There is currently a growing population of people in China that can speak more than one language. Throughout recent years, learning a new language has become very popular in China. More and more Chinese students are electing to spend time abroad in order to study a new language. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, in 2013, there were approximately 413,900 students from China studying abroad, and this was a dramatic increase from the 399,082 students that studied abroad in 2012. However, I heard my friends said it's very difficult for them to study a new language because they are not native speaker. As a result, they combat this issue by sacrificing pronunciation and focusing solely on learning vocabulary words when they are learning a new language. They think it is more beneficial for them to have a greater bank of vocabulary knowledge, instead of distributing time to study pronunciation they utilized it to learn more vocabulary words. However, I don't agree with them. Even though it's difficult for adult learners to achieve native-like pronunciation, they still need to study pronunciation.
However, some people might be wondering why adult learners can not achieve a good pronunciation while they study a new language. Some language learning researchers have created the critical period hypothesis. The Critical period hypothesis explains that if animals or humans don't receive the required stimulus during the critical period of development, they will not develop a specific ability. In this instance, the undeveloped ability is native-like pronunciation of adult second-language learners. However, adults have superior cognitive abilities, which are the strength for adults to achieve a good pronunciation (Pakenham.et.al,2013). Therefore, although it may be difficult at first, it's not impossible for adult learners to obtain native-like pronunciation while they are studying a new language.
