
Adults learn language to fluency nearly as well as children: study - bluffroom
https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn-language-to-fluency-nearly-as-well-as-children-1de888d1d45f
======
mrzool
This got plenty of upvotes and the comments in here are mostly personal
anecdotes. I’d like to point out a couple of things:

1\. The author is the CEO of an online language learning company. That’s a
strong indication that the article might be biased.

2\. This whole “study” is based on data gathered through a “viral Facebook
quiz” in which people provided self-assestments of their own skills and
learning process. Facebook is not a controlled lab environment, and people are
subject to all kind of biases and thus terrible at self-assessment. This whole
thing screams “amateurish” and I would not trust it.

3\. Results are apparently so ambiguous and controversial that, as the author
states,

> a number of journalists have misinterpreted this paper badly, resulting in a
> lot of articles falsely stating things as embarrassing and misleading as
> “Becoming fluent in another language as an adult might be impossible”, when
> in fact the opposite is shown.

This whole thing smells funny. Think I’ll pass, thanks.

~~~
tapland
The number of Swedes who self report being fluent in English is absolutely
nuts. When hired a lot of them have problems talking about anything other than
situations you'd encounter as a tourist.

Sure, they are _pretty_ good, and can manage, but I find calling it fluent
silly.

Maybe I have a very high expectation of what 'fluent' means, but when a person
can't explain anything more advanced than what they did over the weekend I
start to worry about them coming away from meetings with a full understanding
of what was said.

~~~
homakov
I consider myself fluent, but I rarely talk outside of what happened on the
weekend. For some reason it's harder to think outside the box when using a
foreign language. I however understand 99% of what would be said on a meeting.
Understanding is much easier than explaining.

~~~
sangnoir
To add on to what you said - understanding is a subset of fluency. You also
need to be able to adequately explain/communicate your thinking in order to be
considered fluent. This requires a sound "theory of mind for language" in
order to be able to figure out when someone is misunderstanding you, and
avoiding potentially confusing diction choices, which a lot of non-fluent
speakers struggle with.

~~~
homakov
Then it comes to definition of fluent. To me 90% of Swedes are fluent. What
you're talking about is "native", in my book.

------
laurieg
I have been teaching languages for years and the bottom line is the vast
majority of adults don't put in the hours.

1 hour a day is seen as a really dedicated adult language learner. If you only
did activities that involve languages for 1 hour a day as a kid you would
almost certainly flunk school and be way behind your peers.

Adults can simply run away into their native language when things get too
frustrating. Kids have no where to run to, there is no choice to not learn and
no choice to give up.

~~~
acangiano
I'm reminded of how mathematicians do their best work in their 20s. Many
assume this is because of brain decline in later years. I bet it's mostly to
do with responsibilities and life getting in the way.

~~~
hyperpallium
Erdős didn't let responsibilities get in the way.
[https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s)

~~~
pakitan
> Erdős never married and had no children

~~~
gerbilly
OP is probably thinking of Euler, who according to a contemporary often
worked: "with a child on his knees, a cat on his back "

------
beefield
I have started to ponder a hypothesis that this thing applies to almost any
learning. People claim that it is easier for kids to learn, but for most of
the things kids learn, they use much more time than any middle aged could in
practice. Like, "ooh, look, my nephew learned backflip on a trampoline so
quickly and easily, I would never learn that". Yep, he just spent _hours_ a
day on the thing for the last couple of months. You do the same and I bet
backflip is not that hard.

~~~
sireat
The optimism in this thread is nice, but where are the success stories which
would support your hypothesis?

To overturn "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" proverb you need to show
that a 30 year old can achieve similar level of mastery in 5 years of
intensive study/deliberate practice as a 10 year old.

You are not going to become an olympic gymnast if you start practicing
backflips at 30.

Take 100 kids and immerse them in a language at 10 and they all will be fluent
by 15.

Take 100 30 year olds and not all of them will be fluent by 35. I know of many
such examples, adults living in foreign countries in total immersion, speaking
the foreign language as their main language and still not passing for a
native.

My hypothesis: You can get decent in many fields of learning as a 30 year old
with dedication but not great.

The field near and dear to my heart - chess is just one of many fields where
late greatness is lacking.

There are NO chess grandmasters who learned the game at 25. The few late
starting outliers started in their late teens.

Talented kids become GMs at age 13-15 these days after 5-7 years of study.

In fact there are very few people reaching master level who start with tabula
rasa at age 20+ and not for lack of trying.

Grandmaster is not an super exclusive title: there are 1600+ of them in the
world.

My hypothesis is that reaching the innate mastery in many fields requires a
crucial effort in your teen years.

So far I can't find many late starters.

One such outlier Joseph Conrad started writing in English in his mid 20s.

Still he did learn English earlier than that. Per wikipedia - "Shakespeare
brought him into the orbit of English literature." and that was at an age of
10 or so

~~~
shioyama
I learned Japanese to fluency from zero starting at age 26. I don't know if
these qualify as "greatness" but I have read books in Japanese, headed
meetings in Japanese, written blog posts in Japanese, presented in Japanese. I
even have occasional dreams in Japanese.

I think the "learn early" meme is spread by people who do not have the
time/energy to put into late life learning, but who are happier feeling that
_even if they did, it would be impossible anyway_. It's a defeatist attitude,
but I suppose it must be comforting. I personally can't stand it though.

~~~
sireat
Your is a good positive example of starting relatively late and achieving
proficiency by immersion and hard study.

However, I know of counter examples of hard working friends who are totally
immersed in the foreign language and working in the foreign country and still
nowhere near native levels.

Again my hypothesis is not that it is impossible to achieve proficiency in
some skill at a later age, but that it is harder by some unknown factor.

Put 100 foreign kids age 12 in Japanese schools and they will all learn good
Japanese by age 18. Plus they will pass for a native speaker.

Put 100 foreign adults aged 32 in a Japanese workplace and they will learn
some Japanese by age 38. Most will not pass for a native speaker. Yes a few
outliers will get good like you did.

I posit that the second group will have a much tougher time learning and will
advance less than the first group.

The study in OP did nothing to overturn my hypothesis.

If you start learning English at age 18 you can achieve high level of reading
comprehension at 28 but you will still have problems with accent (unless you
can hire a specialized speech coach like Arnold did).

~~~
robocat
> Put 100 foreign kids age 12 in Japanese schools and they will all learn good
> Japanese by age 18. Plus they will pass for a native speaker.

Ummmm, I know people that moved to New Zealand younger than 12 that just don't
sound native. Many people retain accent issues, although usually end up with a
normal spread of proficiencies at grammar.

------
ezoe
Adults won't get the same treatment like children.

If a non-native child lives in foreign language environment use wrong
pronunciation/grammar, he would be corrected by friends and teachers. But
adults won't get that feedback often.

Example, one of my colleague is non-native. He speak almost perfect
pronunciation/grammar, yet he has some minor quirks time to time. I won't
correct him because his language skill is more than adequate for the job and
we are engineers, not the language teacher.

If I correct every minor quirks of him, he got a feedback, so in long term,
his language will be improved further. But why do we have to do that when it
has been more than enough already?

Another example, I'm not a English native. So my writing still contains
grammatical errors. But as my language skills are improving, I rarely got a
feedback these days for my writing become good enough.

Sometimes, I got a hint of feedback like : "Wow, I didn't notice that you are
non-native.". People say that because they noticed unnatural writing of mine.
I guess that's a polite way of saying "You failed."

~~~
bovine3dom
I hope you don't find this too patronising, but I thought I'd offer you some
feedback:

> Adults won't get the same treatment like children.

I'd render this as "Adults don't get the same treatment as children".

> He speak

Should be "He speaks"

> we are engineers, not the language teacher

This should probably be "not language teachers", but the whole phrase doesn't
make a great deal of sense. I'd probably say "not copywriters".

> If I correct every minor quirks of him, he got a feedback

"If I corrected every minor quirk, he'd get feedback"

Generally "got a feedback" should always be "get feedback" \- the tense of get
was wrong, and feedback isn't countable, so it doesn't take an article.

~~~
ezoe
Thanks. Articles and plurals are the last things for me to master since my
native tongue, Japanese, doesn't have such concepts. It's not like I'm
thinking in Japanese when I write English, But the native tongue still affect
my thinking somehow.

------
xrd
I learned Japanese as a 16 year old when I was a rotary student. I learned as
a baby would, never had to unlearn poor pronunciation gathered in American
schools since I only heard it in Japan, going there without knowing anything.
Most people can't tell I'm not native on the phone.

But, I did find myself worried at that age about making mistakes, so I was
hesitant to speak often and focused on the writing. I think that meant I lost
opportunities to speak with people and accelerate my learning through rapid
feedback.

When I was 25 I lived in Brazil. My Portuguese pronunciation is not as good as
it turns out but at that point I didn't care about making mistakes. Now, I'm
much more interested in attempting to communicate, even when I make mistakes.

I think each era in life has a different set of circumstances that can hold
you back and help when learning languages.

I'm glad to see that it doesn't appear that we are at a cognitive disadvantage
to learn later in life, since I love learning languages. I hope someday my
family can live in Barcelona and we can all learn Catalan together.

~~~
new4thaccount
I know reading Japanese isn't easy, but the pronunciation part is pretty
regular and easy enough for an English speaker right? I don't think I've heard
much Japanese that I just went "nope...could never say that" like I do with
Russian, Mandarin, Finnish...etc.

Of course I'm just monolingual and don't know anything :)

~~~
ShinTakuya
There's actually a few significant barriers that don't block communication but
make you sound weird. The biggest one is the pitch accent. Japanese accent
rises and falls on two levels (high and low) and this changes the meaning of
the word. Natives will usually figure out what you're saying but it's an
important part of the language that English speakers struggle with.

Then there's also a few sounds that don't quite match normal English. "r" is
more like a sound between "l" and "d". "f" is between "f" and "h". "t" tends
to be a bit more of a solid sound than usual English. All in all as a current
learner I've been surprised at how many hurdles there have been.

~~~
Zanneth
This is a big problem with a lot of Japanese language learning material
written for English speakers. There seems to be this false notion that pitch
accent is not important enough to teach Japanese learners, so it’s not learned
until much later. As a result for a lot of people who are at the intermediate
level, pitch accent is the main distinguishing factor between sounding native
and sounding like a foreigner.

------
sk0g
I always wondered if the difference relied in some inherent neural difference
that came with age, or how we approached learning languages.

I picked up 3, and then added a 4th language by accident (parents needed a
secret language for adult conversations. To their horror, one day I started
speaking to them in that language...), but I _learned_ none of them. Hard not
to pick up a language when you are immersed by it, and you don't see kids
running around with language books, but rather getting actively taught and
spoken to in a specific language.

But immersion can be harder as an adult too. People might not be as patient
with you, and especially if you know English, people will just switch to it on
the first hint of a struggle, making immersion hard to attain.

But this article doesn't clarify that.

~~~
tomcam
> I picked up 3, and then added a 4th language by accident (parents needed a
> secret language for adult conversations. To their horror, one day I started
> speaking to them in that language...)

Wait, you can’t leave us hanging. Please tell us more about this or point us
to a blog or something. I love that story.

~~~
sk0g
No blog unfortunately, but I remember when I let it slip - I corrected them
about something they were saying about a family member, in Russian. Though,
Russian was all around us, so you would even get to use it at shops, at
school, etc. No longer taught as a language, because English aligned better
with the country's priorities for the future, but still pervasive.

A year or so after, Harry Potter wasn't out in my native language, so I
switched to the Russian copy, and I was able to read fairly comfortably. The
joys of immersion :)

------
EliRivers
I suspect, but cannot prove, that if an adult who already speaks one language
then replicated the child language-learning process by spending a decade
utterly immersed in that new language, surrounded by people who wanted very
much to communicate with that adult, and were willing to spend 16 hours a day
in that adult's company talking to that adult and trying to communicate...

Well, I'd expect that adult to be fluent a lot faster than children manage,
and to demonstrate language-learning efforts significantly better than
children seem to do. Adults who already speak a language fluently should in
many ways be better at learning a language than a child.

~~~
foldr
A counterexample to this claim is the experience of families moving
internationally. It's always the children who pick up the local language
faster.

~~~
EliRivers
I disagree that that is a counter-example, but my disagreement is based
entirely on supposition.

I would hazard that in those cases, the adults still operate in their own
languages as much as they can. The children spend many hours a day in
situations where they cannot do so, or where the consequences of language
inability are not short-term catastrophic. Schooling, for example. I suspect
that in those situations, the adults find ways to continue to operate in their
own language, out of necessity; they don't have the luxury of spending several
hours a day fumbling their way through basic grammar. Those adults need to
work, so they will work where they can continue to use their own language, or
at least get by with hand-signals and a hundred words. Often, people moving
internationally group together with other immigrants, continuing to operate in
their own language and culture. They simply avoid learning.

~~~
betaby
As an immigrant, that's very accurate. Also for adults no one wants to speak
with you for a long time if you aren't already proficient at least on B2
level. It's a visible nuisance for native speakers. Thus adults aren't really
immersed. Most of my (and over immigrant) language knowledge is very
transactional and limit to shopping and my direct work duties. Surely there
are exceptions - some are nearly native level proficient, overs are barely can
express basic needs.

~~~
dasyatidprime
From what I keep hearing from other people transitioning between language
contexts, that second sentence is what seems to make this the most
asymmetrical—put another way, the environment _refuses_ to immerse you as an
adult in the same way a child would learn. You won't get the same inputs, you
won't get the same idioms; you might get more of a sanitized or limited
version.

This is something that I think happens not just with language, but with other
traits—personality, skills, etc. A lot of these things _can_ be more mutable
than “expected” purely based on what a “self” can withstand, but the
expectation itself causes friction and inertia from both directions: the
person has to adjust their self-expectations, but also the social environment
has to add energy and information to make those changes happen in a way that's
integrated with the world. For anything that isn't adequately
compartmentalized, sometimes there is no effective framework available; if the
people around you already think they know you, either by broad categorization
or by previous experience, you have an uphill battle. Children are more
socially recognized as mutable, so both adults and child peers are more likely
to put in the energy, and they're also placed in roles where experimentation
is safe.

~~~
betaby
Definitely true, again adult interactions are transactional - why bother with
idioms, better downgrade to simplified version which can be surely understood.
As for kids that true on any language, we known and expect that kids language
subset more narrow than adult's that's why we repeat the same phrase multiple
times with different wording.

------
tomcam
I used to meet with an endless stream of immigrants, legal and not. One thing
I noticed was that the ones who used the equivalent of “Immersion“ learning
(that is, they simply did not associate with people who spoke your own
language) were by far The most positions learners. I witnessed a few people
from Poland end up with almost no Polish accent, even though they came to the
USA in middle age.

A few years later, I ended up dating a Polish woman who did not know English.
I learned become close to conversational within a few weeks, because (sorry,
but it is relevant to the story) she was gorgeous.

It turned out that the oldest of motivations proved surprisingly effective for
me.

~~~
cblum
I’m Brazilian but I’ve had people think I’m American since I’ve lost most of
my accent. It’s funny though that when I’m tired my accent shows up.

I do the immersion thing without even calling it so. My view is that if I’m
living in another country, I should integrate and learn the culture. I stopped
associating with Brazilians who were only interested in staying within a
Brazilian bubble doing Brazilian things. Might as well just go back to Brazil
if that’s what you want to do.

~~~
filoleg
Just wanted to echo this. Moved from Russia to Atlanta, and did not go out of
my way to do the whole immigrant community thing (unlike what a lot of my
parents and their friends did). 9 years later, living on West Coast now, and I
definitely attribute my proficiency in English to not joining the Russian
expat community. Meanwhile, there are people I personally know who were BORN
in the US in one of those communities, and they barely speak more than just
the very basics, despite their community not being an isolated one at all.

P.S. still have an accent, but it has been getting much better, and almost no
one manages to guess where it comes from correctly. Heavy majority of the
guesses go in the direction of Scandinavian countries :)

~~~
barry-cotter
> Meanwhile, there are people I personally know who were BORN in the US in one
> of those communities, and they barely speak more than just the very basics,
> despite their community not being an isolated one at all.

Really? Outside of communities that educate their children in their own
language second generation children everywhere generally end up fluent
speakers of the language of instruction, even in communities where their home
language speakers are a plurality or majority of a school population. You do
see Indian and Chinese kids in Silicon Valley with accents intermediate
between FOB and more general Californian but they speak English perfectly.

~~~
tomcam
Yes, really. I grew up in a Mexican neighborhood and can give you the names of
people whose families have been here for generations and barely speak any
English. Same with the Russian communities in Chicago and Long Island.

------
lordnacho
I've long suspected this to be the case. For context, my parents were
immigrants to Scandinavia from southeast Asia. I'm an immigrant to two other
European countries.

My parents know all the restaurant related stuff. Food, money, business,
smalltalk. Unsurprisingly.

They have an accent as well. I guess that's because at some point people stop
being corrected on the exact sound they are making.

Now I happen to be taking mandarin lessons at the moment. My teacher is very
particular about the exact shape your mouth and tongue should be making. She's
the first language teacher I've had who's done that.

Likewise with other language learning issues. When you're an adult, nobody
corrects your grammar once it's good enough to be understood. Or worse, they
just use you to practice English.

Also there are great examples of late learners. The three Danish Princesses,
Alexandra, Mary and Marie, from Australia, HK, and France. They all went on
intensive courses in Danish which is a weird, weird language. They're pretty
good at it.

Also I came across a French guy who sang in perfect Vietnamese on TV once.
Don't recall the name.

Aside from that I've heard stories about diplomats who've gotten quite good.

~~~
viraptor
> My teacher is very particular about the exact shape your mouth and tongue
> should be making. She's the first language teacher I've had who's done that.

Isn't that mainly because you're learning Mandarin where tone actually
matters? In English you can pronounce can ad anything between "can" "ken"
"keen" and a few others depending where you're from. I don't believe that's
still valid in Chinese.

~~~
sjy
You are describing different vowels and not tones. Different vowels are
pronounced by changing the shape of the mouth; tones are produced by the
laryngeal muscles, like when you hum a tune.

~~~
viraptor
That's cool, thanks. I learned something.

------
surfsvammel
I have always been under the impression that the only reason children learn
languages faster than adults is because they don’t worry so much about how
they would be perceived if they said the wrong thing, pronounced something
wrongly etc. The adults egos hinders theme

In fact, I always thought adults would learn languages quicker than children
if they where given the exact same circumstances because of their greater
knowledge.

~~~
filoleg
>I have always been under the impression that the only reason children learn
languages faster than adults is because they don’t worry so much about how
they would be perceived if they said the wrong thing, pronounced something
wrongly etc.

To piggyback on this, as someone learning a language as an adult, one thing
that frustrated me the most was the inverse of the phenomenon you described -
adults trying to be too polite and not correcting me when I made some
mistakes, as long as they could understand what I meant. As soon as I had made
close friends and made it explicitly clear to them, that I would really
appreciate them pointing out my mistakes, that's when my biggest learning
leaps occurred.

~~~
krn1p4n1c
This. The more polite/reserved the culture the harder it is to learn by
example.

------
nailuiamai
I moved with my family from Romania to Germany 3 years ago. My kids now speak
German fluently. They speak it to each other and Romanian to us. Their
Romanian grammar is starting to deteriorate and they are using German rules
and mot-a-mot translations when speaking Romanian. Myself on the other hand,
can barely speak any German. I understand quite a bit, but I don't have the
confidence to speak it. My kids had to speak German at school and KG and they
didn't care about making mistakes. I could use English anywhere, actually at
my workplace English is the official language. And if I am not convinced that
what I am going to say is correct, I just switch to English. I learned English
in my early teens (10-15) by watching cartoons, HBO, and the Discovery Channel
without subtitles, and by playing videogames and using the computer in a time
when Romanian was not available as an interface language. Today pretty much
every operating system and app is available in Romanian, but I still use them
in English. They just sound / look weird otherwise.

~~~
Zanneth
> Today pretty much every operating system and app is available in Romanian,
> but I still use them in English. They just sound / look weird otherwise.

A native German speaker once told me the same thing. For example, the word for
“File” is properly translated and is perfectly understandable to German
speakers, but it looks unnatural. He and many peers his age never used
computers or phones in German because being computer literate was synonymous
with being English literate. Many of the localization features we have now in
modern operating systems didn’t exist until five or ten years ago.

------
gumby
I can only attest to anecdote but both my mother and wife switched in
adulthood to a primary language that they had not previously known, and became
utterly fluent (larger than normal vocabulary, both written and spoken). One
adopted the local accent, the other never did.

I learned German informally (by speaking it continuously at home with said
wife) as an adult and am typically considered fluent BUT: A> accent is
atrocious and B> any fluency is rich and deep within a few domains; outside
those domains I flounder like an experienced beginner (which is what I
consider myself).

There are varying degrees of "fluency" but I certainly know plenty of people
whom I would consider fluent in a language they learned as an adult. Articles
that claim that it's impossible have always puzzled me.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_any fluency is rich and deep within a few domains; outside those domains I
flounder like an experienced beginner (which is what I consider myself)._

It probably wouldn't be unreasonable to think of many native speakers of
English in similar terms with regards to English fluency.

There is so much knowledge out there now that you basically can no longer be a
Renaissance Man. We all know a lot about some things and next to nothing about
others.

~~~
gumby
That's definitely true but in the case of my mother and (former) wife they are
a pretty wide scope. Think of their knowledge as a continent with a shallow
continental shelf.

My German is more like a Hawaiian island :-) -- very expressive for
discussions around the house, politics, earth moving equipment and farm
animals (the latter two due to childrearing). I am fine going out to the shops
for groceries and calling to complain when the TV cable went out. But at
parties I can only talk about so much; discussions of religion, negotiating
contracts and the usual business day are utterly beyond me.

------
microtherion
This article focuses on grammar, and the conclusions there seem plausible to
me. But a related claim is that it's much harder to lose a foreign _accent_
when speaking if exposed to the language past age 13 or so, and there I'm
leaning toward thinking that this is true.

In reading and writing, I'm much better in English than in French. I bet I
could pass for a native writer in the former (or fail to do so primarily
because my spelling is TOO accurate ;-). But when speaking, I have a pretty
obvious accent in English, despite spending years being immersed in it, and
working on my pronunciation.

My spoken French, by virtue of starting a few years earlier (and being
mercilessly drilled on pronunciation), is better, despite never having reached
as high a level of immersion, and having lost quite a bit of my vocabulary.

~~~
helloindia
With respect to pronunciation, I think it’s a trait different than language
learning(grammar, vocabulary) itself. For example, I learnt Japanese(not
fluent) when I was 25, and people in class were surprised at how good my
pronunciation was. Same with when I learnt German(limited proficiency) 3 yrs
ago. Recently. I taught myself to sing a few French songs. When people listen
to me sing, they get surprised that I don’t speak french.

Perhaps I have an advantage in this area, as I grew up speaking three
different unrelated languages, introducing me to wider range of phonetic
sounds very early in life.

------
temp1292832
Is it just me or does there seem to be some strange societal stigma around
adult education/learning?

~~~
quadrangle
It's not just you. Adults get used to being competent and have stupid
counterproductive identity issues around learning.

I put it like this:

9 year old who has been learning a skill (say how to draw or play a musical
instrument) for one year says, "hey, I've learned a lot over a year and I'm
not great yet, but I'm just 9 and have years to keep improving"

49 year old who has been learning same skill for one year: "I've made
progress, but it's been a whole year and I still just draw/sound like a little
kid"

In my own teaching, adults who put in the same amount of time and energy as
kids generally progress as fast or faster.

(I was going to add that adults generally don't put in the time and energy,
but then I remembered that lots of kids fail to do that as well)

~~~
matwood
> Adults get used to being competent and have stupid counterproductive
> identity issues around learning.

Learning to put my ego aside was one of the many great lessons I've learned
from training Jiu Jitsu as an adult.

------
astazangasta
Raising a toddler has demonstrated to me how much bullshit the idea of "kids
are language sponges" is. My kid is like an ESL speaker: he doesn't understand
grammar, he often will swallow sentences when he lacks the vocabulary to
complete them, and he regularly mixes up word order and so on. He's been
learning full-time in an immersion environment for several years. I'm pretty
sure an adult that received this kind of immersive education would have been a
much better English speaker by now.

------
dkarbayev
Does anybody have a link to the quiz?

~~~
gniv
I think it's one of the two quizzes here:
[http://www.gameswithwords.org/quizzes](http://www.gameswithwords.org/quizzes)

Edit: It's the "Which English" quiz, as per this article:
[http://news.mit.edu/2018/cognitive-scientists-define-
critica...](http://news.mit.edu/2018/cognitive-scientists-define-critical-
period-learning-language-0501)

------
indolering
This has been known for a long time and it causes a painful amount of eye-
rolling among cognitive linguists.

When you carefully track the amount of time participants spend practicing the
language, children don't perform better.

Kids are forced to speak the native language at school and get ~1 hour a day
of grammar lessons. Just because a kid can explain a biological process
doesn't mean they are "innately" better at grasping scientific concepts than
adults. It just means we were working while they were in biology class.

Some of the "learn a language young" hype is driven by MRI studies that show
kids who learn young process the second language in a different area of the
brain than adults. But processing "centers" aren't in the same place from
person to person, they float around.

For english speakers there is no economic benefit to learning a second
language either. So (as long as you are a native english speaker) don't spend
any additional resources teaching your kids a second language.

~~~
sjy
According to the abstract of the paper [1] summarised in the linked article,
"Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this
ability declines have been obscure ... [the evidence supports] the existence
of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition." The paper was
published in a leading cognitive science journal, and your claim that it is
well-known among linguists that children are no better at language acquisition
after controlling for learning time is not consistent with what I remember
from my undergraduate linguistics studies. Can you provide a citation or
clarify your claim?

[1]
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002771...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027718300994)

------
thaumasiotes
Having read the article, this isn't even a test of language fluency -- it's a
test of logic.

Imagine a university professor lecturing in an impenetrable accent, using the
occasional idiom that probably made sense in another language.

Would they be able to pass a multiple-choice logic test written in English?

Are they "nearly as fluent" as a native speaker?

------
bloak
"Fluent" is a strange term: it basically means "flowing", like verbal
diarrhoea, perhaps. Does verbal diarrhoea need to be understandable? Does the
one who spouts it need to understand anything anyone else says?

I'm not just being pedantic: it really is important to define exactly what
you're interested in. I've met lots of people who speak English in a strange,
foreign way, and quite slowly, but who are easier to understand than 99% of
native speakers. And there are also lots of ways you can parameterise how well
someone understands a language: you might find someone who has a good
understanding of sociology jargon spoken by a US academic but couldn't
understand someone from Northern England who wants to know what time it is.

------
throw2016
Studies were supposed to be about science and the scientific process and even
there we now have reproducibility crisis and a whole string of dubious and
discredited studies.

We are being overwhelmed by a culture of heavily funded think tanks, industry
groups, sundry organizations and interest groups pushing completely motivated
and self serving studies and being unquestioningly magnified by the press.

It's time to be extremely skeptical and closely examine the funding,
motivation and organizations funding studies and research especially in
scientific communities. The alternative is perpetuating toxic unscientific
narratives backed by anecdotes and 'intuitive sense' of some.

------
rgrieselhuber
A lot of it depends on the framework used to teach the language, as well as
what works for the student as an individual. If those two happen to match,
then magic happens. But it also takes a lot of hard work and drilling as an
adult.

------
dev_dull
> _However, looking more closely at the data for the students who started
> learning after the age of 20, there are a lot of late learners who
> outperformed many native English speakers._

Anyone who has been around expats and their children in a foreign country
knows this is anecdotally false. Not only do kids pick it up faster, they’re
immersed in it in a way that adults just really can’t be. Within the first
year it’s clear as day.

It feels like this study is saying “we proved people on a motorcycle and
people on a pogo stick can each travel 100 miles”

------
MaxBarraclough
Much-needed Outline.com link:
[https://outline.com/AqBm6M](https://outline.com/AqBm6M)

Outline seems to have doubled-up some of the images, unfortunately.

------
alexashka
One thing to be aware of is the individual ability when it comes to acquiring
language skills varies, a lot!

The same applies to any skill really. We all know self taught programmers who
are great. We all know top school programmers who suck.

If you have a knack for it, age won't be much of an issue. If you don't, it'll
be hard regardless. Children don't have a choice in the matter so they all
learn. Once you have a choice, most will opt out of struggling to improve
their language skills to remove accents, etc.

------
quadrangle
The trouble is the near-impossibility of controlled studies. Has there EVER
BEEN a study where adults not only had immersion but went through the child's
experience of having some parent-figures and teachers care for all their needs
while constantly correcting and helping them with every bit of language and
reading picture books or otherwise engaging with the most basic nouns and
verbs (perhaps otherwise playing and engaging with mainly peers who are going
through the exact same process) over about 2-3 years before being expected to
grasp any really abstract concepts???

I'm pretty damn certain that I could go anywhere in the world and learn all
the names for stuff in a house and basic actions and syntax in any language if
I got to role-play as an 18-month-old 24-hours a day for a year, and I could
go on to have 4-year-old near-native ability (even in pronunciation) in just
2-3 years and on and on.

Except there's no way I could ever get that experience and unlikely I would
ever commit to it anyway. The only people who could ever even approach this
are already outliers in massive ways.

But it's always seemed to me that people are crazily overconfident about what
we know about child vs adult learning.

~~~
mikekchar
I live in Japan and speak Japanese reasonably well ( _not_ native level by any
stretch of the imagination, but I can have casual conversations in virtually
any normal context). I know a lot of expats who live near me and just can't
seem to learn Japanese. One of the biggest things I noticed they had in common
was a desire to avoid being treated like a child. My level is like that of an
8 or 10 year old (though I lack fluency is some normal grammar which most
children have no trouble with). I'm very comfortable _acting_ like an 8 or 10
year old. When I go to the doctor for example, I don't expect to understand
what he's saying. The "explain it to me like I'm five" thing is my ordinary
lifestyle. But I find that some people just can't accept the step down. If
they are 30 years old, they want to go out with native speakers and interact
as a 30 year old. Then they get frustrated and humiliated when they can't
understand what's going on. They want to watch the news on TV and get
frustrated when they can't understand any of it. They refuse to watch things
(like cartoons) that they _can_ understand, because it is too childish. It's a
bit of a blocker, I think.

Admittedly, though, it's frustrating that people always have to make an effort
with you. If you go out with a group of native speakers to a bar for an
evening, there's a good chance that the only conversation you understand is
when someone makes a special effort to speak to you. There is nobody in your
peer group that has the same communication level as you, so you can get really
lonely. I always had the strategy of coming up with one-liner jokes. Just sit
back and listen and listen and listen until you finally understand something
and then think of a quick funny, but irrelevant thing to insert in the
conversation. It's doubly funny because everybody thinks you have no idea
what's going on. But that was my thing for years -- I never said anything
meaningful in a conversation in a group. Just like a kid...

But all that aside, it's actually pretty easy to show that adults can learn
languages as fast as children. Children acquire about 3 "word families" per
day on average from the age of 1.5 up to 15 (and continue as long as they
continue formal education). A "word family" is a bit like a piece of
vocabulary, but includes all the inflections and combination words (so if you
know "police" and "station", then you also know "police station" \-- it's not
counted as a new piece of vocabulary). This works out to about 1000 word
families a year (although the rate is _very_ variable between the ages of 1.5
and 5 -- the average child ending up with 5000 word families by the age of 5).

That kind of stuff is very well understood. You _can_ learn faster than that
as an adult. It's not even very hard. The trick is understanding that it's
going to take up to 5 years to speak like a 5 year old. Most people forget
what it's like to be 5 and how crappy your language skills are. They think,
"Oh these 5 year olds can play easily together and jabber on constantly" \--
but put them in an adult environment and the vast majority will clam up or be
just as frustrated as we are.

~~~
cortesoft
I have a three year old daughter who is very verbal, but every now and then
she wants to tell me something and she just can't figure out the words to say
it. She will get really frustrated and say "I can't talk!" and gets upset.

I don't know if adults are used to that sort of frustration in their daily
lives, where you just can't communicate the thoughts you have. I can't imagine
how hard that must be.

~~~
koreth1
It is, for what it's worth, one of the most common reasons I hear from Chinese
friends of mine who move back to China after living in the USA. They like a
lot of things about the USA but expressing their full intellectual range is a
constant and often unsuccessful struggle even for the ones who speak English
fairly well, and they feel like they're not able to live up to their potential
as a result.

Having lived in China a bit to immerse myself for language learning, I can
totally get that. It is very humbling to hear something in a conversation,
have complex thoughts about it, and be completely unable to respond with any
nuance or subtlety or precision.

------
WheelsAtLarge
The Mormon church has a program where young people out of high school go out
and preach the religion in countries outside the US. They don't know what
country they will go to until they are told, a bit before they start, so many
can't prepare before they go.

They are sent to a language school where in a matter of weeks they are
speaking the new language they will need to communicate. They are not fluent
but they are good enough to be understood. They will then go on their mission
and many of them will be fluent by the time they return to the US, about 2
years.

How is it done? The bottom line is that they have to put in the time and they
also need to speak the new language 100% of the time. They can't fall back on
their native language when things get difficult so they need to fight through
any difficulties. Learning a new language takes time and lots of effort.

Here's a link to an NPR story:
[https://www.npr.org/2014/06/07/319805068/lessons-from-the-
la...](https://www.npr.org/2014/06/07/319805068/lessons-from-the-language-
boot-camp-for-mormon-missionaries)

------
coldtea
Funnily, when this research was discussed before here on HN (with the "wrong"
reporting TFA criticizes), many people commented to the tune of "but of
course, it's only reasonable that adults can't never hope to learn a foreign
language at a very high level".

------
01100011
Does this really apply to, say, tonal languages? I'm trying to learn
Vietnamese and I feel like there is a sensitivity to the tones that really
needs to be there early on. Another factor, I'm sure, is that my ears just
aren't as good as they were when I was young.

------
ramonbrena
I agree with mrzool that sound methodology is as important as the results
themselves, if not more. As for becoming fluent as an adult, I learned my
first words of french at age 30 and became close to fluent after 6 years in
France, but never lost a bit of an accent...

------
ipince
Here's the original paper: [https://s3.amazonaws.com/l3atbc-
public/pub_pdfs/JK_Hartshorn...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/l3atbc-
public/pub_pdfs/JK_Hartshorne_JB_Tenenbaum_S_Pinker_2018.pdf)

------
xvilka
This is so true. The only recipe for learning language is the amount of time
required. The rest is almost irrelevant. And knowing at least two languages,
finding a time to learn new one close to impossible.

There is one thing in the article I disagree with: they suggest that there are
no hard and easy languages. It is certainly false, for example, the huge
difference between languages with an alphabet and without. In the first case,
you just learn the alphabet and rules on how to read, and you can read the
literature quite early. Latter wouldn't allow you to do that unless you learn
almost all of the commonly used words. So learning Mandarin, Japanese, other
similar languages is way harder than learning Korean or Vietnamese, while they
are very similar by nature (there are even similar words in them).

~~~
indigo945
>So learning Mandarin, Japanese, other similar languages is way harder than
learning Korean or Vietnamese, while they are very similar by nature (there
are even similar words in them).

This is a comically wrong statement. Those four languages are not similar at
all -- they are four languages from four different families, they could hardly
be more different! Even the loanwords that they have are often hardly
recognizable, much less than with languages that are actually very close (say,
English and Romanian).

~~~
xvilka
If you listen the real speech you can recognize the similar words between them
quite often. I admit my mistake of claiming they are similar, but they do
share a common traits, words. Nevertheless from all those both Chinese and
Japanese are like 10x harder than the rest, telling from my own experience.

------
torstenvl
There is no such thing as being able to "learn [a] language to fluency."
That's a contradiction in terms. If you've only learned a language, not
acquired it, you are _by definition_ not fluent. The entirety of this Medium
post is sketchy.

Look at the graphs based on age of first exposure (AoFE). There is a clear
stratification based on AoFE here.

And yet the author concludes that "[m]any late learners become native-like."
Why? The linchpin of his argument is that some non-native English speakers
scored better on a quiz than some native English speakers.

But wait a second. That's mistaking error and fault (or competence and
production). It also assumes the quiz works across English dialects, or that
it actually measures fluency. But the author even says: "This test is not
about fluency, it’s about highly pedantic grammatical accuracy."

And even if we construe all those factors in favor of the point the author is
trying to make, the _top quartile_ of late learners will _still_ never reach
the competence of those who started before age 10 (except, potentially,
briefly while the latter is still a kid).

Most troubling is the anti-intellectual dismissal of "some magic change in
brain plasticity." Changes in neuroplasticity with age are well-established.
The change is, in fact, so stark that people worried for a long time that we
completely lost brain plasticity in adulthood. Even a cursory reading of an
overview of neuroplasticity is sufficient to understand how wrong-headed the
author is:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity)

At the end of the day, the test doesn't measure fluency, it measures the
ability to answer questions about the prescriptive grammar and writing style.
Even so, it largely supports the LAD hypothesis, with clear stratification
based on the age one begins learning a language. The author of this blog post
misunderstands the applicable linguistics and dismisses established
neuroscience out of hand. His opinion should be given no weight.

~~~
pimmen
What definition of fluency do you use? I can’t seem to find any agreement on a
definition in the Wikipedia article on language fluency.

------
ojosilva
Many comments here get fluency and the lack of an accent (pronunciation) mixed
up. Although pronounciation and general entonation is part of being fluent in
a language, the message is still the most important factor in fluency and the
only one being evaluated by the quiz in the study.

For instance, many people who are native English speakers have terrible
accents (ie Texan, Scouse, Scottish, etc etc) that make it hard for other
native English speakers to understand, even though they're nearly 100% "fluent
English speakers". In fact this applies to many if not all languages.

As a curiosity, two of the most lyric works of literature ever written in the
English language - Lolita and Heart of Darkness - were written by Vladmir
Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, one Russian and the other a Polish immigrant to the
US that had terrible foreign English accents.

~~~
crispinb
Fluency is a matter of comprehension just as much as production. English is a
global language spoken with a wide range of accents. Users of English who can
only understand a narrow range of accents (Americans, I'm looking at you!)
simply lack fluency in anything other than their local dialect.

~~~
nck4222
>Users of English who can only understand a narrow range of accents
(Americans, I'm looking at you!)

Is this based on your anecdotal observations, or is this opinion based on
something concrete? Because as an American who knows many other Americans, my
anecdotal experience is that we can understand English accents from people all
over the world.

This of course varies from person to person, but software engineers I've
worked with are accustomed to speaking with people with accents.

~~~
barry-cotter
I have seen an Italian interpreting between a Georgian (US) and a Scot
(probably Glaswegian) with all speaking English.

~~~
paulmooreparks
I'm from Georgia, USA, living in Singapore, and I regularly translate English-
to-English among colleagues who are Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Thai, Aussie,
American, British, etc. I think exposure to many English accents and dialects
certainly helps regional comprehension even though it's the same language.

------
SUr3na
This is interesting because it addresses "second language", not just another
foreign language.Learning a third language is much easier than the second one.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Learning a third language is much easier than the second one. //

I didn't find this.

First language, English; second, French; third, Russian. Fourth, BSL; fifth,
German.

I don't think French helped at all with Russian, but maybe I'm wrong (I don't
know any Russian any more). What probably would have helped is doing Russian
if I'd already done German in the way I was taught that, ie strong on grammar.
Russian was taught with a heavy focus on declensions (that's the language's
fault I think) but prior to that I didn't even know there was such a thing as
a "case" as I was taught English [and French as far as I'd gone at that point]
grammar through use and not in a structured way.

My main problem learning German was that I could only think of BSL signs (or
occasionally French words) when I needed to think of a German word.

Do you have a source for your claim or is it just an assumed fact?

~~~
checkyoursudo
My primary language is English. As a teenager and into my 20s, I learned
German. As an adult, I learned French, then Attic Greek, then Latin, then a
bit of Hebrew. I started with some Mandarin, but I didn't go far in that. Now
I am learning Swedish.

I have found that my ability to learn a given language has been almost
entirely independent of any of the other languages I've learned. At least that
is my perception of things.

I learned German really well -- that is my most proficient besides English. I
don't especially feel like learning German helped me much with learning any of
the other ones or now while I learn Swedish.

Edit: Nor do I think that learning multiple languages has hurt my ability to
learn more, for whatever that is worth.

------
shmat
I wonder how much of the adult language learning research is like the research
on physical fitness. There's decades of research about the precipitous decline
in fitness and strength that comes with age. More recent research shows that
the decline had more to do with decades of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle
than physical decline. Yes, a fit 60 year old is less fit than a fit 30 year
old, but still may be quite fit. Probably the decline in ability to learn
languages is real but may not be nearly as pronounced as some studies show.

------
camillomiller
“Scott Chacon is CEO of the online language learning company Chatterbug.”

Closed the tab.

------
PierredeFermat
Perhaps it's worth noting that this is from 2018

------
tsumnia
To me, this doesn't sound so surprising - Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory
theorizes that we have an unlimited memory capacity. I think the primary issue
comes from time and practice. With a child, even when they don't "want to",
they're forced to practice by parents and adults. With adults, however, if we
don't want to do something, we don't and others are frowned upon if we insist
they do it anyway.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
>Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory theorizes that we have an unlimited memory
capacity

How is a memory stored on a neuron or series of neurons?

And, given that, why would the amount of memory not be capped by number of
neurons and synapses?

~~~
x0137294744532
Maybe the amount of neurons grows as their "usage percentage" reaches a
certain threshold, making the memory capacity unlimited.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Surely we've done enough brain experimentation to know that "people who do
more learning have more neurons" is false?

~~~
shrimp_emoji
Well, haven't there been findings that London cab drivers have higher-volume
hippocampuses because they use them more in orientation[0] and that meditation
increases white/gray matter[1]?

0: [https://www.wired.com/2011/12/london-taxi-driver-
memory/](https://www.wired.com/2011/12/london-taxi-driver-memory/)

1:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004979/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004979/)

------
bsder
I would love a link to the quiz.

One of the interesting things is how _bad_ most "native" English speakers are
at English.

------
jwang2019
Good news for me

------
foldr
The "every hiker climbed a hill" question is silly. The sentence is ambiguous
between a surface scope reading and a reading with a specific indefinite. The
first reading is compatible with every hiker climbing the same hill, and the
second reading is true only if this is the case. So even if one of these
readings is obviously more accessible than the other (which is not clear to
me) there is still no obvious sense in which either picture is the "right"
answer.

~~~
mehrdadn
I think the idea is that, if you know English well, you will immediately
contrast it with "every hiker climbed _the_ hill", and realize there was a
very likely reason the speaker didn't say that instead: there was probably
more than one hill, and/or that the speaker could not be confident that there
was only one.

~~~
foldr
I guess, but I'm a native English speaker and I don't find myself particularly
tempted to make that inference in the absence of any kind of context. There
are surely far better tests for "a" vs "the" than examples like that.

It's also _not_ in general a correct use of "the" to say something like "We
all climbed the hill" in an area where there's more than one hill, even if you
all climbed the same hill.

~~~
mehrdadn
> I'm a native English speaker and I don't find myself particularly tempted to
> make that inference

Perhaps your mathematical/technical background is overriding? :-)

> It's also not in general a correct use of "the" to say something like "We
> all climbed the hill" in an area where there's more than one hill, even if
> you all climbed the same hill.

Seems entirely context dependent... and this example doesn't say "we". I don't
know about you, but if I was talking about a bunch of hikers (myself _not_
included) and they all climbed the same hill, I would _not_ say they climbed
"a" hill. Yes, I might not get charged with perjury on a legal thing, but it'd
still be quite misleading...

~~~
foldr
>Seems entirely context dependent...

Yes, indeed, and there is no context in the question.

>but if I was talking about a bunch of hikers (myself not included) and they
all climbed the same hill, I would not say they climbed "a" hill.

I don't think this is right in the multi-hill scenario:

    
    
        The hikers went to Yosemite. Every hiker climbed the hill.
    

That sounds pretty weird.

~~~
gowld
A ntive English speaker would say "The hikers went to Yosemite. Everyone
climbed some hill." where "some" has a commo English meaning, not the common
math-English meaning of existential quantification.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Everyone climbed some hill. //

That sounds awful to my en-gb ears. "They climbed some hill" sounds like a
weird way to say "a little of a hill, but not the whole thing".

"They all climbed hills" or "Everyone climbed one of the hills" if people
didn't climb more than one hill each.

------
m0zg
Children learn phonetics much better though. For an adult an accent is darn
near impossible to fully overcome, even if they speak for hours a day. For a
child it goes away in a few months.

