Another key window for learning language appears to happen around our teen years. Before this time, kids are great at learning words more quickly than the rest of us. But they don’t hold on to long-term memories of many of those words. In this later phase, something solidifies, and we form lasting memories of vocabulary, grammar and language structure. That’s why if someone who knows a language never speaks it again after age 7, there’s a good chance they’ll forget most of it. But if you yank them away around age 12 or older and reintroduce them to it 30 years later, there’s a good chance they won’t miss a beat, Hernandez says.
Experts are still debating the exact age when language cements, but they’re getting a better idea. For example, in a study published in 2002, Schmid examined 35 oral testimonies of German Holocaust survivors who fled to England. They generally were given the choice to speak German or English in their interviews. Almost no one who left Germany before age 11 gave the interview in German. But many who left after age 11 did prefer German.
Hernandez tells me I’m in a gray area because, though I only used Tamil early in life, I was still exposed to it after I stopped speaking it. My prolonged exposure has likely let me retain a good amount of what little I did learn.
First Words
So I do have some foundation upon which to rebuild my use of Tamil. How long would it take to become fluent again? Hernandez is hesitant to give me an answer. True fluency would require total immersion, and likely five to 10 years of it to really get there. There are so many variables, such as my level of proficiency when I was little and how much I’ve been exposed to it since. I also have to consider how good I am at learning languages in general and how hard I want to work.
Schmid, the language loss expert, agrees, but also points me to a case study in which a Frenchman remembered speaking Mina, the language of the West African country of Togo, when he was a young boy. While born in France, he and his family, native Togolese, spent three and half years living in Togo, where he became fluent in Mina. But after returning to France when he was 6, his family was told not to use Mina with him anymore because it would hinder his French. When he was interviewed as an adult, he had forgotten most of the Mina he used to know. But after several sessions of age-regression hypnosis, he was able to speak full sentences in his childhood language.
“I think it will be a case of forcing yourself to say the first sentences,” she says. “Once that has been achieved, I’m not going to promise you anything, and I’m really only going with my gut feeling. But I suspect you will feel the flood gates open.”
I hope she’s right. I’ve since joined an online community to find people to converse with and look forward to speaking my first full Tamil sentences in a long, long time.