shows that age is not such a significant factor. More important factors are motivation and the amount of exposure to the new language. So it might take longer to learn a language but on the other hand the motivation will bring you a long way. And some other good news: there is a theory that acquiring a second language in your adulthood will delay cognitive decline later on!
My French learning(s)
My motivation is very high and I am exposed to the language on a daily basis, that is a good start. I noticed that when I was in France for a couple of months, my ability to understand people improved enormously. On the other hand most conversations were still a struggle for words and when I did a good old dictation I had a massive amount of mistakes on the lowest level.
I am studying on my own at this moment and I try to improve on all levels. I listen to podcasts, check the news, watch French YouTubers, write stories and I do a fair amount of grammar. The more I get the hang of the construction of the language, the exceptions (a lot) and the conjugation of the verbs the more I feel confident to speak. I rather repeat again and again to fully grasp the basics than go to fast.
Thanks to the internet there is a lot of free material to choose from. My two favorite French teachers with excellent content are Hugo from innerFrench and Guillaume Posé.
And for the very important informal everyday language learning I just listen to friends and family conversate and try to memorize: laisse béton, un mec, le bouquin, le boulot, etc, etc.
Sources:
The sience of language is as complex as learning a language (Now)
Dit is waarom een tweede taal leren als volwassene zo verdraaid lastig is (Scientias)
Waarom kinderen sneller taal leren (Eos wetenschap)