[bsder]

> A 5-year-old would just try.

And a 5 year old would be cut a lot of slack for screwing it up.

One of the issues with learning anything as an adult is that other adults are viciously unaccommodating. Foreign language learning turns that up to 11.

Personally, I think this is the primary issue with adult learning. You have to be a very strong personality to have an intrinsic motivation that will cause you to put in long hours of work because you aren't going to get any external motivation for a very long time.

[dheera]

Interesting take. Are they?

I know adults in the US are often sadly viciously unaccomodating of broken English, but I feel that isn't the case in most of the (especially non-English-speaking) world, where any attempts to speak the local language are usually very much welcomed.

There are some places where the locals tend to speak good enough English that if they realize you speak English better than their language they'll viciously insist on speaking English to get business done, but that is sometimes mitigated if you place yourself in a more rural area or less cosmopolitan city where English isn't common.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It depends how racist the country/situation is. Many countries will give English-speakers a break because many English speakers don't even try. So just being able to say something - anything - in the language counts as a plus. Anything after that is a bonus.

Even in English-speaking countries, you can screw up the grammar badly and still be comprehensible. US and British people may decide you're an idiot - and treat you accordingly - but they will mostly understand you.

So my personal ordering of importance is vocab, grammar, and finally accent/voice coaching. You will definitely need the latter for most languages, because even supposedly non-exotic ones like French require a novel set of mouth movements. Most lesson systems underemphasise this.

My working assumption as an adult is that it will take three months to learn basic conversation with full immersion and minimal distractions, and five years of constant practice to reach reasonable fluency in speaking, listening, and writing.

This is actually less time than it takes kids to learn a language, so the idea that kids are especially malleable or open is clearly wrong. Of course kids are learning language in general - and more - at the same time, so timings aren't absolutely comparable. But similarly adults are having to do a lot of distracting adult things at the same time, so it more or less evens out.

[throwaway55421]

This doesn't match my experience at all, you just have to have a good sense of humour.

One of the first things I learn in a language is how to say some variant of "I'm a little puppy", spring chicken, I speak like a 2 year old, etc.

You're never going to sound like the Queen, no-one reasonable expects that.