Nobody Corrects an Adult

Ask ten people in an evening language course why they are not better at it, and most of them will say the same thing: they started too late. Children simply absorb languages, they explain. Adults have to work at it, and the work does not stay.

It is worth looking at what is actually being compared.

A child who speaks a language well at seven has been listening to it for seven years, most of the day, every day. Nobody hands her a textbook exercise. She cannot get away from the language, and there is no evening when she decides she is too tired for it. The hours are enormous, and they are free.

The adult in the Tuesday class gets two hours a week, minus the week she was ill and the week of the school holidays. In a year that is perhaps eighty hours, and some of those are spent waiting while somebody else reads out an answer. Eighty hours is not a smaller version of seven years. It is a completely different thing, and it tells us nothing at all about anybody’s brain.

Then there is correction, and this is where the real difference sits. A small child is corrected all day, by everybody, and nobody thinks it is rude. She says something wrong, an adult repeats it back correctly, and she carries on without a thought. She is not embarrassed, because she has nothing yet to be embarrassed about.

An adult is almost never corrected. Waiters understand and answer the question. Colleagues nod and move on. Correcting a grown person in public feels unkind, so it typically is not done, and the same mistake is repeated politely for ten years until it becomes a habit. Unlike the child, the adult is protected from the one thing that would help.

And adults have one real advantage, which is easy to miss because it is so ordinary. A rule can be explained to an adult in thirty seconds and used the same afternoon. Tell a four-year-old that the past of “go” is “went” and nothing happens; he has no way to use that information, and will simply have to hear the word several hundred times. Tell an adult, and she has it by dinner. Adults can read an explanation, write it down, ask why, and then notice the pattern the next morning in a headline.

Unfortunately, this is also the advantage that almost nobody asks for. The two sentences that would unlock it are the two that adults find hardest to say: Was that right? and Please correct me. They sound like weakness. They are not. They are simply the only way to buy the correction that a child is given for nothing.

So the next time somebody understands you perfectly and says nothing, ask them what you should have said. It takes five seconds and it is a little uncomfortable. It is also the one thing you can do that no child in your position could.