Interlingual Differences In Learning English

From age 10 to 14, I learned the Chinese language, Mandarin, with a private teacher. Mandarin became my fourth language, as I was trilingual at the time. I had been fluent in Korean, Indonesian, and English. My mastery of these languages significantly helped my learning of a fourth language, especially in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Grammatically, I used my knowledge of grammatical rules in other languages in order to understand the Mandarin sentence structure. For example, in Mandarin, the grammatical elements of subject, verb, and object come in that respective order. This is the same in English and Indonesian. However, in Mandarin, the adverb comes before the verb, unlike English. To understand how to construct a phrase with adverbs,

They also stated that metalinguistic awareness is present in everyone who has a mastered language, as it includes necessary skills in language such as the difference of homonyms and the separability of a name and the object which it describes (Tunmer, 1984). However, studies have shown that those who have more than two mastered languages develop a noticeably higher level of metalinguistic awareness, which promotes the learning of more languages through advantageous cognitive mechanisms. (Jessner, 1999). Further, according to a study by Jacqueline Thomas (1988), bilinguals or multilinguals who have had formal training (i.e. schooling) on their languages, an experience which enhances metalinguistic awareness, have a higher advantage over bi/multilinguals who have only informally learned their languages at home (Thomas, 2010). In my case of learning a fourth language, I met this criteria as a multilingual who had formal training in all three of my languages. Consequently, as attested by my teacher, I was faster than many of her students in

There are two specific types of learning, one being more natural and spontaneous, and the other more methodical and intentional. According to Eric Lenneberg’s critical period hypothesis, the natural type of learning a language, language acquisition, can effectively occur up to puberty. However, after puberty, language must be learned with labor and detailed methods (Singleton, 1995). This hypothesis is applicable in foreign language learning as well (Johnson, 1989). In my case, I learned my fourth language at the age of 10 to 14, right around the end of the critical period. Consequently, I had been in the transitional phase between language acquisition and language learning. As described above, my experience was a mix of spontaneous interaction and methodical study of the technicalities of Mandarin. According to a recent study, this synergy of language acquisition and language learning is most effective when it progresses from methodical learning to spontaneous acquiring (Zaščerinska, 2010). This was the case in my experience. After understanding the sentence structures and the definitions of vocabulary, I stored them as separate entities in my so-called “language bank”. To elaborate, the word “piào liang” no longer referred to the English word “pretty”, but rather to the abstract quality of prettiness. I also no longer needed to depend on my knowledge of other