A letter to a language learner



Above: King Lear and the fool
"Mark it, nuncle. Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest, ride more than thou goest, learn more than thou trowest."

On soft science, critical periods, age factors, foreign accent, and the wonder and torment of continuous perception
April 2014

INTRODUCTION (for people who aren't M.)

This is a letter that I wrote to a member of a film group I attend. We watch movies at the rinky-dink independent theatre in town and discuss them afterwards. Our commentary usually goes far, far afield — we rarely talk about the film for more than a few minutes. This group is full of stupidly brilliant people, stupidly successful people, and me. They tolerate me. We chat, we eat, maybe we drink some drinks or smoke some legal grass (go Washington!)

This is a letter to M. He is planning to emigrate to Norway soon. He has been working hard on his Norwegian; as I understand it after he arrives in Norway he intends to speak Norwegian, forgoing any English at all at least until he's finally solid, and that's that. Understandable. Probably not a bad plan. He has some family in Norway he will be with, though most of them he has never met, and the couple he has he barely remembers meeting. As far as I can tell, they are real saints. I'm sure he'll have tremendous support from them, but there is a lot up in the air, a lot he doesn't know, a lot of fear and uncertainty.

He is under an enormous amount of stress. He's leaving the country he's lived in his whole life. That, all by itself, would be enough. While he has reached a level of intermediate fluency in his Norwegian, and he has little difficulty working his way around in the language, it's still a new language and there's a lot he won't work out until he's lived in Norway a while. That would, under the best of circumstances, double his stress and anxiety. This is an enormous change of life, a momentous time, and it is not the kind of thing that a person can merely shrug at.

Something happened about a week ago that blew him up, and shook his confidence tremendously. It was absolutely the last thing that he needed. I hate it when people do this fucking shit.

Some Encyclopedia Brown in his old workplace — some weekend Wikipedia warrior — what a fuckhead — explained to him the critical-period hypothesis in second language acquisition (hereafter L2CPH). This was about as helpful to him, under the circumstances, as a quick dab of Ebola virus.

He came to the theater last week haggard and sleepless. He barely watched the film, he couched his head under his arms. At the group, this was all he talked about. He broke down into sobs. Just a damn mess.

For those of you not familiar with L2CPH: well, there are a bunch of different versions of it, but they all say more-or-less that there are strict maturational constraints involved in learning languages beyond your first. If you don't acquire a second language before the end of some critical period (usually ending quite young, definitely before adulthood) there are, it maintains, serious ramifications on ultimate attainment: that, in some aspects or others, your attainment in L2 will be incomplete, compared to those who acquire the language before the critical period closes.

There are weaker and stronger versions of the hypothesis: the weaker versions typically go that "okay, so you might maybe be able to eventually have native-like command of the grammar or make natural vocabulary choices in a language learned past the critical period, but in the realms of pronunciation you'll have a foreign accent (and probably a bad one)" while the stronger versions say things like "basically that, and fuck your grasp of grammar, too".

Now, Norwegians (at least in my limited experience) seem to have a pretty liberal-minded and laid-back and generally nice culture. I doubt that, even if M. does end up with a foreign accent or some 'broken' Norwegian (and he will certainly have such things at least for a while), he would come to much mischief. Maybe I'm wrong — maybe he'll fall headlong into a conclave of cannibal Norwegian racists somewhere or something. There are weird things in the world.

But that doesn't help him right now. That is little consolation at the moment. He was already holding the sky up on his shoulders — was it really necessary for someone to suggest to him that his plans for the future might be futile, that for the rest of his life he may have to struggle to understand or be understood, be indelibly marked in his use of language (ultimately the most important and fundamental of human activities; the way we connect with each other), living among his kin and but never being truly at home?

Now, M. is a highly intelligent human being. Norway should be thrilled to have him. But now M. was petrified of the future he might have. He was already scared by the situation, already tired out from his study and all the preparations he's made. Now he was despairing. There was a sense of identity being challenged and shaken here, and I can understand that. And I totally understand any desire to make yourself less of a target, less vulnerable. This could be hell even under the best possible conditions. Somebody always has to go and be an asshole and make things more difficult.

Let's be clear about something. Motivation is basically the most important thing going in language acquisition. It's far more important than the age factors that are observed (rather than the ones that are only hypothesized). If you have motivation, even moving the proverbial mountains can be possible. If you don't have it then you mostly wander through the proverbial wilderness. Now I'm getting all Biblical. Well, all right. Here M. was staring down a Great Deluge, and here he has an ark that he is building in anticipation of the coming calamity, and here is some scoffer explaining to him how his ark is doomed to sink. So his confidence took a big hit — if his motivation buckled, who knows how that could set him back? I mean, he has to finish his ark. Fuck that noise. Fuck that needless pain.

So I wrote M. a letter. Well, first, I gave him a big hug and promised him a letter. (If I ever promise you a letter, know that you're getting a book.) Then I went home and wrote him a letter. This letter.

He actually read it, the whole thing, and he's feeling a lot better, now, because the facts are that arks commonly float. He asked if I would post it on the Internet. Parts of this letter are painful and personal; it is not really something I was keen on circulating. I wrote it for him. He insisted, he thought other people might like to read it, and that it might help somebody else. I acquiesced finally, but did, however, remove my history from the letter, and some other potentially personally-identifying information; "names and a few details have been changed to protect the innocent."

Here is the text of the letter, with those slight edits:


For M. from Chris

Hi M.,

Fair warning: This is a long letter full of fairly heavy things. Don't feel like you put me through an undue amount of effort. You didn't. I had written down a lot of this before, some of it for S., some for students at the UW. Some of it — the introspective stuff about my own cognition — I wrote after Professor Richter died, because if it were not for him I would take these things for granted, and my life today would be poorer. I have regular manifestoes ready at hand for many things. And I enjoy corresponding about Real Important Things, and this is one of them.

I hope you've talked to your family, M. Family is everything. In the end your family will make more difference than anything else. I hope that what I write here might be helpful to you, might get you back on the track of "at least not despairing", but ultimately what I am doing here is a small thing.

I apologize for the length of this letter. Some of it might ramble a little. I'm sorry if it does. I touch on a lot of ground, and I had to hold myself back from writing a great deal more. (Always know more than you say, and never write everything you think.) And I want you to know that you will be better than all right.

Now. There are certain widely-held hypotheses in the academic world that ain't necessarily so. Or, they are only sometimes so, in a general sense, or they are useful as models of the truth, but they aren't actually, strictly speaking, true. They are statements of probability, statements of statistics. They may be flawed attempts at explaining some observations, perhaps more descriptive than prescriptive. That's why they are "hypotheses" instead of "facts" or "theories". We are going to talk about fuzzy and complicated things in this letter, things for which people don't have definitive answers. Instead of talking about science, we're going to concern ourselves with reality. Sometimes the reality is a little too difficult for our science, and we have to attempt to simplify things first, cut off the rough bits around the edges, before we make an stab at understanding it. There is a reason that "soft" sciences are sometimes so called. Let that never slip your mind.

There are also ideas that are challenged, contradicted, even refuted in the literature, in the laboratory, or in the observed "real world", however, people cling to them still. Maybe just because they don't have any better ideas, or because their own work or reputation is invested in that idea, or simply because of cognitive dissonance or some other human quirk. But bad ideas survive longer than they should, even in the face of the facts. Generalities are sometimes erroneously made into specifics, and in narrowing them like that you make them sharper, and being sharper they hurt real people.

I think that's what's happened to you, and I want to let you know exactly why you have no reason to fear.

Now these hypotheses that are continuously challenged and contradicted — these aren't crank ideas I am talking about, these are things that are generally regarded as mainstream. There are usually some good reasons to believe them, some at least superficially compelling evidence. But in the end, wrong is wrong, and some of these false notions do cause significant harm when people apply them in the wrong ways — when people confuse them for the truth.

I find these academic dogmata come in three flavors, sometimes in combination:

  1. They are broad generalizations meant to be theoretical framework for models, not actually intended as 'laws' — but which are cited and used that way anyway.
  2. They are originally meant as statements of probability, but are commonly misinterpreted as statements of hard fact, leading to mischief.
  3. They were mostly illusory in the first place, and much of the supporting literature is full of bad statistics or other subtle flaws.

Do you remember K. in our group? The fellow who hates Norway, cause he's the free-market libertarian? I had a lovely argument with him years ago about the efficient capital market hypothesis (ECMH) in academic finance. I wish you could have saw that.

There are a number of forms of ECMH, but they all say (to some degree and in some way) that information relevant to asset prices is reflected in asset prices. A simple idea, and one that in most cases at most times is a good approximation of the truth.

ECMH, as Paul Samuelson and Fischer Black understood it anyway, fell mostly in category #1 — a statement that is a simplification of what is actually a very complicated reality. That simplification, describing reality with limited distortions, is "good enough" to make models that make sensible conclusions about market and asset price behavior. It works as a framework for interesting research in finance and economics. It has some practical real-life applications (in portfolio theory, etc.) It does not, however, work as the basis for a market gospel: in fact it falls apart when you take it for granted.

It can be a helpful idea, you see; it is not, however, actually true. This is an important distinction. In fact, ECMH can't be true in the strict sense (if a market is fully efficient, there is no reward for and no participation by rational arbitrageurs, and hence no reason or cause for markets to be efficient.) The real "equilibrium" in market conditions in the real world involves, necessarily, some degree of inefficiency. Interesting, isn't it?

Something can, technically, be false and still be helpful. So there is such a thing as a white lie. The ECMH is, technically, wrong. You can quite confidently say that, whatever the truth is, that isn't it. That doesn't mean that it has no use, however.

There are people who earnestly believe it's true (bless their hearts) and they might die still believing it's true. There are even more people who realize it isn't actually true, but that, from a distance, it can model the reality "close enough" to stand in for the messy truths. And in that context, it is a useful belief, even if, y'know, it ain't actually so. There might not be angels, but belief in angels is useful to some people at some times.

Now, I am not saying here that academic finance or linguistic study is as unrigorous as angelography, not at all, but I am saying that certain tenets, certain hypotheses, certain common assumptions, of those fields of endeavor are every bit as... unlikely?... as angels. In the end, this may or may not actually matter. But it's true.

There is such a thing as a "white lie" in science, you see, especially when you get away from physics or chemistry or mathematics or such. There are places where our actual knowledge is sort of a dark, black pit, and we have to lie to ourselves to find our way anywhere. In truth, we might be in the bottom of the pit. But we can't tell ourselves that. Reality is extremely complicated.

Now, I just gave you one example of a "soft" science hypothesis that, while often widely accepted and quoted as something that is actually true, actually isn't. If you are interested, I can share with you some extremely amusing concrete examples of how ECMH fails if you try to directly test or observe it. When you go looking for unlikely and impossible things, you often find them. (Poor K. lost that argument hard, I don't think he expected me to have examples on my laptop.) But that is besides the real point here. I'm going to tell you about another not-quite-true hypothesis, now. While ECMH falls in category #1, this one is more categories #2 and #3.

There is no such thing as a critical period for second language acquisition. It exists like Santa Claus exists. It might seem strange that I can so confidently say that, when there are still many intelligent and educated people who would disagree. Even so, I am definitely right.

I could write a hundred pages explaining how and why this is so — I might before I'm done — but surely then I'd just be doing other people's work. Let's try and make a long story short, or shorter.

The first thing to say is that there are a lot of different statements of L2CPH quoted around. Not one of them has really emerged as the most favored by the evidence in the past 40 years. Some people assert that a critical period exists, but they disagree broadly on what domains of language acquisition are affected, or when approximately the CP is supposed to close, or what biological basis or mechanisms are actually involved in the CP, etc. Despite decades of research along these lines, there isn't a clear winner. This, all by itself, should have your baloney detector blinking a little.

Most formulations of L2CPH, anyway, allow for some important and eminently testable predictions. Here are four of them; these things fall pretty straightforwardly from a hard critical period, and we can actually test them:

  • If you plot age-of-acquisition of second language (L2) with measures of attainment, L2CPH predicts you will find a sharp drop-off in attainment corresponding to the end of the L2 critical period, because people who acquire L2 before the close of the critical period are able to reach a much higher level of mastery than the people who acquire L2 after the critical period has passed. Nothing says the critical period has to end around the same age for everybody (exhibiting a sharp discontinuity) but there is generally a narrow range of ages hypothesized for the CP, which should still result in a clear dive in L2 attainment through that closing range.

  • L2CPH predicts that people who are bilingual[1] since early childhood will be capable of maintaining proficiency of about equal (high) level with both languages. Since they acquired their languages before the close of CP, they will not exhibit the wide variance in attainment often seen in later learners.

  • L2CPH predicts that there will not be found adult ("late") L2 learners, people who acquire L2 after the critical period, that are broadly nativelike, or even nativelike in more specific domains (such as pronunciation or grammar use).

  • L2CPH commonly predicts it will be found that "late" bilinguals, even high-proficiency bilinguals, do not access the same structures of the brain for language tasks when using L1 or L2. After the CP ends, it is hypothesized that how the brain learns or accesses new language fundamentally changes. This ensures that late learners will have to co-opt different structures/processes in the brain to learn their L2. Early bilinguals, who acquired both languages before the end of CP, will use the same structures for both languages.

Guess what? None of these things are true. If none of these natural consequences of L2CPH are actually so, then (to be quite frank) why should you worry about it? Seriously, these have been tested repeatedly over the years. Here's what is found:

  • There is no sharp drop-off in language attainment with age. There is (on average — again, this is a statement of probabilities) a slow and gradual decline with age, but it continues long into adulthood, long, long past any putative critical period would end. Neither is there the rapid drop that would be associated with a CP. This is better explained as simply efficiency of cognitive processes, neuroplasticity, etc. declining normally with age — along with other factors correlated with age, for example, the fact that the older-acquisition your sample of language learners is, the lower the average time and frequency of L2 use will be[2]. It is also often shown that the age factor is far, far less important than L2CPH would predict (all-important). In fact, in many recent studies on the topic, age-of-acquisition is reliably shown to be a worse predictor of ultimate attainment in L2 than other factors, such as motivation, education, ability to construct and utilize learning strategies, etc. (There will be some studies along these lines for you to look up at the end of the letter, if you are interested.)

  • Equal proficiency in multiple languages is very rare, even in child learners. It is far more common — possibly universal — for bilinguals, whether as children or adults, to have a dominant language in which they are more proficient. You can teach somebody two languages from the time they are born, but unless they use both languages frequently and about equally (they almost never do) one will end up "stronger" than the other. Even if they do one will probably wind up dominant.

  • There exist broadly nativelike adult L2 learners. They are not especially common, but neither are they especially rare; David Birdsong had a study (again, quoted below) in which the incidence of broad nativelikeness was about ten percent, which he noted was similar to the frequency of left-handedness, hardly so unusual. There exist even more adult L2 learners who are nativelike in narrower domains (nativelike pronunciation, for example, or nativelike mastery of the grammar.) It's hard to get good figures on the actual frequency of nativelikeness, due to selection biases in most of the studies that test L2 attainment and other problems in methodology or construction, but some specific studies (I'll get to those) have in fact shown remarkably high incidence of narrow nativelikeness (10-40% for pronunciation, for example) with 1-15% as typical figures for broad nativelikeness over multiple domains. Due to the nature of the selection biases involved, these are more likely to be underestimates than overestimates. Of course, nativelike attainment may be more or less difficult/likely depending on the L1 and L2 involved in a specific case, or any number of other factors. But it does happen.

  • Neuroimaging has shown that high-proficiency bilinguals who acquired L2 as an adult do, in fact, use the same structures in the brain for language tasks as high-proficiency bilinguals who acquired both languages as children. These are the same for both L1 and L2. Conversely, bilinguals who learned both L1 and L2 as children, if they have a strongly dominant L1, do not necessarily use the same brain structures in both languages. Again: the deciding factor is L2 proficiency, not L2 age-of-acquisition. Given the same proficiency level, people who learned their second language at 30, in the brain, looked like people who learned it at 3.

Although those facts all present pretty stiff challenges to the hypothesis, the last one is perhaps particularly surprising, and the most recent to be tested (neuroimaging was a nascent science when L2CPH was first proposed.) Back when L2CPH was first proposed and being tested, people thought that the brain was much less plastic post-adolescence than it actually is. It was a lot easier then to believe that a hard critical period existed, simply because people didn't think the brain structures involved in language could change or grow much after early childhood, or at least after puberty. It's been convincingly demonstrated in the past ten years that they can.

The existence of nativelikeness in late L2 learners, even in relatively low incidence, is of course troubling for L2CPH as well: it, at the least, weakens it tremendously. Late nativelikeness exists, so, at least for those people, perhaps there is no CP, or, perhaps the CP extends well into adulthood. We can start weakening the hypothesis, but that still doesn't reconcile it with the other observations. When a hypothesis says "here is something that should never happen" and it happens, even happens repeatedly... well, your hypothesis is problematic, at best.

Let's talk a little bit about weak L2CPH, pertaining specifically to pronunciation. Proponents of weak L2CPH sometimes quote the fact — and they want to use this as evidence of weak L2CPH mind you — that there exist early bilinguals, people who learned their L2 from age 2 or 3 or 4, for example, who speak L2 with a noticeable foreign (L1) accent. The conclusion some people draw from this fact is that the critical period for pronunciation is extremely early. Some have suggested it might be as early as 1 year old! This, of course, has the very slight problem of not acknowledging the many L2 learners who acquire a language not-from-infancy but still do not exhibit FA... you know F. didn't speak English until he was 10 years old, right? Either such an early CP doesn't exist, or he is a exception that must somehow be explained else-wise: but if he is an exception there must be a million more in immigrant families around America, and what good then is there in such an early weak L2CPH? What does it actually tell us?

You see, these researchers first found adult L2 learners who spoke with foreign accent, so they decided that there must be a critical period for pronunciation somewhere around puberty, or maybe a little afterwards. This boundary seemed natural and logical — maturational changes occur in the brain around this time after all, etc. Then they found adolescent L2 learners who spoke with FA, so they shook their heads and decided the critical period for pronunciation must more likely end somewhere sooner, perhaps between ages 6-8. This boundary seemed less natural and logical, but whatever. If that's where the data points, right? Then they find some people who learned their L2 as toddlers and spoke with FA, so clearly that critical period must sometimes or somehow be narrower yet... No doubt the next step would place the CP somewhere just barely encompassing ubugoe. There is a better explanation for these funny facts, of course, a better and more consistent way of thinking about things, and it doesn't require any notion of critical periods.

This is the simpler explanation that is more consistent with the observed facts. It is that almost all (or possibly all) bilingual people are dominant in one of their languages at any given time. L1-dominant bilinguals are generally liable (whether they learned L2 as children or as adults) to speak with some degree of L1 accent in L2. This is true regardless of age of acquisition. Even if the L2 is learned from infancy! However, L1-dominant bilinguals who become L2-dominant later in life (even in adulthood — again, age is irrelevant) exhibit a reversal: they then speak L2 without L1 accent but typically exhibit some degree of L2 accent in L1. L1 and L2 existing at the same time without foreign accent in either is fairly rare — not totally unheard of, but again even most child bilinguals (the ones not predicted to exhibit FA according to L2CPH) have some degree of FA in one of their languages. Those things are what is observed. Those observations don't support a weak L2CPH, they don't even stretch or stress it, they sort of twist it backwards into a pretzel before shooting it out of a cannon. Things are a lot more complicated in the world than "young learners speak pretty and late learners are broken". Instead, it's more like you speak most accurately in whatever your dominant/primary language is currently, regardless of when you actually acquired it. If the preponderance of adult L2 learners speak with L1 accent, it's because most adult learners aren't L2-dominant, not because of their age. And the dominant language does not necessarily stay static, it might change throughout the lifetime. It's possible it can even change more than once.

Again, the magic thing isn't "did you learn your language before puberty/before age 8/from infancy/whenever that elusive critical period actually supposedly is?" The neurological data tell us high-proficiency L1 and L2 look alike in the brain, even if you acquired L2 as an adult. The magic thing is, instead, "hey, what language is dominant right now?" Your brain is plastic and fancy, a real miracle: just because one language is dominant now, doesn't mean that it will necessarily be that way a couple of years from now. Now, you can argue that older brains are less plastic, so the older you are the harder it might be to shift that dominant language — that could be a real and relevant age factor — that's consistent, and that's probably true, but note, that's not something that is out-of-hand insurmountable, unlike the hard maturational constraints suggested by a critical period.

You see, having said that L2CPH is definitely not true, that does not mean that there is no truth in it. I said that a critical period for second-language acquisition exists "like Santa Claus exists" and I'll stand by that. Santa Claus is a faulty hypothesis for a real observed phenomenon: presents appearing on Christmas morning. If you don't believe in Santa, well might you wonder where the presents come from. I think more modern notions of bilingualism and language dominance hold better (and more straightforward, Occam would be pleased) answers to the sorts of questions that L2CPH sought to answer, about the presents on the floor. There is still some degree of age factor, you see, possibly due to (as I said) changes in neuroplasticity, but it isn't likely to be a drop-dead thing like a critical period. And there is still room for discussion of "sensitive periods", really narrower or less strict sorts of critical periods. Some of that, of course, is Ptolemaic wheels-within-wheels stuff — I believe that in the future, the most fruitful kind of research into L2 acquisition will be the stuff S. does, looking at the behavior of people's brains. Some of the answers I suspect may be surprisingly simple, even if the overarching picture is enormously complex. The fact that we can now peek into peoples' heads and see that the same mechanisms in the brain used in L1 are used to learn and process L2 is far more compelling, to me, than all of the statistical studies on L2 attainment.

For your purposes, there is no reason to worry about critical periods; if you are already acquiring grammar implicitly, without even being in Norway, I consider that is a good sign; you don't let foolish hypothetical ideas (especially not ones as thin and watery as L2CPH!) get in the way of the beautiful thing that is happening inside you. Those are just things scientists fart out, throw against the wall, and see if they stick. L2CPH doesn't stick very well, it's violated constantly, it falls apart if you look at it too closely, but it's sort of dear to some people. I think it was thrown at you to appear smart, and to be mean, when in reality the fellow explaining it to you didn't even understand it, much less the complicated, messy realities it tries to describe. Don't let silly bastards like that interfere with what you are doing. Instead, be one of those horrible people who goes out and does the "impossible" thing anyway, and laugh about it afterwards.

You expressed concern about your accent in Norwegian. You have read and re-read the bullet point above about some adult L2 learners who do achieve nativelikeless in their pronunciation of L2. You are curious whether you can be one of those "exceptional" people, those "talented learners", that fly in the face of critical-period expectations. You wonder if you can achieve L2-dominant bilingualism. Good. That is the right attitude.

If you're interested in specific academic studies pertaining to nativelike attainment in the realm of pronunciation, please look up Bongaert's studies from the 1990s on native Dutch speakers' performance in English and French (these document nativelike attainment in pronunciation), or Jedynak's examples of L2 Polish and L2 English learners (she did some interesting work documenting strategies used by the best learners in her study, and says some incisive things about motivation and learning strategies). David Birdsong is another well-known researcher in language acquisition who started out ages ago skeptical that adult L2 learners could ever sound like natives, or acquire grammar to even near-native competency, but even so he found quite a few instances of these things happening and documented them in his work. Early in his career, he advocated L2CPH; nowadays he rejects it in favor of the more general hypothesis that ultimate L2 attainment is a complicated function of age, motivation, amount of L2 input received, personal identity, language-learning ability, and any number of other factors. No doubt closer to the truth, but much more complicated. [3]

Most smart people, you understand, know the limitations of their own knowledge, and they are slow to rule out exceptional things. They just believe that exceptional things are exceptional, not impossible. This might seem a bit fatuous, but it is actually a brave theory. Even the people who think that L2CPH is some kind of hard fact like gravity or the theory of evolution — well, even some of those will come around eventually if you expose them to the truth — sort of the same way some people can acquire an accent if you expose them to it long enough. Don't be like those stubborn folks who don't change their ideas when they see something that surprises them. Don't be like those stubborn folks who don't change their speech when they hear something that surprises them.

There are more of these studies — I didn't make nearly an exhaustive list, just a list of the easiest to find ones; you can probably find more examples, just searching the literature for people citing the studies I've cited. To be fair, there are still researchers that argue against nativelike attainment in the domain of pronunciation as well, but they generally only can conclude this when they move the goalposts out very far — when they start searching for differences beyond any level that occurs with any frequency in natural speech: the differences they find tend to be the sort of things that are of dubious relevance in the first place, the kind of things nobody would have reason to learn. Such studies also often have mistakes or shortcomings in subject selection and methodology (I will mention more about these problems later). There are still people who believe that L2CPH is gospel truth; there are still people who believe that ECMH is gospel truth; hell, if you look long enough, you can find people who believe geocentrism is gospel truth. Given the facts of this thing, and given what I've heard with my own ears, I can say, and be sure of it, that for something that isn't supposed to happen, high attainment in this domain happens with surprising regularity.

Going far afield, there are also potentially useful studies in the anthropological literature on passing rites and practices for immigrants — about both assimilation and integration. I know I've read some interesting material in this vein, I'll try and dig up the specific cites for you. Ingrid Piller did a similar study from a sociolinguistic point of view about ten years ago. [3]

Now about "equal attainment" in bilingual people, and how it basically never happens, and what that actually means. Hello, M. I am not a typical monoglot L1 English speaker. This is actually a good thing, as far as I can tell. My language — and I mean no conceit by this, it's a fact — is better than most people's. (I'm not a linguist, so I can say things like that and not burst into flames.) However, I am positive that there are tests you could formulate, where I would differ, in my L1 English, from "native (monoglot) speaker norms", even though I am a native English speaker, and my English is better than almost anybody else's English. (In fact, I can tell you right now that my voice-onset time on certain consonants would land somewhere outside "norms" for native American English monoglots — I don't think monoglot English speakers commonly notice this, it is a subtle thing, but that is a difference in my speech that exists.) Why is this so? Because most native English speakers don't have other languages bouncing around in their brain — that's all it is. Because I'm not a monoglot. Most native English speakers, especially American English speakers, have never been dominant in another language, even for a short period. My English does not work quite the same way as a monoglot's English. My brain has organized in such a way that it can use multiple languages, and use them well. That is a difference, and there are some consequences, even if they are generally not bothersome. I'm fond of saying, "you can have two tongues, but you only have one brain." There is some degree of one language informing another, no matter how young you were when you acquired your languages, and no matter how proficient you are with either.

However, I hold (in contrast to L2CPH) that there is no feature of a language that a person can't learn, regardless of age. They might or might not learn it, for whatever reasons, of course. It is unlikely that you will ever find any bilingual person who will look like a monoglot native speaker (of any of their languages: dominant, native, or otherwise) in every test you can come up with (except, perhaps, in the extreme case of attrition, when a bilingual person effectively becomes a monoglot again — even your L1 can attrite if you don't use it).

In practical terms, that probably doesn't matter much, though. All that actually says is that "monolingual people are not bilingual people; bilingual people are not monolingual people". That is not an earth-shattering revelation. Whatever differences you may ultimately exhibit from monoglot Norwegian speech may simply be because you are not a monoglot, rather than because you are not L1 Norwegian. And those differences will apply to your English just as well as your Norwegian; again, my L1 English is not that of a typical monoglot speaker, and neither is yours. Learning another language, especially to high proficiency, changes your brain and that will affect the way both languages are processed, produced, and used.

You are particularly concerned with your pronunciation of Norwegian, and wonder if you can one day sound like the other members of your family, the people you love. Is that possible? Sure it's possible. It might even be possible to be more broadly similar to monoglot native Norwegian speakers, across more domains than just pronunciation. What might not be possible (regardless of age-of-attainment) is attaining monoglot-type proficiency in more than one language at the same time. (It's sort of like cramming twenty pounds of shit into a ten pound bag.) When such attainment is observed to happen in one language in a bilingual person, it's (again) usually because his other languages have attrited. Even people raised with multiple languages from birth don't show this particular kind of attainment; it has little or nothing to do with age, it's just because bilingualism is not monolingualism (psst: it's better — I can freely make such value judgments because, again, I am not a linguist). If you intend to achieve extremely high proficiency in your Norwegian, like Henrik Ibsen-on-Adderall Norwegian, your English will certainly suffer for it.

Even without ditching your English, M., I know of no reason why you can't be basically indistinguishable from an L1 Norwegian/L2 English bilingual person with good attainment in English; I understand there are more than a few of those in Norway, and they don't have trouble "fitting in" with the monoglot natives. When people talk about "native speaker norms" in L2 attainment literature, they almost always mean "native (monoglot) speaker norms", which isn't really comparing apples with apples. Of course, that often isn't even the worst problem with those studies. We'll get to some of the other problems.

The Greeks have this letter. They call it "epsilon", or rather έψιλον. You know what mathematicians take that letter and have it mean? It often means, to put it simply, a difference that is so small it is not of any practical importance. Meaning, if A and B differ by only epsilon, then where A goes, B goes too, what A does, B does also, what properties A exhibits, B exhibits as well. A and B are not actually the same: epsilon — the difference between A and B — does not become zero. It approaches zero. It becomes infinitesimal; that is a word taken to mean the same kind of concept. Epsilon is when you come so close to something that you stick.

Some people believe that "epsilons" and "infinitesimals" are not real: how can something be smaller than any small positive number I show you, and yet not be zero? What space is there between zero and the positive numbers? You can say that "epsilons" and "infinitesimals" aren't real concepts, that they aren't actually real things. If they are not, however, then all of calculus, all of physics, all of what we know, really, is false. Without epsilon, there is no science, "hard" or "soft". Without epsilon, M., nothing ties us together.

Things tend to converge to the point of epsilon — to the point where any differences that remain are too small to be important, too small to drive continued convergence. This is what happens. Once epsilon is reached — that difference that makes no difference (hello, there's some English!) — then there is nothing to cause closer convergence. There is no more friction to grind the stone smoother.

It may be that you eventually converge on a Norwegian that is, in your day to day life, indistinguishable from typical monoglot L1 Norwegian speech, but that if somebody at that point gave you a battery of linguistic or phonological tests, far more demanding than anything you have ever required before in your everyday life, they would find differences between you and monoglot Norwegian speakers. Under such circumstances, I would have to pull out the poetic question: so what? And how would they (or anyone) expect you to converge in all situations, including all of those you haven't experienced? If you do not converge in realms where you do not need to actually converge, you are still whole.

If you have converged to epsilon — your epsilon, wherever and however close that is — you have succeeded perfectly and want nothing.

It is not a matter of "converging to Norwegian", because you have other things that aren't Norwegian. But there is a "converging to Norwegian plus epsilon", and that is what we are talking about here. Avoid ye ill-conditioned input, and iterate forwards, ever closer and ever finer, you beautiful, hungry-for-learning neural optimizer you. You are the Newton-Raphson of the Norwegian tongue, and don't you ever forget it. You own and drive that process. Speak your language to however many decimal places are required.

This is another reason why most L2-attainment studies are terrible. Anybody who goes out looking for convergence nearer than an individual's epsilon, anybody who imagines that bilingual people should behave exactly like monoglots rather than monoglots plus epsilon, is looking for the wrong things, and looking at the wrong things, and misinterpreting the wrong things through a lens that is skewed and wrong. It's really quite a mess.

This is admittedly sort of an arcane topic, high-level L2 pronunciation — one most people don't ever have a reason to seriously study or examine. There's very little to say that we can be confident is true. I was very fortunate, however, to spend several years of my life in a rather unique culture in which this particular attribute (being able to speak a second language as if it was your first) was highly-prized, hotly pursued, and often attained. I've had my share of experience in this arena, both first-hand and anecdotal. Having slapped you about the face with some of the relevant science, I suppose I can give you anecdotal evidence as well. Everybody loves anecdotal evidence.

As you know, for about a decade I had a prestigious job as a developer at a big software company, on the core team responsible for the innermost workings of a multi-billion dollar product. The very best thing about this job — by far — was the people I worked with. They were, to a one, amazing. They were all fantastic programmers or software testers, of course, among the very best in their fields. They hailed from all corners of the Earth. There were about twenty people there whom I worked with on a day-to-day basis and who spoke English as a second language — at least, as far as I know.

Let's talk a little about L2 English attainment in that group. Now, I did not ask them for their histories, or ask them about their English — impossibly rude! — but we often interacted with each other (NB: this will come up later). On bug nights, we'd all gather around some catered dinner and shoot the shit for an hour or two. Every now and then they would bring their stories up themselves. You found out all sorts of things about people.

They were all fucking monsters with their English. Every one of them. This was true even of the people who acquired the language in their thirties or even later. Sure, most of them had some degree of foreign accent. More remarkably, many of them did not. You might not think of a group of computer programmers as taking such pride in their language ability, but these were pretty special programmers. They were the sorts of people who needed to look for things to challenge them. I love this attitude, I love people with this attitude.

One of the most remarkable examples was a native Khmer speaker. He had a horror-film childhood; he spent much of his youth dodging landmines, his country torn apart by war. He fled Cambodia in his late teens; he never even met a native English speaker until he was almost 20. He did not learn English until he was in his mid-twenties — he lived as a sort of hobo for four years, hitchhiking and couch-surfing across Canada and the northern USA. That's when he acquired English. He enrolled later at university, double-majoring in mathematics and English.

By the time I met him he had been at the company seven or eight years and speaking English about fifteen years. He was a delightful, articulate speaker; he was also a good writer. Before joining the company, during his life as a wanderer and a student, he had earned some extra money selling short stories to magazines. He sounded for all the world like he grew up in Michigan. You know I have ears like a bat — if he was even slightly foreign-accented I would tell you so. You could listen to him for hours and you would never guess what a hell his childhood had been, never. I'm pretty sure when he was a child he never imagined where he'd be at forty. Life is funny: both cruel and kind.

Sometimes I wonder what other people think but do not say, what secrets they choose not to show. I know, with certainty, that I have no idea. I also know that every person, every one I ever meet, holds things close that are more remarkable than I can reasonably imagine.

One native Russian speaker joined the team while I was at the company. He did not seriously study or speak English until university; it was his fourth language (Russian, Ukrainian, German, English). He had some exposure to basic English vocabulary in high school but there were no native English speakers around to teach him pronunciation. When he joined our team, he was thirty years old and spoke fluent English already, though with a pronounced Russian accent — indeed, one of the thickest I've ever heard. By the time I left the company five years later, that was gone and he was working with another Russian on the team on his accent. (I don't know how his student turned out, but when I left he was making clear progress.)

There were two others that I knew of who spoke with impeccable American English accents, but only acquired English in adulthood, one a native Mandarin speaker and one a native Portuguese speaker. I would point out that none of these L1 languages are particularly closely related to English. There were two others who spoke with excellent Received Pronunciation that may also have been native-like (since I do not normally use RP myself I hesitate to declare them native-like, but they were without question excellent and at the very least near-native). Note: that's six (six!) with native-like or near-native pronunciation of L2 English. This is from about twenty. There may have been more still: there were other L2 English speakers on my team with excellent pronunciation, but I did not know their backgrounds with enough certainty to say whether they were adult English learners or not.

I have to give an honourable mention to another fellow. There was another Russian developer on the team we teased for his "disappearing accent". He had this odd habit of speaking with a slight Russian accent for a sentence or two at the very start of a conversation, and then speaking with a pitch-perfect American English accent for the rest of the conversation. He was enormously good at this. Why did he do that? He explained it this way: it was entirely deliberate. It was possible for him to speak typical American English all of the time — he proved that by speaking it up, down, sideways, and everywhere after the "introductory" bit. But if all he did was speak ordinary American English, then nobody would realize just what he had accomplished. They'd just assume he was another ordinary native English speaker. They might even confuse him for an American! The ignominy! He wanted people to realize he was speaking a second language, and speaking it excellently. What he was saying with his vestigal Russian accent was, "Listen up, Yankee. I'm Russian and I am proud of it, and I probably speak better English than you do. You like that? I am insanely intelligent. Keep that in mind and listen to what I'm about to say." He was flashing his Russian accent like a damn badge, as credentials for whatever followed. Now, some people can get away with stunts like that. Some people can't. A six-foot tall Russian computer programmer, sure.

Now, I do not pretend that my co-workers were in any way a representative sample of L2 English learners. It is safe to assume that only people with well above average communicative skills in English would land such a high-powered job on this team in America in the first place. Besides that, these were also generally highly motivated, educated, intelligent, well-off people with basically unlimited time and opportunity to perfect their English skills. This was about an ideal environment: they could receive about as much native English input and correction as they desired. (And yes, the native English speakers in the office participated actively in this process; you think we didn't want "in on" their English? The knowledge sharing and comraderie this sort of thing promoted was tremendous.) Who had the "best accent" was a serious point of pride among several of the developers who spoke English as a second language; when I left my office door open I could sometimes hear them practicing, and books on phonetics and diction were almost as common on the shelves as books about Perl or SQL.

One night, early in the wee hours — maybe 3 o'clock of the morning — I was in the office debugging on a remote server, in China. It was one of the worst sorts of bugs; everything I did had crazy network latency — crossing the ocean and back — and this latency made the bug diabolically hard to reproduce. Suddenly, I heard Shakespeare echoing through the walls.

The building we worked in was longer than a football field, with long hallways running along the sides. I quietly left my office to see where the Shakespeare was.

When I reached one of the long side halls, I saw him — it was A., one of the Russian developers — the one who arrived with the thick Russian accent but successfully adopted an American English accent. I stood silently at one end of the hallway, watching him from the back. He did not see me. He walked slowly toward the far end, reciting passages loudly from King Lear.

His Cordelia spoke with an emerging American English accent; it was close to his usual speaking voice. His King Lear was a sonorous approximation of Received Pronunciation. He gave his Goneril and Regan some exaggerated Russian accents, and he read their lines wickedly and with relish. Those were, really, the best acting. I watched him walk down the hallway, gesticulating wildly with his arms to an invisible audience.

That Shakespeare performance in the hallway was one of the most beautiful things I saw during my life in software.

I didn't tell A. that I saw it, of course; instead I plotted. The day I left the company, there was a farewell party for me. After we had some cake and had a few drinks from the liquor cart, I walked up to A. and I quoted Cordelia, from the opening scene:

If for I want that glib and oily art /
To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend, /
I'll do it before I speak—
He suddenly blushed, but without missing a beat he completed her line:
...That you make known /
It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness, /
No unchaste action or dishonored step, /
That hath deprived me of your grace and favor; /
But even for want of that for which I am richer- /
A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue /
As I am glad I have not, though not to have it /
Hath lost me in your liking.
I clapped him on the back and hugged him.

Here's another example, now that I am thinking of it. Not all of them were from my life in software. One of my mathematics professors at university came to the USA from Germany as an adult. I was cozy with all of the math professors, so I knew something about his history. Until emigrating he had lived in Germany his whole life, and he also had only learned English in university, although by the time I met him, his pronunciation didn't betray the fact. He had some seriously slick English. When he was assigned one of the basic math courses — one of the ones that hundreds of bored, unmotivated first-year students were forced to take for core-curriculum requirements — he would sometimes pick an opportune moment to shout in German at 'em just to startle them awake. This never failed to get a reaction. Being by far the top student in the school, I made pretty good money as a tutor then, and I was constantly hearing of Dr. S.'s antics. "Hey, you know he speaks German? Wonder where he picked that up." You know what? High-attainment L2 pronouncers are kind of hilarious assholes. That's my new hypothesis. Call it the critical math-period hypothesis.

Dr. S. also taught English composition at a nearby community college, affiliated with the university. I imagine, though I don't know, that he didn't pull the same kind of stunts in his English classes. When I saw Dr. S. in the teachers' lounge — I spent way too much time in the teachers' lounge for a student — I sometimes asked about his English class, and he always had something wonderful to say about it. I never got to see him teach English, and I regret this; his enthusiasm for the subject, his ability to explain things in different ways and on different levels, his outright brilliance were blindingly obvious. He was a lot like you that way. You'd have liked him, M.

This is one of those things that happens a lot more frequently than most people think, you see. It is not something that is typically "visible", so people naturally ascribe a low degree of success to this particular endeavour. You know how it goes. "Well, every immigrant or foreign-type person I've ever known has an accent! Usually a heavy one!" Of course, the only reason they knew they were foreign in the first place was the accent. They're much more ready to believe data that supports that experience/prejudice, and much more ready to dismiss data that contradicts it as flawed, or highly unusual, exceptional, something too rare to bother with. This ignores all the successful learners, who are often invisible, and who probably aren't so keen to be recognized in the first place. They typically don't mind being missed too much. Often, indeed, being "missed" is the goal.

People like flashy, moving, visible things, things that flag the attention. They are often blind to the subtle, much like a naive native English speaker might not hear the difference between ʃ and ɕ. Just because they don't hear it doesn't mean it isn't there. Lots of people, bilingual or not, are eager to blow their trumpets. Lots of people, bilingual or not, are like that Russian fellow who was so proud of his accomplishments in English that he hung on to his accent, just so everybody would know. He hung it out like a sign outside his shop. "WATCH OUT YANKEE! I AM SMARTER THAN YOU. AND PROBABLY FRIENDS WITH PUTIN. HE COULD KILL YOU WITH JUDO, YOU KNOW." There is nothing wrong with that. You aren't like that, M., and there is nothing wrong with that, either: in my mind, I personally like your thinking better, even if right now you want to tear your hair out.

The best accomplishments in life, I believe, are the things that you have done so well that people do not even recognize that you have done them.

Let's talk a little bit about so-called "failure" and some of the reasons that might be. For every language learner who becomes native-like in their pronunciation, there are certainly a few more that do not, after all. I use scare quotes because, in the overwhelming majority of these cases, I don't think "failure" is really an appropriate label. It's a loaded term, it privileges the dominant ambient culture over another, it hurts people. There are reasons this happens. Sometimes accent is merely an expression of identity, and adopting a more native-like accent might seem like a betrayal of that personal identity; there is actually no desire or motivation to modify pronunciation. Sometimes there is a desire to do it, but there is actually no opportunity to do so. There are countless assholes ready to stomp on people who are different, the marked people. (And I know that's a major reason why you are afraid right now.) How many idiots say, in their own chimp-like fashion, "live in Murika, learn to speak Murikan"? As if it was as simple as to just one day put on an American English accent. These people are cruel and ignorant, and unfortunately, many of them are quite capable and willing to oppress people who talk differently than they do.

Now, if somebody is to acquire fluency and native-like pronunciation in a language in adulthood, then it must require both opportunity and time. The L2 learner must receive an enormous amount of input, and ideally correction, from native speakers (how else could you learn pronunciation?) It's also safe to say that the learner must work at it for an extended period of time.

Now consider that L2 English speakers in America are much more likely to be towards the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole. If you're an immigrant and your English is weak, or you speak with a heavy foreign accent, how much job opportunity do you really have? Without a question this makes it harder to acquire and hold a good-paying job, much less to acquire a privileged phonology. Employers aren't supposed to discriminate based on place of birth or nation of origin, but of course there will be assholes, some of those countless assholes, who do, and most of the time there isn't much to do about it (it is difficult to prove in court, and requires money to fight.)

While I worked at this software company, I had about a dozen different janitors. Once a day, they would stop by to empty the wastebaskets. I do not think a single one was a native English speaker. They worked long hours for little pay. They did not have much interaction with native English speakers during working hours — the most they were likely to get is a "thank you" after emptying the wastebaskets, and a lot of people didn't even say that. They certainly weren't striking up any conversations. And in what little free time they had outside of working hours, well, you know they'd rather spend it with their family or friends, and shouldn't that be the highest priority?

So what opportunity do they actually have to improve their English? Certainly not enough. Even if they want to do it, they can't. The people who need the help the most, as a group, also have the least opportunity (and therefore ability) to do it. Given those facts, of course it would be highly unusual for any person in such a situation to attain any great success in pronunciation.

On the other hand, the L2 learners on my team had ideal or near-ideal conditions to practice and improve both their English in general and their pronunciation in particular: so why would I be surprised there were so many L2 learners on my team that spoke such beautiful (by my prejudiced, pointy ears) English?

I spent a lot of time in my office, waiting for builds to finish, thinking about things like this.

This is, incidentally, one of the many reasons I believe a universal basic income should be instituted before we can call ourselves "civilized", but that is an argument for another letter. (Maybe they would do that in Norge one day.) People should have the opportunity, even if they are born poor or in a disadvantaged position. I am a fucking dreamer; mandatory cannibalism is more likely in this world than, you know, the actual freedom to do things to enrich our lives, or celebrate our humanity. For every great idea we have as a species (public libraries, say) there are a hundred destructive ones, and at least one or two debates on how best to take away the good ideas, or limit them to the people who already have all the toys. Fuck it all.

So any study on L2 attainment that doesn't control explicitly for socioeconomic factors somehow is, I think, flawed. Deeply flawed, right out of the gate.

Another major problem is that most L2 attainment studies have selection biases in their construction that leave out the highest-attainment L2 learners. This can't really be a knock on the researchers; in fact, it's very hard to find the highest-attainment L2 speakers — they typically aren't noticeably "marked" in their speech or appearance, they by and large do not congregate together in easy to find places (like immigrant communities or universities) but live all over the place, they do not advertise their presence, they work in a wide variety of fields and endeavours, and hey, many of them wouldn't participate in your study even if they were asked. If you do a study of language learners using the ones you can easily find, you are by default always going to leave out the most accomplished. Just like my anecdotal sample of L2 English speakers, your study will be biased, just in the other direction. The best L2 learners aren't likely to be found participating in any study, they are more apt to be doing things like wandering the halls at 3 a.m. playing Lear, or teaching native English speakers how to write English. If you are attempting to find something but look in the wrong places, you will probably not find it — and you shouldn't draw any conclusions from the fact you didn't find it.

But we see, even among the studies with flawed construction, the ones that by rights shouldn't find nativelikeness, that there are many studies that do find it, at least in some of the domains (pronunciation, word choice, grammar, etc.). The studies that make special attempts to include more high-attainment L2 speakers find even higher rates of nativelikeness. So, again, there do not appear to be strict maturational constraints on L2 attainment, at least in certain people. You can argue, and be correct, that the age-of-acquisition is still a factor in the degree of ultimate attainment of L2, but if you look at the data we have, it doesn't even seem to be the most important factor. When you consider the L2 learners out there that the studies are missing — ?

The more interesting and practical questions in this area (L2 attainment) don't have to do with critical periods, because they aren't there. They all have to do with "What makes some people more successful than others, despite age factors? Can that be taught, what are the necessary or sufficient conditions, are those conditions something that can be reliably replicated, or is it some kind of talent you're born with?" And those are the kind of questions that I think are ultimately better answered by people like S., using instruments that can peer into people's brains and watch what happens. I think they'll better be able to understand this puzzle than the people without this ability, the people who try to find the answers by statistically sifting through data that doesn't even have them in the first place, due to the way that data was collected.

There is another, subtler, objection to make with almost all studies about L2 attainment: even if they are free of statistical errors or selection biases or defects in construction or methodology, what they establish, at best, is a description of the level of L2 attainment. They say very little about the possible ceiling of attainment. That is what's actually more relevant to L2CPH, but very few studies make that distinction or attempt to probe that. What if the learners in the study had more L2 input, phonetic instruction, no interaction in L1? Would they eventually have higher attainment? Well, we don't know, at least not from L2 attainment literature. That isn't in the data. We don't see the ceiling, we only can say with certainty that "the ultimate ceiling, in these cases, was somewhere at or above this level". To say the least, this is never a particularly satisfying treatment of the subject.

I have issues with the way a bunch of other studies were arranged — lots of pronunciation studies use a rating methodology that structurally disadvantages the non-native speakers in the sample, for example — but whatever. If I outlined all the problems with L2CPH literature I'd be here for years. I could have given you one brief counterexample, and that, logically, would have been sufficient to reject L2CPH. Why give you one counterexample when I can give you a bunch, and explain why they are there, and say something about why the hypothesis arose and why it finally fails?

I would point out, M., that L1 Khmer and L1 Mandarin learners achieving such high proficiency in L2 English should be particularly encouraging — English and Norwegian are closely-related Germanic languages, after all, whereas Mandarin and Khmer are quite remote from English, in every way. If a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin can sound nativelike in a stress language like English, a language which also has a very different phonology, without acquiring English in childhood, who is to say you cannot do the same in Norwegian? There is no reason to dismiss that potential outcome; your co-worker was foolish and wrong to say otherwise, no matter how impressive his Wikipedia copy-pasta skills.

I will tell you another story about that group of L2 English learners at the software company. I said something about it being hard to locate the highest-attainment L2 learners. They often don't self-identify, even if you ask. Take the example of that fellow who didn't speak a word of English until his twenties, who lived as a tumbleweed, who then went and earned a degree in mathematics and a degree in English before coming to work with us. (Damn were we fortunate.) One day somebody, on one of those bug nights, having learned a little about his past, said something earnest about his English. (While this is the sort of thing I shied from doing, other people sometimes didn't.)

"It's not that good," was his simple reply.

There was some general chuckling and throat-clearing in the room at that answer. Maybe rude, but you know. The same fellow asked, "Really? Well then, on a scale from 1 to 10, how would you score it?"

"Oh, I don't know — a 5, maybe a 6."

This was an outrageous lie — I repeat, the man made his money writing in English before going into software, and he was a better speaker in English than I am (since I am not a linguist, I can tip my hat as well) — he was both consistently adventurous and consistently correctly adventurous in his English — he wasn't a "6" even if you decide Shakespeare is "8" — but I recognized his self-deprecating tone. That is the quiet, dangerous tone of someone who knows the fuck what they're doing. That is the go-to answer of somebody who doesn't ever lead himself on, who doesn't stop, even after maybe he could. Sometimes people get into the habit of running their race, because they have to; sometimes the only thing that keeps them a healthy distance from the past is running: they remind themselves of what could be right behind them. That brings me into some terrifying things.

...Here, I had a long section that went deep into the personal history of my own speech, starting from when I was twenty months old. This included some difficult and painful experiences; things I haven't spoken to maybe five or six people about outside of my own family, total. It was something that I believed may have been helpful for M., but it sure as hell isn't something I'd want just anybody to read on the Internet, and if I tried to edit it and make it less personal, I'd have to cut out so much it would be near unreadable. The only reason I'm even mentioning it here is because you would notice it was missing, anyway. The bits that were most relevant to the subject at hand (discussion of regional accent in L2, for example) I repeated in the pronunciation letter anyways.

Let's talk a little bit about accent as performance, and also about people and their lazy perception.

Let's say that you did not know me previously. We meet, and we have a happy amazing time together, like we usually do. We open up like new friends and we share some things about our pasts. One of the things I tell you is that I grew up in France. I sell it, maybe I speak some French or pick a snail off the ground and eat it or something. The first thing you'd likely think is, "wow, her American accent is really surprisingly good," and the next thing you'd likely do is start listening for traces of French in my English. And you'd eventually find them! Sooner or later, somewhere in the course of my speech, I would make some sound that you would interpret as being French or French-like (whether it actually was or not) and you'd seize upon that, nod your head sagely and assure yourself that, although my American accent might be good enough to fool most unsavvy ignorant people around you, you can "hear" the Frenchy frog in me still.

Of course, I didn't grow up in France and don't have a French accent, but you'd start hearing one if you believed one might be there. And be proud of how clever you are for finding it.

People have done experiments along these lines. Perception, especially categorical perception, is a funny thing. Suggest to a person that somebody's not a native speaker, or comes from a distant land, and they will quickly hear accents that aren't even there. (It works especially well if the subjects also look like they could be foreign, or you dress them up in slightly funny-looking clothes, but you don't need to go through that much trouble.) People's perception of "accent" is always part cow flop anyway.

Let's get back to those English learners I knew on my team, specifically, the native Mandarin-speaking fellow, X. His English pronunciation, let's be clear on this, was such that you could not tell blind that English wasn't his native language. But you could certainly guess by his appearance that he was from out-of-town. One time I went out to lunch with him and one of servers actually gave him the whole "could you speak slower/say that again?" routine when he ordered, just because he looked like a foreigner. This is so stupid it hardly qualifies as sentient — X. speaks English like a poet. If you do not understand him, it is because you are not listening to him.

I was tempted — so sorely tempted — to make my order in butcher's back-slang (what, you don't understand English?) and have X. "translate" for me, but I did not want spit or worse in our food. Ooh, I had to hold myself back. Never piss off your food servers, though. Don't do that. Good life advice.

There was a young woman on the testing team who was born and grew up in the United States. English was her native and dominant language, and she did not have any unusual accent. She looked like she might be a foreigner though (her parents came from India, she was Indian-American) so people sometimes gave her the same kind of shit. She had the same sorts of stories. Again, if you think you don't understand her, it's because you aren't listening to her.

The fact is, surprising as it might seem, that lots of people don't actually listen.

You see this thing happen even in very trivial, kind of stupid ways. I remember watching an episode of Fawlty Towers with a friend of mine, who came from the UK. In this particular episode, Polly (Connie Booth) entertained dinner guests by singing show-tunes with a Midwestern American English accent.

"Her American accent is very good, isn't it?" said my friend.

"Yes," I answered. "She grew up in the United States."

"Heh! ...I suppose, then, her English accent is very good."

If by "good" we mean that they resemble the native accents, then really, both her American and English accents (at least what we hear of them anyway, in the best takes — I don't know how she speaks generally) are good. There is no 'real' or 'natural' accent, no reason to privilege one over the other, no reason to ignore one and label one as skillful or an artifice. They are both there, they both exist. They are both very good. What do you expect from an accomplished actress anyway? Accents are, ultimately, performances, after all. You know, like King Lear.

A few minutes later my friend went ahead and completed the stereotypical script for me. He said, "I suppose I hear it a little," meaning her American-ness. That he was going to say something along those lines was predictable; all I was wondering was exactly what form this justification to himself was going to take. He went for one of the laziest and most unimaginative ones. 'Oh, I guess I heard it all along.' Good grief.

He was lying to himself a little of course — why be surprised at her American accent in the first place, if what he heard of her English accent was so 'American', after all? — but here's the thing: people are nigh universally proud of their ability to detect and isolate (and often expel) "the Other" amongst themselves, and they may feel threatened when people subvert this ability. They build up all these walls in their minds, and they are bothered when something breaches them. Even in such a trivial and unimportant case as this! Think about this: A television actor in some forty-year old programme, completely harmless, just a light bit of comedy, slipped momentarily by his radar, and for some reason he found this a little troubling, troubling enough to make up lame excuses for it.

I am not different myself — I am proud (and, I believe, justifiably proud) of my pointy ears. The difference is that I have had enough life experiences and have learned enough things that I can't pretend to be surprised anymore when something defies my expectations. I mean, that's a fact of life: sometimes you're wrong. I take the advice of my pointy ears, but I do not pretend that it is the Gospel. Today, I try to find what frustrates my ears fascinating. It is not a threat to my safety or my identity, it is instead a challenge to learn about something new. The pluripotency of the human brain is a miracle, the one great miracle of the universe, and the greatest hope we have for the future.

That is the next thing: people feeling threatened when you breach the wall. People get weird about this. Most people don't like uncanny things, even when they are beautiful and marvelous.

If you intend to attain native-like pronunciation in your Norwegian, you will face this, M. You will find that there are people that don't like it. You will know when you are succeeding because they will get a little uncomfortable. It is not your responsibility, however, to accommodate their prejudices. You are not required to justify for them any easy short-cuts or convenient rules of thumb: stuff that is, ultimately, just sleight of mind. They might be lazy, but I know you aren't.

There will be people who try to shove you outside when you're already inside. These people might succeed though if you aren't mindful of the possibility.

There may come a day, M. — there is a high probability that this will happen — when one of the smaller people whom you meet in Norway introduces you to somebody new, and they make sure to immediately explain that you came from America. They will do this because they realize the other person won't necessarily apprehend that, and that idea personally bothers them: that you might end-run around their barricades. They will mean this as a warning — don't let M. fly under your radar, 'cause he ain't really one of us! — but of course the other person won't quite understand what he means by that. They haven't met you yet.

The other person, the person who is only just meeting you, may look at that small person strangely — why did he bother telling me that? he will be thinking. Prepare your witty response ahead of time. Make it impossibly charming.

People misinterpret motivations in this sort of thing. People might act like you're lying or being somehow deceptive, misrepresenting yourself. People might try and give you idiotic pap about "hiding who you are" or "not being proud of your past" and shame on you for doing your best speaking our language, you filthy outsider, you should go stick your nose in the corner, Johnny-too-big-for-his-britches. People are, by and large, a bit foolish. Or jealous. Or jackasses.

Or provincial, cliquish, narrow, xenophobic. These are all synonyms for wasting your own mind.

You own your language, M. Just and only you. It's your thing. If you want to speak Norwegian as (most) Norwegians do, then go and do that. If you want to speak Norwegian with an American accent, then go and do that. If you want to speak Norwegian with a Cuban accent while waving your arms making semaphore signals, then go and do that. (And make videos) Don't worry much about what people think about it. Don't let them tsk-tsk you for sounding American when they expect you to sound Norwegian, or for sounding Norwegian when they expect you to sound American — because there will be small folks who try to shame you for that, too, and do not let them! Just do what you need to do how you need to do it, and fuck the haters. You are a work of art. Your life is yours alone to live.

Other people do not own your past. That is yours, too, M., yours exclusively. Sometimes you do not want to share that past with others. That is all right! Other people are not entitled to know about it. It is not their right. Do you think I really like telling you about the terrors I faced with my speech? No. I only tell you that because I think it might help you. I do not generally tell people that, certainly with my words, and neither with the sound of my voice. I do not fly that flag. Some things would be exponentially harder and more painful if I did.

Other people do not need to know about what happened in your life, M. They don't need to know why you washed up on their shores, or even that you washed up on your shores. It's too painful for general audiences. It would cause you personal harm to broadcast.

Breach whatever walls need to be breached, and build up whatever walls must be built up. This is your life.

Now so far, M., I have given you reasons, excellent reasons, to believe that what you hope to do is, at least, not impossible. But what reasons do you have to believe that you, personally, can succeed at it?

Here, of course, you're going to have to do some long and hard introspection. ...Or, who am I kidding? You've already done some long and hard introspection. You're doing it right now. You have already decided, it seems to me, that this is very important to you. If it isn't important to you, there's no way in hell you would have read this far. I mean, it's obvious.

What you're hoping to do requires some conditions that are likely necessary, even though they are probably not sufficient. These include very high motivation, large amounts of native input in the target language, exclusive or near-exclusive use of the new language, and so on. You have these things, or are about to get as much of them as you want, so that at least is right.

M., I do not mean to waste your time with the obvious, to insult your intelligence, or even to be giving advice like some snoopy nosy television neighbor. But this next thing is important, and I care about your success. Please forgive me for having to ask it.

Have you told your family in Norway about this? I mean, told them all, including your plans and intentions? Tell them at least as much as you told me. If it takes as many tears to tell it, tell it. If it takes more, tell it, let them wash it right out of you.

The only reasons I'm mentioning this are because it's important, and I think there is a slight chance you might not have done this, perhaps because it is painful to tell, perhaps because you're afraid it will cause them to share your pain. But for both your sake and theirs, please consider letting them know.

For one thing, if you don't, they may become accustomed to your American accent. They might say that they missed that after it was gone. That would hurt both of your feelings. Don't let that happen.

Then there is the big thing: Your family is also the single biggest help you have, by far, for your Norwegian. They are a terrific blessing. After all, if your desire is to sound like one of them, who else should you ultimately go to?

Let them know from the start that they can (and should) correct you even for the slightest error. If you do not do this, they may not correct you at all except on the largest mistakes. That would not help you, because you care about the small mistakes. Make sure that they know this! Make them know what is tied up in this, and they'll be happy to be as strict as you like.

When they do correct you, make sure that you know what the incorrect sound was that they corrected. You will more easily recognize it as mistaken if you take the time to identify it.

Make it clear that they should be so strict, that not only your pronunciation but your word choices, body language, taste in food or clothing, whatever — they should call you out on that, too, if you get it wrong. They might not actually be that strict with you — when you make a request that large, people will tend to be lazy with it — but then, even if they get lax or lazy with your wishes, they will still more likely fall back to something that is still extremely strict. Ask for more than you want, and you may get at least what you need.

Let them know also that they will need to be patient. You do not want them to stop if you do not correct an error after a few repetitions. Let them know that, in order to succeed, you need correction whenever and however long it is necessary. And no matter how many times they must correct you, the correction should not become rote or a ritual. It should always cut. There should always be the expectation of fewer errors.

At the start there may be many errors. They may, at first, need to concentrate only on the worst ones. But do not let them become lazy!

Remember, many of the L2 English learners in my office did their best with what they had. If they could still accomplish this thing, gathering feedback from distracted co-workers, who were busy most of the time doing other things, how much better can you do with people that live with you, that love you, and earnestly care about your well-being? Hmm?

Make plans and set goals. I think your epsilon is very small, so behave accordingly.

Don't let them talk down or simplify their speech too much, either. Make sure they know to speak just a little bit above your head. If they keep doing that it won't be long and they won't be able to aim that high. (And you'll have some ridiculously interesting conversations.)

Somebody long, long ago said that the rough stone does not become smooth until it has ground up against another many times. I am sure that grinding process would be a little painful, if stones felt anything — if either stone felt anything.

I hope I have made an impression of the importance and the size of this feedback loop you should build. You have the advantage that these people love you. This is a big deal, M.

Oh, and never lose sight of the beauty and wonder of what you are doing. Language is a way of sharing the patterns in our brain without touching: an intimate and beautiful thing. Learning a language is shaping your brain, its inmost delicate structures, according to those in others around us; and we can do this thing without touching, without seeing them, without even thinking. It is something like a miracle. One pattern cries out, and another pattern, if he wants to understand, if he chooses to understand, can adapt itself to cry back. The mere existence of such a thing seems like enough to justify all of evolution. Language is a fire that can spread over distance but does not burn.

I am certain that you have thought about these things a hundred times before. Please accept my apologies for writing them.

I would like to talk here a little about the continuous-categorical model from cognitive psychology. Maybe this is something you haven't thought about before. It is possibly helpful to you, because it is relevant to why most adults have difficulty distinguishing between sounds in L2 that differ only subtly from sounds in L1. There are obvious implications for high-level L2 pronunciation.

As you can gather from the above, I do not believe in critical periods for L2 acquisition: but I do believe, and with some good reason, that use of the cognitive processes in the brain we identify as "continuous" in the continuous-categorical model is more or less vital for successful acquisition of language. These do tend to be the dominant processes in children and are much weaker in most adults. This, also, may be a real age factor, not related to any notion of "critical" or "sensitive" periods, but rather to the individual's neurology and the way they employ their different cognitive processes in different ways during life.

I think this generalizes quite a bit beyond language acquisition, as well: I believe that most creative processes need to lean heavily on continuous perceptions for greatest success. You've probably heard me say that mathematics is language, or music is language. This is ultimately what I am talking about. You can have two tongues, you can have nine lives, but you only have one brain, and it all proceeds thence.

A lot of what I'm going to say here about my own cognition, although based on things that are factual facts, aren't things that I can know for certain, because I'm talking about my own brain and Dr. Gödel would have some objections I know are valid, and who really knows anyway because the brain is phenomenally complex. Even if what I say is true for me I cannot with any confidence know if it is true or valid or helpful to anyone else under the sun. I have experiential knowledge of this stuff, for what it's worth, and I know what and how I feel, and where I am at the moment — or at least how I understand the moment.

There are different ways your brain perceives and processes input. It's an enormously complicated process and nobody actually understands how it all works. But people who study cognition have suggested two basic methods of processing information that are fundamentally different and are normally used for different activities and at different points in your life:

The "categorical" mode of perception is basically a mess of sloppy short-cuts. It's when your brain takes input from the outside, input that could appear on a continuous spectrum, and immediately maps it into a discrete "box" (a category, hence the name!) that it recognizes and to which it deems the input sufficiently similar to belong. These categories are typically all-or-none, many-to-one mappings. This is good if you need help (more error-tolerance) in recognizing the input you take in — if you need to decipher some nearly illegible handwriting, understand a particularly garbled telephone message, whatever. It can also help in making some especially fast snap judgment. It is good at discarding parts of the input that are superfluous (not necessary to make a categorization with a high degree of confidence.) It is immensely helpful when you need to match various sorts of patterns, identify a person from an unusual angle, whatever. Generally a useful thing, but with one important limitation, which I will discuss at length.

The "continuous" mode of perception is rather more intensive, and undoubtedly more primitive. It allows for input that actually is on a continuous spectrum (hence the name). It takes just about everything in, and doesn't attempt to simplify the process by mapping it into discrete categories of stuff it already knows, or ignoring information that it deems superfluous. Instead, it takes the input as it is and, using it, does some magic under the hood we don't understand, but that eventually forms the necessary new categories needed for the same kinds of input to be recognized by categorical modes of cognition.

When you are a small child, you are in the continuous mode of cognition almost all of the time. You are experiencing almost everything newly. The categorical processes are there and active in your brain, but you don't commonly use them because you do not have sufficient life experience to have formed useful categories yet; you have not made mental short-cuts that actually work most of the time. Eventually enough categories form that you can use categorical cognition most of the time.

Most adults are in categorical perception most of the time, but just as categorical processes exist in a child's brain, continuous processes exist in an adult brain. It's typically either more rarely used, more difficult to use, or both. The thing is that, when something is more easily handled with categorical cognition, you tend to lean more on that than on continuous cognition. And the less you use continuous cognitive processes, the less likely you are to rely on them in the future. They never actually go away entirely (as far as anybody who's studied it knows) but they may and often do fall into disuse. Continuous cognition is comparatively quite a bit of work. However, it has some advantages that categorical cognition lacks. These advantages are related to the information preserved by continuous cognition that categorical processes ignore.

Mathematics in categorical perception, for example, is difficult to do both creatively and rigorously. You might be able to apply a rule (like integrate a function) using the categories you've created, applying patterns you've learned before — that is what categorical cognition is made to do: correctly categorizing input according to recognized patterns and "pressing the right buttons" in your mind from there. Creatively solving a problem you've never seen before, especially a difficult problem, though, is different; it does not work without engaging the continuous processes of your brain. This is because you can't rely on the answer being in any known, discrete categories of problems/solutions you already know about — the information needed to determine the answer might exist outside of the categories you recognize, or it might be folded into an incorrect category when recognized using categorical processes (these are many to one mappings and nothing guarantees that they are always accurate). You must allow for other, new, strange solutions to exist, along the wide broad range of things that are possible. The difficulty of the novel problems you can solve, I believe (and this is, again, basically a tenet of faith for me), depends greatly on the health of your continuous perception and how carefully you can avoid falling into the traps your own existing categories might lay for you. Incorrect categorization of information may make a problem difficult or even impossible to solve. Incorrect categorization is the cardinal sin of my religion.

Lots of people do not think of creative problem-solving as actually being a learning process, but it is, I believe.

Similarly, if you stick to categorical perception you can learn where and how to apply a data structure in a computer program, but I doubt you will ever be a world-class computer programmer without working out your continuous perception as well. Somebody will eventually give you a problem that nobody's ever reasonably tackled before, and you will need ideas. You see this happen even early on, in classroom settings: there are some college students (and, based on the times I worked as a TA, this may actually be most students) who take comp-sci classes and study hard and work in the computer labs day and night but never grasp the basic idea of recursion, despite patient and detailed instruction, despite being given mountains of examples as input. I think this is because they never formed categories for recognizing recursive/self-definitional things in their brains (hey, it's a concept lots of people don't encounter early in life), and by the time they reach university they were not able or did not remember how to create new categories for recognizing this concept. This thing I view as being analogous to acquiring unfamiliar grammar rules in a new language — some folks (those advocates of strong L2 critical-period hypotheses) argue that past some age, different for different people but usually very young, you're NOT able to create the necessary new categories, and I think we've seen there are exceptions to that rule; it is not generally true. Indeed, some comp-sci students DO learn how and when to use recursion and apply that knowledge successfully, despite initially finding the notion totally unfamiliar and baffling. Again, I don't know for certain why exactly that is possible for some people and not for others (nobody does) but I'd bet good money (my religion demands it) that the difference between continuous vs. categorical cognition is one of the main factors here. With only categorical input processing — stuff matched incorrectly to other stuff you already know — there's clearly no hope of learning truly new things, but with continuous input processing you can learn just about anything you need to learn. That's what it's for.

Or how about music, whether composing or performing? You are certainly a far better musician if you are paying careful attention to every sound, rather than letting it fade into some "note box" you've already formed, not even actually listening to what it is. Categorical thinking will effectively throw away subtle differences in sounds — it will mush all sorts of similar things together. For obvious reasons, that is not an asset while making music, just as it is a problem when learning and using language. Now, sufficiently fine categories might work — but the only way you can get such fine distinctions in your categorical thinking is by spending a lot of time in your continuous thoughts! Try tuning an instrument by ear without fine continuous perception. And learning to play a new instrument well without leaning heavily on that same continuous cognitive ability is also a difficult process — I'd venture in the same general difficulty league as unfamiliar programming concepts, learning an unfamiliar language, or solving an unfamiliar mathematical puzzle without employing the appropriate continuous cognitive processes.

Let's talk about learning a new language. Well, clearly you'll never become fluent or achieve any degree of accurate pronunciation if you use only categorical cognition. Categorical processes always map things back to whatever languages you've already learned. That's what they do, but it is counter-productive in every way if you hope to learn. So slow down and exercise those continuous processes! If you do not use them you will map (via categorical processing) L2 input to other, similar sounds in L1 (or other languages you already speak), which will not only kill your listening comprehension but make accurate reproduction of the sounds of L2 just about impossible. You simply cannot construct new phonological or grammatical categories in your brain without being in the continuous, learning mode — the process that actually creates the categories — that's just how your brain works, according to the continuous-categorial model anyway.

I would point out that as this is true not only for pronunciation, but for subtle points of grammar as well, the fact that you are so successful with your grammar is encouraging. If you are acquiring the grammar, then I believe you must be using those continuous processes still.

Really, just about any creative activity, in my faith, is much better done if you attack it accepting a continuous range of input, a "wide open mind", rather than relying on previously, carefully-delineated categories in a workmanlike fashion. There is some dogma that I believe. It is not necessarily more quickly or easily done this way — but that is not the point, because in some cases it is actually impossible unless you use those continuous processes in your brain. Sometimes you have to be able to form new categories. You need that flexibility of mind. If the necessary categories do not already exist in your mind, then you simply cannot recognize the information/strategies that you need to solve a problem by your existing categorical processes. Using the continuous processes might be slower for certain tasks, but they can at least work, and they may make it, eventually, possible to do similar things in the quicker categorical mode. Eventually, what you learn in continuous cognition makes its way into your categorical cognition, et voila! You are suddenly a monster at maths, a fluent speaker of a new language, or one hell of a guitar player. When you are working in continuous modes of cognition, you are a hell of a learner; the categorical mode makes you a hell of a doer. You want them both, but the vows of my religion force me to be careful not to forego the sometimes difficult continuous for the easier categorical.

We do not have a hard critical period for language acquisition; but what we may have, instead, are these "learning" and "doing" processes in our minds. As we grow older and learn more and generally become more capable people, as automaticity becomes a more prized attribute, as people stop pressuring us to learn things and start pressuring us to do them, we tend to move away from the "learning" places in our brains, and towards the "doing" places. But we must not settle down in the "doing" places, not you or I. We must not become too comfortable there. Our native lands are the "learning" places. That is where we belong.

There are times when the categorical mode of processing information is vitally important, of course. If you are warring with a neighboring tribe, if you are running from wild mastodons — you really do want as many categorical short-cuts as possible in your brain or you will without a doubt find yourself spread about in a bloody mess. That is not the time to take in continuous input and spend any brainpower on how the mastodon smells. You need to recognize and respond based on already existing categories. If you are playing a sport or casually reading a book or really doing almost anything else that isn't sort of artsy-fartsy or skill building, you can stay in categorical as much as you like and you'll be at least as well served, and often better served.

And then there is also the fact that using the continuous perception frequently will tire you out. It isn't nearly as easy because you aren't taking so many short-cuts. Do you remember how tired you were as a small child, at the end of the day, even if "all" you did was talk and play? But it is my firm philosophy — this is one of the things that I believe, this is part of my religion — that to one who loves the way it feels to be alive, or who wants to understand what they see or hear, who longs to be a better person tomorrow than they are today, then they want to stay continuous: atavistically, jealously continuous, as much and as long as possible.

The strength of categorical cognitive processes (the ability to make fast judgments based on your body of experience) is also its weakness (sometimes things end up in what is actually the wrong category, or since they don't match any existing category sufficiently, that input is simply ignored.) Difficult to discover new things that way. In categorical cognition it may be easy to perform, but it is difficult to learn, adapt, change; you lose so much fluidity, so much flexibility. Things outside your previous experience suddenly become, more or less, invisible, or worse, become misidentified as things that they are not.

How about social interactions? Well, everybody is different. If you do not approach every new person you meet newly, allowing them to fall onto the whole spectrum of whoever and wherever they are, then what you're actually doing is breaking them down into already-identified categories, and depending on how you've learned and the experiences you've had, it might be a wrong category. Any person sufficiently outside of your experience will be misunderstood by these processes. It is the same problem again! This time you are doing it with people instead of proofs or phonemes or programming! Aaaaggh! My religion informs me that exercising your continuous cognition might just make you a better, fairer person overall. That is part of its Sermon on the Mount.

Yes, I am in fact suggesting that the same cognitive processes that help you find a creative mathematical proof can help you strike up a new friendship. I am saying this because it is, in my life experience, true. Again, this is like a particle of religion for me. Some people believe in the immaculate conception, some people believe in the transmigration of souls. I believe that your brain is a pulsing mess of language and math and music and code (they are all the same thing) and mountains of "boxes", a powerful place, where the inquisitive, open-minded, learning child in you fights with an eidetic, but ultimately unimaginative, accountant for dominance, like some bad Zoroastrian mystery play. I have bizarre notions of this sort.

Can people, particularly adults, volitionally change between the categorical and continuous perception? Well, I think yes — some might find it harder than others, and I doubt that many, if they have fallen out of the habit, can do it without being first consciously aware of the difference. It is certainly something that adults do sometimes; I know this not only from experience but because I have the evidence of people who learn things they would not learn otherwise.

I would point out that it does not need to be volitional — isn't volition an illusion anyway? It does not need to be a conscious choice. If you are spontaneously continuous often enough that may be sufficient to do what you need to do. That is in your brain. At some level, consciously or sub-consciously, I think you know where.

Many adults — most adults — spend the majority of their time processing categorically. And let's be honest, it certainly makes some things in life a lot more tolerable. Dreadful day at the office? Long boring commute? Flick! Off goes your continuous cognition. You remember just how long a car trip was when you were a kid, M.? Think about that for a moment. See if you can call that feeling back again. Now, I suppose there isn't really a point to fully experience and process all the dull parts of our lives in all of their profound paucity. Do we pay close attention to things we've done a thousand times already? Do we bask in boredom? Not usually, no. But those continuous processes are still precious. They may be slow, they may be sometimes painful, but they are precious.

I also suspect that the increased reliance on categorical processing is one of the reasons that people's perception of time often seems to speed up as they get older. You experience something and it immediately gets broken into bits and shoved into dusty "brain-boxes" that probably formed when you were a kid. It doesn't even really register as a new thing that is happening now; as far as your brain's concerned it's just the same as some things that happened years and years ago. But hey, that time, that unique moment, that unique experience that you just missed, that you did not take the time to understand its uniqueness, that you did not learn from, is gone. There's probably not even an individual memory of it. GONE. Accordingly, after the fact it seems to have gone really quick. You just have to sort of hope it wasn't important.

I believe that there are some adults who almost never use the continuous processes of cognition anymore. They might only consistently experience them inebriated, in some altered state of mind. You get really drunk or really stoned and then your categorical thought processes are inhibited. What's left is your continuous perception of the world. Then, time seems to stand still. You hear music like it's the first time you ever heard music, like every beat is a new damned universe. You notice subtle things in people's speech and body language you didn't while sober. You might, instead of reading a lowercase letter "i", become transfixed by the irregular shape of the dot on top — huh, how did you not notice before that it wasn't a perfect circle? You hear the music as sounds rather than a collection of discrete sound-categories, you don't read the letter "i" so much as see the letter "i", you experience and remember moments, rather than filing them away in a box. You suddenly remember things that happened when you were a small child — things that you haven't thought about in years, memories that are closely coded to your continuous thought processes, because that's what you were using primarily then, and not your adult categorical process.

That's what continuous cognition is like, in the extreme, when you are entirely absorbed in it. The fact is, you can, and certainly did as a child, and hopefully still do at least now and then, use that method of perception even sober. There are enormous advantages to it.

But it will also make any very painful experience nearly unbearable, like the way it was when you were a small child, when you had an earache or a fever and the whole world was nothing but constant suffering. A piece of music might haunt you for years, decades, floating forever in your brain. Cutting words might draw blood. You will always look for new ways to shelter yourself from those things.

When I hurt, when I am under stress, there is temptation to fall away towards the easy categorical processes, to give up. Continuous processes force me to feel and process the pain; it does not attenuate it like categorical processes might. The continuous world can be like a Garden of Eden, the pristine perfect state of the world primeval, when anything is possible, and the world is full of both infinite learning and infinite mystery. It also can be like the depths of Hell, where you are alone, unknowing, and you experience every pain and disappointment as itself, as something new, instead of filing it away into a brain-box, under "the aches of life, that I have felt many times before". That is the ugly side of the continuous-brain candy-store. You see, you've got Willy Wonka's Chocolate Room, and then the fucking boat ride in the tunnel. That's your chocolate factory if you want it, Charlie, but you "take the good with the bad".

You are there now, M. You have the continuous world before you, and it promises you both possibility and pain. There's pain now and it's about unbearable. Cleave close to your family, M. Don't let the stress and fear cause you to abandon that which makes you a learner, rather than a mere doer. You are going into another world, and most remain awake and wonder-full. You want to take it all in, and never forget it. Stay awake and continuous. You do not ever want to confuse your new world with the old world.

I believe you hurt so badly, M., because you are commonly continuous; because you know how to be that way, and better, you prefer to be that way. I believe that you know the difference between the continuous mind and the categorical mind, even if you did not know their names before; I think you feel that contrast. Hold that precious. That is important. That is what it means to be awake in the world.

I've never dared let go of the continuous altogether; I have tethered it close to me. There have been intermittent periods in my life when it wasn't my dominant process of perception, but everytime I've gone there, I was always worse off for it. I never intend to deliberately abandon it. Indeed, the thought of doing that breaks my heart. That is the place in my brain where I am comfortable. It slows things down for you; it keeps you from speeding through life. It allows you to really think, rather than listen to a prejudiced judgment from your backbone. It allows you to hear subtle things you would not notice, learn things you would not learn, perceive things you would not otherwise see. I utilize the categorical perception, of course, and I try to utilize it well. Thanks to the sheer amount of continuous input I've had in my life, many of the categories that have formed in my mind can make very fine and accurate distinctions. But it is not my first choice. I prefer to stay more alert than that. In most circumstances I try to keep a continuous perception. Again, there are things you can do that way that you cannot do any other way. I was talking about religion, and every religion has to have a practice, some precepts, something you must do. This is my commandment to myself: don't ever let that go, it's one of the only things that I do right.

When I hear meditation people or religious folks talking about the importance of "living in the moment" or the value of "mindfulness" or "having the hearts of children" or similar such statements, this is what the categorical parts of me imagine they mean: they are talking about the importance of maintaining a healthy continuous cognition. This might actually be wrong (who knows what those people are actually talking about) but it is helpful to me.

I remember a short story, which I believe was written by L. Frank Baum (the guy who created Oz), about a boy who (as I recall) meets a fairy in the woods and saves her life. In gratitude, she gives him a fantastic gift: a magical ball of string that allows him to travel through time — but only into his own future. The ball of string represents his remaining life, and he can unwind it as he chooses.

He accepts this gift, and then proceeds to use it to speed through all the unpleasant or dull parts of his life. At first it was only little things: he would skip through a boring lecture at school, for example. If he was punished, sent to bed without supper, he would tug at the string and then it would be the next morning and he'd be eating breakfast. As time wore on, it became bigger things. As a young man he went to war for a few years: he sped through all of that. He was captured by the enemy and thrown into a prison; he jumped past that too. Every time he met any problem, any kind of adversity, anything unpleasant, he tugged at the string. Soon he was charging forward past things he was merely tired of. As he lost loved ones and felt crushed by constant grief, as he aged and his body began to ache, he tugged and tugged at the string. Before he knew it, he was an old man and he had lost most of his life. HE HAD WASTED HIS LIFE, HE WASN'T EVEN PAYING ATTENTION TO IT. Now he was left with only a tiny bit of string, and was all alone with nothing left but his old age and death. He hurt, he was in constant pain and tired, but he couldn't bear to tug away at the string anymore, to speed through that last bit at the end. There was nothing left.

You see, he had committed suicide by categorical processing.

The truth of that story is: We all have that ball of string. It sits in all of our minds. At first we don't even know how to tug at it, it just unspools at its own pace. We soon learn, though, and then we have to abstain or tug away. Either choice has its own difficulties, but my way I think has been better for me so far.

I was terrified by that story as a child, but it's a true story (except for the happy ending where the fairy gives the man another chance at his life because she suspected he'd fuck it up, that doesn't happen. The rest of that shit totally does happen, though.)

The past year or so has been pretty hard for me. Not as hard as your life has been, and certainly not in the same ways, but it's had some trials. I take care of my grandmother — she's slipping, and it is a terrible thing to watch; I've seen it happen before, but never to somebody close to me. It's like slowly scraping my skin off. My uncle was killed in an automobile accident last summer — I was not very close to him, but my mother and grandmother are both devastated, and I am close to them. There's no real way to deal with that kind of grief, I think. You just sort of assimilate it. There's a good chance my business will fail sometime in the next year or two, that I'll finally run out of savings. But y'know, right now I would rather live as a hobo like B. did (at least I might learn something new) than go back to some big company and work fixing ten year old bugs and unkinking bad design choices: stuff that's inevitably the projection of some sloppy short-cut in somebody else's mind. I know I'm capable of just about anything. I'm going to be able to find something out there that I can do and make at least a modest living at and not have to tug at that string — and if I can't, what am I missing anyway?

So there is pain in everyone's life. I have had shit torn from me the past year or two. I know it gets worse from here. I'm going to get older. More and more of the people I love and know will, eventually, leave me. More of the things — those memories coded so closely to my continuous mind — will leave me, or change. If I live long enough, there will come a point when I feel my own mind going. And all of this is going to hurt, no matter what — but especially so if I cling to my current predilections, facing and trying to take in the continuous spectrum, instead of finding a hiding place in the safe boxes I have formed in terrifying quantity in my own head. I will be tempted, horribly tempted, to hide that way — to stop trying, to turn the keys over to the more prejudiced, less perceptive parts of my mind, the part of me that feels much less, and not keep at my older ways because they hurt too much. But in my mind, that's the devil talking — that is the only devil that exists.

I'm going to be tempted to pull at my string. Hell, I've done it before, listlessly; we all have. I had to move on to other places and other things because I was getting too eager to do that. But so I wasted some time: I can lament that wasted time but that only wastes more time. Instead, I'm going to vow not to pull at that string again. I can become wiser from that experience. I am (still) that flexible.

The older you get, I am told — but does anyone know? — the harder it is to maintain continuous modes of cognition with any regularity. The categorical mode of thinking grows stronger and easier to maintain with time, as more of those 'brain-boxes' are formed and less experience is actually new. The continuous mode does not, as a rule, grow stronger. In some fortunate people, it just starts out large and strong and so remains a useful tool for a long time, maybe (in some very fortunate people) their whole lives. But let that continuous processing go, and what you are tends to harden and crystallize. The categorical mode may be faster than relying on continuous mode to do heavy lifting for you, but you (your mind, your life, your world) no longer grow the way that you did before.

I am terrified by this more than my own mortality: that there may come a time when I can't choose anymore, when I might become blind to unfamiliar things, when I will still hear but no longer will be able to hear, when all those memories of who I was and how I got here are essentially of a different person, a better person, altogether. There may be a time when it becomes too painful or too much hard work to maintain continuous input, and so I will merely dwell among the many, many categories I authored in my brighter days, lost among boxes whose contents may or may not be truly reflected by their labels. I will have to trust them then, I will not be able to stare at them with skeptical eyes, and take a closer look.

It might not be anytime soon, at least I hope it's not, but there is some likelihood that time will come, and whenever it does come it will be far, far too soon. That is an event I can only emerge from a worse person. That is the Götterdämmerung. That is when the spool unwinds. That, not death, is when the slow process of decomposition begins in earnest.

When you broke down in our film group, M., I saw a little of myself, terrified that there would come a day when my categorical processes would dominate me, drown me — terrified, again, that I will still hear, but not hear. There may not be a critical period for learning (language, or anything else), but there is this enemy that must be battled: that must be fought back. Eventually this enemy wins one way or another: if by no other way than slaying us. This enemy is, perhaps, no more or less terrifying than apathy — sure, death may stop us from learning, but apathy does just as well. But you care, M. You do.

This again proves to me, M., there is the continuous in you. If there was not, you would not be so hurt right now. If those continuous processes had atrophied in you, M., you would not, again, have had the success you have already had, in the way that you have had it. If you were only a categorical processor, you would not be mired down now; you would try to mash your current grief with past misery and accordingly forget it — defying any meaningful differences, denying the existence of epsilon, ignoring the peculiarities of the present moment, only trying to become inured to the pain however possible. You are not doing that; that is good. Categorical processing is only for things that are known and established, not for new challenges.

So long as there is the continuous in you, there is promise and potential. That is another tenet of my religion.

It also reminded me of the nights, almost twenty years ago now, when I would soak my pillows through at night, struggling to come to grips, when I would only sleep in snatches, disturbed, waking to tears that were still somehow warm. It made me weak, it made me sick. There was no help for it, and there seemed no end to it. I was prescribed Xanax by the fistful, and yet through the drugs my life was still a wretched mess of cobwebs. If I took enough to deaden the pain, it deadened the rest of me, through and through. I had nobody around then, M., to tell me that there was any kind of hope. I hurt for years, even though I eventually came to the other end of the tunnel. Despite doing something tremendous and rare, despite surviving, I do not feel proud for it; I only have recovered my life. That's all I received in the end. That is, ultimately, enough. That no longer needs to haunt me. That is, indeed, enough.

There is hope, M., and there is enough. That is waiting for you, if you want it. I want you to know this. Nobody told me this, and that made things twice as bad.

What you are doing ain't easy, not in any sense of the word, but if you need to do it, it can be done.

I can also say that, here as in anything else, the long right tail is very long. The long right tail does not behave like the shapeless middle. I didn't just read that somewhere. And that is not a "soft" fact, that is hard and real. That is, in fact, reality.

You desire your language, unmarked and unscarred, because ultimately, that is who you are and that is how and where you belong. That is your voice. It's clearly extremely important to you, and that level of motivation is frightening and transformative. You said you don't feel you have any attachments anymore, no anchor, and now you are adrift and lost. But you are not lost — not really. You know exactly where you are going.

If you have to, I don't know any reason why you can't achieve this.

Now, I do not speak Norwegian, at least beyond the little bit I've heard in Poulsbo, so I regret I cannot help you with any specifics of your language. (That is your language now, correct?) No matter. Where you are going you have family who will aid you. They will slobber over you, as a mother cow bonds with her calf, and call you their own. You will not walk the road you walk alone. If you love them, and they love you back, they may make this impossibly difficult thing seem impossibly easy.

Since I do not speak your language, M., this means that soon you and I will part. This is a more profound separation than that of mere distance. I am glad, however, that I knew you now, and you are going on to better things. This is a long road, but one worth traveling. If you are interested, however, before I go, I'd be happy to share the general strategies on pronunciation and phonology acquisition that I have. These are, also, regrettably long, but you know. Facts in this world are kind of complicated. If you try and simplify them too much, you just lose the salt: you are doing the work of the categorical devil. Now, many of those ideas are general and should apply equally well (or equally badly) to any language. Some of it is pretty heavy, some of it (I freely admit) is rather strange. Some of it is a little cruel, but needs must. Some of it relies on those ideas from cognition that, while certainly incomplete, are still probably mostly true, or at least helpfully descriptive of things that are otherwise difficult and ineffable. "Soft" science, you know. "Soft" science. Even if it is not true, it may aid us. It may be a white lie that gains us admission to the paradise of learning, where we should all be so lucky to dwell continuously, forever and ever.

What works for me might or might not work for you, but perhaps (and this is the thing) it might give you your own, better ideas. Again, ability to construct and employ various learning strategies is consistently cited as one of the most important factors in attainment of a language.

There will come a time, M., some long summer noon, when you'll look back on our film group, the day you dissolved, and it will seem dark and dim. This will have been an unimportant eruption.

I understand, if I've read you right, that after you leave for Norge you intend to avoid English indefinitely, and use Norwegian exclusively, inside and out, at least until you are satisfied and situated and acclimated. That seems, at least, the right level of dedication and personal identification. That also means, I suppose — and this just occurs to me — that this crazy letter might be one of the last things you read in English before a long sleep. That thought is suddenly humbling, and forces me to apologize. Please excuse me for the length and extremely dense and obnoxious content of this letter. I hope it isn't too heavy for so late at night, or that you find something much better to cleanse your palate before bed. Or perhaps I should have made it even longer and more obtuse, to put you off from English further? A little bit of additional motivation? A little extra soporific to perhaps help ease that off to sleep? I would say not to let that attrite too badly — to rouse it at least once in a while — you got that and it may be useful some time later — but that isn't my place to suggest, and I wouldn't dare hinder your Norwegian, either. Forgive me also because I don't have the antidote to every poisonous thought, I don't have the surefire solution to your problems, and I recognize that there are no certainties or guarantees in this universe, but I do believe that you can get where you need to be. Go for what you want, I believe you can accomplish it. You're golden. I've known you long enough to know that.

Someday I hope to see you again, M. Norway's a long way away. Do keep me posted, through e-mail, on Facebook, however you choose to do it, and yes, certainly do write in Norwegian. If you don't want any English input from me, I understand that also and that is fine. That don't bother me none at all. If you do want to communicate, let me know when and what lingo and dammit we can make something work.

I said it earlier: you're my friend, and I don't want you in any more pain than is necessary. All that sobbing and choking just about killed me. It robbed you of a beautiful spring day — have you ever seen the cherry tree in my backyard? — and of enjoying a good movie. But, you see, there was no reason for such fears. The old M. is tired, crying before being sent to bed. That's all it is. So send that to bed. Leave that behind, let it lie. Go out with your eyes and ears wide open. Go out and explore, find new places. Go and converge, go out towards epsilon. Go with the continuous child. Go out and offer your heart to the people whom you love. Go out and drink up the ocean. Go out and play Peer Gynt. Go and catch your family's fire. Go and speak and bear yourself, the beautiful and brilliant person inside, and then all cannot be but well.

I look forward to meeting again, M.




Chris.




[1] Just to be clear: "bilingual" or "bilingualism" throughout this letter can refer to people who speak two or more languages, not two languages only.

[2] Ach. This is the sort of thing that gets overlooked lots of times in any field that isn't math-heavy. Just to explain it simply: You can easily have in your sample somebody who learned a language at age 10 and has spoken it for 40 years. You are not likely to have somebody who learned a language at age 30 and has spoken it for 40 years. You will certainly not have somebody who learned at 60 and has spoken it for 40 years. So, how much of the difference in L2 attainment is due to age-related factors, and how much is due to differences in L2 experience? Okay, so say you attempt to control for this variable by including only L2 speakers in your sample with a specific amount of experience in L2, let's say 10 years give or take a year. Well done. But then, what about changes in learning speed at different ages — might they partially or wholly explain differences in attainment? How do you know you stare at the ceiling? How about the fact that a 40 year old, all else being equal, is probably not likely to speak L2 as frequently as a 20 or 30 year old? Do you account for differences in L1 use? Really, the best you can say from this evidence is that age-of-acquisition appears to be a factor, but it is complicated and confounded by all sorts of other things that go along with it. The evidence for a significant age factor in language acquisition is not nearly as compelling as it first appears.

[3] Here are a number of interesting studies and scholarly publications about L2 pronunciation, CPH challenges, "passing" strategies of L2 speakers, non-critical period interpretations of age factors, learning strategies in L2 acquisition, neurological observations of L2 acquisition, categorical-continuous cognition in phonology acquisition, etc. Not all of them are necessarily critical of critical periods, but they all have some interesting perspectives. There are a ton more of these. None of the really smart people believe in a hard critical period for L2 acquisition, especially for pronunciation, so why should you? ❤

Bongaerts, Planken, Schils, 1995, Can late learners attain a native accent in a foreign language? A test of the critical period hypothesis.
Bongaerts, Summeren, Planken, Schils, 1997, Age and ultimate attainment in the pronunciation of foreign language
Bongaerts, Mennen, van der Slik, 2000, Authenticity of pronunciation in naturalistic second language acquisition: the case of very advanced late learners of Dutch as a second language.
Birdsong, 1992, Ultimate attainment in second language acquisition.
Birdsong, 1999, Whys and why nots of the critical period hypothesis.
Birdsong, 2004, Second language acquisition and ultimate attainment.
Birdsong, 2005, Interpreting age effects in second language acquisition.
Birdsong, 2007, Nativelike pronunciation among late learners of French as a second language.
Darcy, Peperkamp, Dupoux, 2007, Bilinguals play by the rules: perceptual compensation for assimilation in late L2-learners
Green, 2003, The neural basis of the lexicon and the grammar in L2 acquisition.
Ioup, Boustagui, Tigi, Moselle, 1994, Reexamining the critical period hypothesis: a case study in a naturalistic environment.
Jedynak (editor), 2011, Critical period hypothesis revisited: the impact of age on ultimate attainment in the pronunciation of a foreign language.
Kinsella, 2009, An investigation into the proficiency of successful late learners of French.
Marinova-Todd, Marshall, Snow, 2000, Three misconceptions about age and L2 learning.
Perani, Paulesu, Sebastian-Galles et al., 1998, The bilingual brain: proficiency and age of acquisition of the second language.
Piller, 2002, Passing for a native speaker: identity and success in second language learning.
Singleton, Lengyel (editors), 1995, The age factor in second language acquisition.
Wode, 1993, The development of phonological abilities.
Wode, 1994, Nature, nurture, and age in language acquisition: the case of speech perception.

lots more...

Index