970x125
I have always had a problem speaking English since I started to speak it as my second language at age 27.
Early in my teaching career, students occasionally complained about my accent. My department chair once summed up my performance in a line that still rings in my ears: Dr. Sun was a good teacher, but he had an accent.
My children, never known for mercy, urged me to try harder. “Anything can be done,” they insisted. The unspoken accusation was clear: If I still sounded foreign, I simply wasn’t trying hard enough.
What neither of them knew was that biology had already cast the die.
There is a name for the stubborn grip of one’s mother tongue. It is called imprinting, a form of learning that happens early and is mostly irreversible. The idea entered science through the eccentric brilliance of Konrad Lorenz, who famously persuaded newly hatched goslings to follow him around as if he were their mother. His trick was simple and profound. At the moment of hatching, he made sure he was the only moving object in sight. The goslings learned, once and for all, who “mother” was.
Lorenz’s work earned him a Nobel Prize in 1973, shared with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. At the time, imprinting was mostly treated as an animal curiosity, charming and slightly absurd. Its deeper relevance to humans took longer to sink in.
That insight came in part from John Bowlby, who showed that early learning windows shape how children bond with caregivers and how they learn language. Decades of research since then have reinforced the same point. Human brains pass through a critical period for language acquisition. During childhood, neural circuits are exquisitely tuned to absorb sounds and accents. Later in life, those circuits become less flexible, not because adults are lazy, but because gene expression and neural plasticity change with age (Bowlby, 1969; Kuhl, 2004).
This is why children can pick up a new language without an accent, while adults, no matter how diligent, usually cannot. It is also why neither secure attachment nor native-like pronunciation comes easily once the window closes.
When my children teased me for failing to erase my accent, I joked back, “Daddy has worked his ass off. I have nothing left to give.” Then I added, only half joking, that Lorenz was my Ph.D. advisor’s advisor. That usually bought me a few seconds of respect, though not forgiveness. Biology, in their view, sounded suspiciously like an excuse.
But something unexpected happened when I stopped fighting biology head-on and started working around it.
I never gave up on pronunciation. I read aloud. I mimicked native speakers. I corrected myself every day. (I’m still doing that.) Moreover, I shifted my attention to what imprinting does not control: word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, cadence. I started using short sentences. Clear emphasis. Clean phrasing.
Within five years, no student complained about my speech. More surprisingly, my English writing improved so much that I began writing books in English for general audiences. In the end, I’ve never lost my accent completely. But I’ve gained something better. Knowing my biological limitation became my strength.
This lesson applies far beyond language. It is also why many of my childhood dream career pursuits have been crossed out: basketball (too short); soccer (started too late); track and field (not athletic enough); mathematics (lack instinct and intuition); and so on.
One of our biggest problems is not the existence of limits, but failing to recognize them. Psychologists call this the Dunning–Kruger effect, the tendency for people to overestimate their abilities when they know the least (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). It helps explain why confident people make disastrous decisions, while careful thinkers often doubt themselves. I had a deep reflection on my own worst failure some time ago.
Biology does not dictate our destiny. But it does draw boundaries. When we ignore those boundaries, we stumble. When we understand them, we can work around them, and sometimes even turn them into strengths. The best kind of confidence is not the belief that you can do anything. It is the wisdom to know what you cannot do, and the discipline to stop wasting precious time trying to prove otherwise.
