[forty]

The ability to learn things slow down dramatically when you get older, it's probably even more true for languages. It's fairly obvious when you look at kids. They can learn in the 5 first years of their life, without even thinking about it, to speak a language as well (at least accent wise) as any adult would do in 20 years of pretty intense studying.

[LAC-Tech]

If people spoke to me using using baby level words, then took great delight when I learned and re-produced sound, and steadily upped the sophistication of what they said, I'm sure I'd learn super quickly as well.

People can be weird with non-native adult speakers.

I tried to learn my wifes family language - mother in law seemed a bit embarrassed with how to deal with a non-native speaker, and mumbles short things very quickly. My father in law is better, he'll just talk and talk, reasonably clearly and slowly, and I've conversed way more with him (even if it's not at all fluent and involves a lot of dictionary pauses and trying to explain things).

[300bps]

Do you have a citation on this? Or is it as you say just obvious?

Here’s a study that found no link between age and a slow down of ability to learn things:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4552811/#i...

And here’s Harvard’s thoughts on it:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-memory-and-...

Scientists used to think that brain connections developed at a rapid pace in the first few years of life, until you reached your mental peak in your early 20s. Your cognitive abilities would level off at around middle age, and then start to gradually decline. We now know this is not true.

[dahart]

While this myth is repeated often, I don’t find it true or obvious at all, I’m not sure where it comes from and I don’t see any actual evidence for it. You need to compare the hours spent learning, not years, in order to compare effort.

What seems “obvious” to me is that the opposite is true - language learning accelerates for people who learn multiple languages; learning a second language takes less time than the first, if you measure the number of hours spent on it. A third one often goes even faster, especially for related languages. The main problem people have is they don’t put in the hours, and that may indeed get harder to find the motivation to do as we age.

Accent is not a metric for proficiency, understanding and communication is. 5 year old native speakers have good accents but have been immersed 100% and often don’t have the vocabulary for adult conversations. The article is someone reaching B2 level from scratch in 1 year, without full immersion. (B2 is the requirement for a foreigner to start a university degree, for example.) It doesn’t take 20 years of intense studying to learn a language, older adults learn them to proficiency in a year or two all the time.

Think of the hours again, a 5 year old has spent 8-16 hours a day (56-112 hours/week) immersed for 5 years, while the author here did like maybe 10-15 hours a week (which is indeed pretty intense and aggressive). Read his notes - ~100 hours of conversation to reach B2, where a 5 year old will have definitely had more than 1,000 hours of conversation and likely closer to ~5,000 hours of conversation. That’s more than 10x, plausibly much more, so it seems clear that in this case the author’s learning is far more efficient than childhood language learning.

[forty]

It is true that learning extra languages makes it easier and easier, but that just makes the learning capacity of babies even more impressive: they are not even learning a language, they are leaning what is a language, what does it mean to make sound with their mouth, etc etc.

Several comments seem to suggest babies are learning to speak full time, but it's very far from it, they have to learn to walk, eat, read physical expression, draw, etc etc, all kind of things we don't even realize. They are just awesome learning machines, which I find fascinating to watch.

[echelon]

Because kids aren't working full time jobs and stressing out over free time.

[na85]

There's more to it than that. Neuroplasticity exists.

[youngNed]

I'm sure it does, but you put me in a house, with 2 adults, house, feed and clothe me for 5 years that i don't have to worry about going to work and i guarantee you i will speak whatever language they speak a whole lot better than some 5 year old.

Hey i'll even throw in another language and still be able to fight the 5 year old. With one hand.