> 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.
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.
Agreed.