[sytelus]

Do you have anything cite for this claim? All the research I'm aware of strongly suggests (1) It's extremely hard for adults to learn new languages - usually requiring many more hours compared to kids learning second language (2) Brain circuitry to hear, distinguish and pronounce new sounds effectively gets shutdown in older age.

[jaredklewis]

I too often read about research that suggests children are better at learning languages than adults, which may or not be true, but I am rarely convinced by these reports. Finding a correlation between the age a person started learning a language and their fluency, the reports then conclude that children are superior learners, without considering other factors like that bi-lingual children are exposed to their languages constantly and must learn them to communicate with others, while adult learners find 2 hours of study onerous and suffer few if any consequences from not learning.

Other studies are more scientifically rigorous, testing the aptitude of various language learning abilities with quizzes and games, but I think we can infer very little about the efficiency of long term studying from these narrow tests.

Just anecdotally, I live in Japan, and most foreigners I know who come as adults and work in a Japanese environment are conversational in a year, fluent in 3 or 4.

[eitally]

I only have this anecdote. My wife, two kids (3 & 5 years old) and I have been taking Mandarin classes for the past six months. My wife & I pick up the concepts, grammar/patterns and vocabulary about three times faster than our kids (we are also forced to work harder at it because we're constantly reinforcing the lessons to them, so that inherently biases this analysis). That said, their pronunciation is muuuuuuuch better than ours.

[tomerico]

Kids learn by observing and interacting in the language. Adults usually learn the grammar and vocabulary directly, which is a slower mechanism for the brain.

[therealdrag0]

Unfortunately I can't remember where I heard that recently. Knowing my own habits, it wasn't merely hearsay, and may have been from a podcast or other such non-fiction program, and still may have been a rogue opinion. I wish I could think of it. I'll Google around this evening.