| Agreed, child immersion is more effective for the oral language. I just tried to say that diglossing one's interior monologue with the L2 is not only possible, but has proven effective IMX. Adults have to learn in a different way, but we do have two advantages: (a) money[1], and (b) literacy[2]. [1] with which to pay someone to instruct and correct us, who will often describe things deductively in grammatical terms, taking advantage of our adult L1 knowledge, instead of exclusively inductively by example. Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24716468 When starting part-time language instruction, an adult learner is behind even a four year old. After two years, an adult learner will be dealing with more complex sentences than a six year old. "Dinosaurs have been extinct for 60 million years, but there's substantial evidence that birds are the evolved form of dinosaurs today." is a fine example of a sentence that an adult learner should be able to grok before two years, even if they might parse it at first as "Dinosaurs splodge extinct for 60 million..." [2] Unless one is seriously hipster or hermit, we are surrounded by the written word. (My italian is nearly nonexistent, but I do try to follow cooking directions in it, before falling back to the languages I have.) One language teacher of mine observed that she could tell within a few weeks which of her students read or not: the non-readers were advanced in oral comprehension and generation over a limited conversational domain, while the readers were less fluent orally but used a much wider range of grammar and vocabulary. Having seen celebrity twitter, I concur with her reader/non-reader dichotomy. |