07-02-2006, 02:24 PM

posted to uk.rec.gardening

Distance Learning/Correspondence Courses

In article .com,

“La Puce” writes:

|

| Not torture, one would hope, but immersion is the key I’m certain, that

| and love. My husband is very dyslexic, and at school his French was non

| existant. He however got a 1st at uni and a master’s degree, wrote

| hundreds of publications and a few books. He lectures and give many

| conferences around the world, notably in France, annually, and in

| French.

Dyslexia is affected by unrelated neural pathways, and so is

completely irrelevant.

Yes, immersion is the key in learning the auditory neural pathways,

and those get increasingly hard to learn in old age (i.e. after

about 5 years old). That is why Chinese is very hard to learn,

and a few North American Indian languages effectively impossible.

As I said, French is very hard for many/most Germanic speakers,

because it depends on acoustic features that are essentially

unused in those languages.

You may not know that the recognition of basic ‘objects’ (i.e.

shape, pattern and colour for sight, and sounds as in vowels,

consonants, animal noises etc.) is largely genetic and developed

before birth for sight (and is common to almost all humans), but

is learnt after birth for sounds (and is NOT common to all people).

But it is so.

In particular, if you have not learnt to hear certain sounds by

the age of 5 or so, you probably never will – even if you have

an early hearing problem that is later corrected.

Regards,

Nick Maclaren.