[FranzFerdiNaN]

It’s ridiculous to compare native language acquisition by children with second language acquisition. A child has so many advantages: 100% surrounded by ghe native language, people who constantly talk to the child at levels they understand, teachers who work with the child (and yes native children do get grammar lessons). And children also get constantly corrected when making mistakes.

A second language learner lacks most or all of these things.

[masklinn]

Readable text provides immersion and context, which allows implicitly absorbing the most common grammatical constructs and intuiting vocabulary.

Anecdotally I can’t recall being anything more than a middling student of English until I reached the end of the translated discworld volumes and figured there was a lot more to read if I but acquired them in the original English. Some contribution can also be credited to getting into computing although mostly because EverQuest required daily interactions with English sites and speakers.

[ido]

Now try to learn another foreign language as an adult and report back on how easy it hard that was :)

[adastra22]

I have, multiple times. I’ve also raised bilingual kids. Adults fare vastly better (an order of magnitude) than kids, when compared on a basis of hours invested. The thing is, kids are exposed to a language learning environment 24/7/365 with few other responsibilities or a mother tongue to fall back on to express themselves.

If you were able to put in the same immersion effort as is forced upon a kid, you’d be fluent in less than a year and native-level a few years later, for most languages.

[fullmoon]

It’s not so ridiculous once you realise that it’s entirely possible for a second language learner to surround himself in the target language and constantly consume level appropiate (and interesting!) input.

If someone lacks those things, IMO the method isn’t very good.

[Tor3]

It's not ridiculous at all.

I learned English in exactly that way: Massive input. I learned nothing back in elementary and middle school - they tried to drill grammar, in the form of "I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are, they are". Didn't work. But I got interested in microcomputers in the mid seventies, when I was a teenager, and most of the material available was in English, so I subscribed to Personal Computer World after finding issue 1 in a local shop. Drank it all up, slowly at first, then faster, and later on I just continued - not in order to learn English, I just wanted to read what I wanted to read. And there were of course movies etc. I didn't get past technical English until much much later, when I started to read English books because that was what was available when travelling. I got all my English vocabulary and grammar from that.

English is admittedly a bit special in that it's easy to immerse even if you don't live in an English-speaking country. There's no problem finding comprehensible input (a term I hadn't heard until recently, but looking back that's what I was doing). I can manage in more languages, to a survival level, using exactly the same method. And I've worked for many years trying to learn Japanese, by more traditional methods (I couldn't just start reading.. I thought) - and I got almost nowhere. Yes, I can describe basic grammar, but I can't (or couldn't) understand Japanese outside of greetings, and I couldn't speak to save my life. But some months ago I switched to what we're discussing: Acquire the language by comprehensible input. Fortunately there are now people around who prepare material for you, and that's what I'm using. Suddenly I'm finally getting somewhere. It works. The fog is lifting.

As to "And children also get constantly corrected when making mistakes" - no, that's not really true. That's a myth. If you look, you'll see that children's mistakes are only corrected if it's serious. For the rest, except for a small amount of corrections, children simply gradually correct themselves. And they don't need teachers to work with them to learn the language. Children are fully fluent when they enter school, what they learn is more vocabulary (something which continues for the rest of their lives, of course), expressions etc. But that's not teachers teaching them said expressions. They simply come across them as part of everything else they do.

"people who constantly talk to the child at levels they understand" Again, that's not how children learn the majority of speech. What they do is to constantly (but in a relaxed, passive way) listen to adults and other older people talking between themselves. They're surrounded by input. And that's how they acquire their language.

An adult actually has an advantage most children don't have: A great ability to read. If they can read, and understand a lot of interesting topics, adults have access to massive input which is not typically accessible (at least to that level) by children.

[stevekemp]

I think the nature and number of corrections a child receives depends upon the people. For example I'm a parent of a bilingual child, and I've spent literally years correcting pronouns - as his native language doesn't have them.

So many times I've said "Your mommy is a she, not a he". Or "She said". Similarly correcting words like "I did fall" to "I fell".

I accept that teachers probably wouldn't be that picky, and most of the other English-speaking / bilingual children let things slide so long as he's understandable.

(I don't want to be "strict", but I have a social circle here who ask for corrections so it's an easy habit for me.)