[charlesism]

Laziness? To learn a second language takes a long, long time. I remember reading "4400 hours" somewhere.

If you don't have an accent, congratulations, but it's not solely because of how hard-working you are, it's also because you learned the language while you were young.

I have yet to meet a single person who speaks a second language without an accent who began their study as an adult.

[Jtsummers]

https://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY...

An infographic I found once regarding approximate time to learn a language for English speakers.

> I have yet to meet a single person who speaks a second language without an accent who began their study as an adult.

I've met a couple, but they're indeed very rare. Although English may not have been their second language, it may have been more like 4 or 5, perhaps that made a difference.

[rdancer]

Learning a language requires a lot of tedious work. Learning a new accent can be done in an afternoon: All you have to do is: (1) learn a few new phonemes, (2) learn how they combine, (3) learn how they map to the accent you already are familiar with, (4) practice the mapping. Compared to the thousands of words, grammar rules, idioms, culture differences, the two kinds of effort are hardly comparable.