mentecuerpo wrote:Cavesa wrote:mentecuerpo wrote:It is an aggressive manner to push parents to pay for early language lessons at any cost. Not just financial (even though it is important. Lessons starting earlier than officially at school are expensive). The well meaning parents are so convinced that age is all that matters, that they settle even for horrible (although sometimes native) teachers. A three year old won't learn that much anyways in two hours per week (and needs to learn and do tons of other stuff too). And a five year old can already be discouraged from language learning, due to an incompetent teacher.
I think immersion works best for children. Paying private tutors can help, or bilingual schools, but immersion makes all the difference in the world. Even one or two years of immersion can contribute significantly, and the younger, the better.
We can all enjoy the benefit of immersion at any age, but children will thrive in their new language skills. As you say, they will probably not do very well with a language teacher in a non-immersion environment. It is hard to keep children motivated to learn a language; however, when they are having fun and mingling with other children and hearing the language everywhere for some time, the magic happens.
Yes, but this has much more to do with immersion and pressure than with age. Even teenagers or adults will do really well in such an exceptional situation. Those children learn extremely well, because they are immersed and have no other choice. They are forced to get schooled in that language, that is a very demanding thing. To either learn, or be extremely isolated. It's a matter of survival. Put an adult under a similar pressure, and they'll succeed much better than others of their age too. The children not living abroad are just as young, their neuroplasticity is just as high, but they do not progress miraculously, or that much faster than children a bit older.
You are mixing "Paying for a year abroad works" with "The older you get, the harder it gets.", and those are two different things. The children in normal language learning situations, such as classes (including the immersion classes that are not full time) are not doing that well. It is extremely simple. Just have a look at any coursebook series for children. The modern methodology (so playful at all costs, supposedly active and immersive, often delivered by natives) leads to totally laughable, slow, and demotivating results. The children hear the language all the time for several hours a week, they are doing supposedly communicative activities, they are definitely not drilling vocab or grammar (otherwise they'd do much better. Just like we did at primary school twenty years ago), but they still don't end up better then their classmates, who start several years later. At the end of high school, you won't find much of a difference between those, who started at the age of 4, and those who started at the age of 9. But you'll find a hell of a difference between those, who have put in thousands of hours outside of class over the years, and those who haven't.
Btw, do you know some of the children, who went abroad for a year or a few? It sounds to me like you've never met any. I actually know a small sample (perhaps a dozen). Those, who kept an intensive contact with the language after their return profited from the experience immensely. The others, no matter how young they were during their experience abroad, ended at the same level as their less privileged peers after some time. They had profited from "the magic", they had spoken like natives in the foreign kindergarten. But a decade later (or even less), they were not too different from the usual learners of their age.
The idea that starting earlier is better is of course vaguely true, nobody says otherwise. But the problem I've got with your post is different:
-no, the decline of the ability is not linear, and age is not the only important factor. You are making a too bold and dogmatic claim on something that is scientifically nonsense. It is not linear at all.
-it supports the stupid and highly elitist ideas, that paying for years of immersion is basically the only method worth considering. And there are people abusing the fact that moving abroad is simply impossible for most people. Such as language schools selling immersive classes with absolutely trashy native teachers. You know, those people who fail at their original life, take a short English teaching course to access a sweet expat life, and go damage children to another country, where nobody dares to challenge their incompetence despite the bad results. Those tons of children making too little progress (and ending up discouraged) are a direct result of the "let's all pay for modern immersive classes with native teachers" hype.
-this sort of simplification is not helpful to anybody. It doesn't motivate the older learners, the younger learners that cannot just move abroad, the poorer families, anybody.
-you are on a forum, the existence of which fights these ideas. There are learners of all the ages, and most of us haven't been sent abroad as children. Not even us with high levels. So, this claim is not useful to anybody. It's as if you were telling us to just give up.
To the older learners, to shake the walls of "I'm too old" and "let's try to learn like babies". 
Really PM? 
