Agreed. By "people" above, I should have clarified "adults".
The issue is that it is very difficult for adults to learn new phonemes (individual units of sound that distinguish words from each other) - an adult hearing a novel phoneme tends to map it to one existing in their native language.
Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words.
In the Mandarin context, this means it is difficult to learn the ü sound - it just is perceived as something like "u" (resulting in inability to distinguish lü from lu). Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. Needless to say, production of the novel sounds is also incredibly hard.
Point being - it's difficult to bridge this gap - and I'd imagine near impossible for most without a teacher. I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.
Most teachers don't know enough about phonology to give that kind of explanation. My Mandarin teacher certainly didn't. I can only credit Wikipedia with helping me perfect my pronunciation to the point where I can be mistaken for a native speaker on the phone.
> Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words.
This is accurate, but it's worth pointing out that infants are born recognizing every potential phoneme, and what they learn to do is to ignore the differences between sounds that their language considers equivalent. They don't learn to make distinctions they weren't formerly able to make. (This supports the idea that learning foreign sounds is much harder for adults -- I mention it because most people intuitively believe that things happen the other way around.)
Adults do preserve the ability to learn to ignore the difference between two sounds, but that's much less useful than learning a distinction would be. :(
> Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality.
English features tones pretty heavily, most prominently in the usually-obligatory tonal marking for yes/no questions, but interestingly also in the I-don't-know tonal sequence.
> I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.
The issue is that it is very difficult for adults to learn new phonemes (individual units of sound that distinguish words from each other) - an adult hearing a novel phoneme tends to map it to one existing in their native language.
Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words.
In the Mandarin context, this means it is difficult to learn the ü sound - it just is perceived as something like "u" (resulting in inability to distinguish lü from lu). Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. Needless to say, production of the novel sounds is also incredibly hard.
Point being - it's difficult to bridge this gap - and I'd imagine near impossible for most without a teacher. I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.
A source that goes into this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2846316/