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by kriro 1155 days ago
My main "issue" with the paper (which I really like just to be clear) is that I can't completely figure out how they grouped someone as bilingual (maybe that's on me but it doesn't seem very clear in the methods section). It seems they used self identification by the participants (18+ old). If that's the case someone that learned the language in school would be considered bilingual. For example, if the questionaire asked me which languages I'd feel confident speaking or something similar I'd certainly include Englisch even though I learned it in school/from books/TV and neither of my parents speak it. I'd find it much more interesting if they could somehow split between people raised in a bilingual environment vs. people that learned another language.
2 comments
lupire 1155 days ago
It's impressive that your comments reads like a well-educated native speaker of English, except for "Englisch".

Anyway, your English is far, far better than "learned it in school". Those books and TV(And fluent English users in school?) were an effective immersion. It's quite different from the common USA style of learning a non-English language: "5 years of classes but no immersit in culture"

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The_Colonel 1155 days ago
Immersion in English is easy because there's so much quality content on the internet. It's often THE motivation to learn the language.

I'm learning German and there's a surprising lack of quality media. I don't want to throw shade on contemporary German culture, but it's just a very different level from the English-speaking world. My native language is Czech - which has a small cultural sphere - yet somehow the German-speaking cultural sphere does seem more similar in size to the Czech-speaking one than to the English-speaking one.

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mannykannot 1155 days ago
One could always ask additional and more specific questions, such as whether the subject learned more than one language as an infant. On the other hand, it is not clear to me from the abstract alone whether the authors were concerned with when their subjects learned their languages, though it may be clear enough to the intended audience.
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