[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.