[franticpedantic]

I am not a linguist, but I have been working on learning Portuguese, and based on what I read the conventional wisdom among laymen is that native language acquisition is different for children, but the research actually shows the opposite. The only thing I've seen research suggest children are different at is accents. Furthermore, I think many of us know Americans who immigrated in their teens and have been here for a long time and really are indistinguishable from native speakers.

I also am highly skeptical of your claim you are more native in programming, but I started when I was in my early teens so I'm not sure I can comment.

I think your skill at learning languages rises when you are very young, and you face diminishing returns after that, so adults never get that much better at learning a language than when they were young. With other things you begin later in life, you start at the bottom of the learning curve and improve much more. So adults and kids are usually about as good at language learning, unlike most things, so people think kids are magically gifted at learning languages because they are about as good as adults. And of course, adults are actually much better because they already know all the real world concepts from their L1. I've also seen it asserted many times that children learn languages faster, and I've only seen research supporting the opposite, so I think your claim is just the programming version of that fallacy.

[Cushman]

I'll believe you've seen people saying that kids learn languages faster, but I'm not :) There's a lot of research both ways, and second-language acquisition is very similar to first-, but there's definitely something different going on or we wouldn't have any idea how a baby can learn a language starting from knowing none.

There's also solid evidence that learning two or more languages as a child, while being slightly slower, sets you up better to learn more as an adult, as well as just making you a cooler person overall.

That aside, though, I share your skepticism. I was just relating my experience, and hoping maybe we could, you know, have a conversation about it :)