The older you get the harder it gets.

[Speakeasy]

As much as I generally highly respect your contributions Speakeasy, it appears here you have outted yourself as being a round-earther (a sadly-deluded believer in the quaint but improbable theory that we all live on some sort of marble-shaped globular thingy). For me and the rest of my fellow flat-earthers, the issue you describe does not present itself at all. And despite your suggestion, we are perfectly aware of where we are: smack dab at some point on a ginormous flat plane, living in constant fear of getting too close to one of Earth's edges.

I would not dispute the ample scientific evidence supporting the Flat Earth hypothesis. Going further, direct observation and common sense make such a position simply unassailable.

Flat Earth 1.jpg

And yet, I find myself attracted by recent discoveries suggesting that the Earth is doughnut-shaped. This could explain the commonly-held illusion that the Earth is some sort of marble-shaped globular thingy. All the same, I have difficulty reconciling this notion with the observed flatness of our world.

Flat Earth 2.jpg

[mentecuerpo]

I am off topic here, intrigued by the theory that the earth is Doughnut shape.

I was thinking more, the earth is flat, as the convention shows:

Flat earth convention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gHbwT_R9t0

[mentecuerpo]

https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=11762

There is a linear relationship between age and language learning.

If you want to learn more than a few languages, once you have learned a few, and you have acquired the skill to learn languages (BTW, you learn a lot about language learning skills in this forum). I think that strategically makes sense to learn a language distant to your native language first and let the easiest ones for later.

For example, if your native language is an Asian one, it will make sense to learn English the younger you are, because English will be hard for Chinese speakers. The same for a European adult trying to learn Chinese.

We hosted a Chinese girl in our home for three years, and she improved significantly. She is now studying at a university in New Zealand.
At first, her English was basic and weak; she made significant improvements, though no miracles, I think she was too invested in iChat and her Chinese world and Chinese friends. Despite that, she made tremendous progress in her English skills. She has a linguistic advantage for life.

The point is that that the younger you are to tackle a language, the better.
The older you are, the harder it is. I am not saying it not impossible to learn a language in the last decades of life; I am saying it gets harder over the years.

I believe that the findings are back up by research.

For example, I am in my 50's learning German for the first time. I will not probably achieve the same proficiency in German as if I had started studying German during my 30's or 20's or even better, teen years.

You probably know people who speak a second language like a native. I would bet that they probably learned the language before age 17-yo. Exceptions to the rule is if your first language is closely related to your second language. For example, a Dutch person who learns German as an adult. An Italian adult person who learns Spanish as an adult, or a Spanish person who learns Portuguese as an adult. Because the first language is closely related to the second language, it may be possible to achieve a native-like pronunciation and grammar. But if the language is not a related one, such as Spanish and English, then the younger you learn the language, the better.

if you are a parent of children younger than 17-yo, it will be a good idea to help them learn a foreign language now, and if you have the possibilities, abroad study for one year if possible. That would be gift for life.

Edited Note for the readers of this post:
I posted this blog on Thursday, today Wednesday I do an edit to the original post. My post is a controversial one, and many members have expressed their disagreement, indicating that language learning is not affected by age and that my claims that there is a linear relationship between age and language learning lacks scientific evidence.

I am making the following edit:

Edited Note for the readers of this post:
I posted this blog on Thursday, today Wednesday I do an edit to the original post. My post is a controversial one, and many members have expressed their disagreement, indicating that language learning is not affected by age and that my claims that there is a linear relationship between age and language learning lacks scientific evidence.

[mentecuerpo]

This study may be relevant to the topic:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2920538/

Format: AbstractSend to
Cogn Psychol. 1989 Jan;21(1):60-99.
Critical period effects in second language learning: the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language.
Johnson JS, Newport EL.
Abstract

Lenneberg (1967) hypothesized that language could be acquired only within a critical period, extending from early infancy until puberty. In its basic form, the critical period hypothesis need only have consequences for first language acquisition. Nevertheless, it is essential to our understanding of the nature of the hypothesized critical period to determine whether or not it extends as well to second language acquisition. If so, it should be the case that young children are better second language learners than adults and should consequently reach higher levels of final proficiency in the second language. This prediction was tested by comparing the English proficiency attained by 46 native Korean or Chinese speakers who had arrived in the United States between the ages of 3 and 39, and who had lived in the United States between 3 and 26 years by the time of testing. These subjects were tested on a wide variety of structures of English grammar, using a grammaticality judgment task. Both correlational and t-test analyses demonstrated a clear and strong advantage for earlier arrivals over the later arrivals. Test performance was linearly related to age of arrival up to puberty; after puberty, performance was low but highly variable and unrelated to age of arrival. This age effect was shown not to be an inadvertent result of differences in amount of experience with English, motivation, self-consciousness, or American identification. The effect also appeared on every grammatical structure tested, although the structures varied markedly in the degree to which they were well mastered by later learners. The results support the conclusion that a critical period for language acquisition extends its effects to second language acquisition.

[Lisa]

I think that saying its harder for older people to learn languages to the some given level, or that they can't, is such a generalization that it's easy to disagree with.

Most people would agree that generally, the average young person (for some value of "young") who moves to different country with a different language and has lots of exposure, has a much easier time reaching a high level of fluency than the average older person (for some value of "old"). No one questions babies have the easiest time, for example!

[mentecuerpo]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... via%3Dihub

Cognition
Volume 39, Issue 3, June 1991, Pages 215-258
Cognition
Critical period effects on universal properties of language: The status of subjacency in the acquisition of a second language☆
Author links open overlay panelJacqueline S.JohnsonElissa L.Newport
Show more
https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(91)90054-8Get rights and content

Abstract
Recent studies have shown clear evidence for critical period effects for both first and second language acquisition on a broad range of learned, language-specific grammatical properties. The present studies ask whether and to what degree critical period effects can also be found for universal properties of language considered to be innate. To address this issue, native Chinese speakers who learned English as a second language were tested on the universal principle subjacency as it applies to wh-question formation in English. Subjects arrived in the U.S.A. between the ages of 4 and 38 years. They were immersed in English for a number of years (a minimum of 5) and were adults at the time of testing. Non-native performance on subjacency was found for subjects of all ages of arrival. Performance declined continuously over age of arrival until adulthood, (r = -.63). When immersion occurred as late as adulthood, performance dropped to levels slightly above chance. In all of the analyses performed, subjacency did not differ from language-specific structures in the degree or manner in which it was affected by maturation. These results suggest that whatever the nature of the endowment that allows humans to learn language, it undergoes a very broad deterioration as learners become increasingly mature.

[mickallen]

Glad I have read this, I have been on the brink of stopping my Spanish learning journey due to me convincing myself the reason I am finding it difficult to retain anything useful was because of my age, I was using Rocket Spanish at one point and mentioned this in their forum and a very nice member there told me he had started learning Spanish in his fifties and he was now pretty fluent, which did encourage me to believe that maybe I could also do it.

After reading the posts here I am further encouraged and hopfully I can make better progress over the next few months/years, and can hopefully find a process that suits me and my learning style.

Thank you all for your very insightful comments, this has been an interesting read!!

[Cavesa]

[
Edited Note for the readers of this post:
I posted this blog on Thursday, today Wednesday I do an edit to the original post. My post is a controversial one, and many members have expressed their disagreement, indicating that language learning is not affected by age and that my claims that there is a linear relationship between age and language learning lacks scientific evidence.

No, I don't think anybody at all indicated that language learning is not affected by age. What many disagreed with was the "linear relationship", and the assumption that age is the only thing that matters. We also pointed out that there were many more factors in play. And we looked at the issue perhaps more broadly than you may have intended, rather looking at a human from age 0 to 80, not just at a young person.

The evidence you show is thirty years old. Thirty years is a loooooong time in science. And even then: your quoted abstract from 1989 shows linear decline only up to puberty, not after, and was conducted on a laughable sample of 46 people. That is not much, such a tiny sample can logically be affected even by several families with lower or higher than average IQ being included, or by the individual education of the people in this tiny sample. The second one, from 1991 (so much for the beginning of the abstract "Recent studies have shown"), the abstract doesn't even mention the size of the sample, and some of the people were immersed for 5 years, but some of them for much more (we don't know the details from the abstract, the link doesn't lead to full text).

Nobody has doubted that immersion of small children is probably the surest method. But this obvious statement 1.doesn't bring any value to a usual member of this forum (quite the opposite, it is just another "just give up" message), 2.is different from bold statements that the decline of language learning ability is linear during our lifetimes. It is not, and even your own quoted research doesn't claim that.

I just don't think there is any value at all in crying over the fact we are not babies anymore, and that the parents of most of us didn't send us abroad for a year. Truth be told, I ended up with better skills than some of the kids, who had this opportunity, and just didn't work on the language afterwards. But of course, the kids, whose parents moved the whole family abroad (and more specifically to a better country) permanently, those ended up the best. They got better education than me, better opportunities, better language skills. I don't find anything surprising or noteworthy about that.

[Cainntear]

The bulk of academia seems to agree that the "Critical Period Hypothesis" is only really applicable to natural acquisition of language, and that the loss of natural faculties is compensated for by the ability to actively study language.

Kids learn language by listening, whereas adults tend not to pick up on all the details of the correct language they hear from natives until and unless their attention is drawn to it (and will therefore continue to repeat the same mistakes despite never hearing anyone else say it the way they do).

This failure to notice can at times be pretty extreme -- like the following story that genuinely happened to me.

I was teaching a private lesson to a Spanish couple. We were doing a listening lesson, which started with a "gist listening" (listening to the full passage and answering several comprehension questions) followed by "close listening" exercise where they listened to short excerpts of one or two sentences and tried to fill in the blanks.

On one sentence, they struggled. They filled in most of the gaps, until they just had two blanks left. The audio was talking about how "house prices" had increased in the speaker's village. Both of them were really confused. There were only two gaps left, but what they heard was three words: "prices of houses". I repeated it about 5 times -- they kept hearing "prices of houses", every single time. I told them it was "house prices", and they listened again and still looked a bit puzzled.

My explanation for this (personal hypothesis, I've never conducted any studies to confirm this, and really don't know how you ever could) is that as we get older, we get better at understanding people with different accents and dialects from us. It seems to me that our brains learn to understand what we hear by treating it as the closest thing that we might say ourselves.

As I see it, it's not a loss of language skill, but a change of language skill. We're trading our ability to learn new language against the ability to understand varieties of language that are different from our own.

And this paper....

Format: AbstractSend to
Cogn Psychol. 1989 Jan;21(1):60-99.
Critical period effects in second language learning: the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language.
Johnson JS, Newport EL.
Abstract

Lenneberg (1967) hypothesized that language could be acquired only within a critical period, extending from early infancy until puberty.

Well, there are two important details here: time and place. We're talking about a study carried out in America in the late 80s. America is the home of Krashen, and the late 80s were the peak of Krashenite thinking. Krashen suggested that there is no "teaching" or "learning" of a language, only "acquisition" in the style of a first language. In that context, the critical period hypothesis is seen as having broad applicability to adults.

However, in modern times (at least outside the US and the English teaching industry) it is widely accepted that adult language learning/acquisition is fundamentally different from childhood language learning/acquisition, and the critical period hypothesis now really is only a matter of adapting techniques to move to a more "adult" style of learning as the capacity for "child" learning declines.

[mentecuerpo]

Thank you all for your contribution to this post.
It is a constructive discussion.

As some of you may know, I am in my early 50's. I am a bilingual person, Spanish-English.

I started learning Italian six or seven years ago. I have a solid A2 Italian level or maybe a B1 in some areas like conversation. When I travel to Italy, I have no problems at all communicating with Italians.

Currently, I am learning German and French, and I am happy with my progress.
I am using my experience learning English and Italian to learning German and French.

I use many of the teachings in this forum, and I am confident that I will probably be speaking German and French in a few years.
By the way, when I go to France, I can get by in the language, very tourist-like but I understand a lot. No doubt that my Spanish, Italian, and English have made the magic.

I am happy that there is now a direct flight from Phoenix to Frankfurt, which started operating last year, so I will be able to travel a bit easier to Germany as well.

In May this year, I will visit London, Paris, and Saint-Raphael, the French Riviera - Cote d'Azur. I have been to Saint-Raphael three times, and I like it a lot. I want my daughter to learn French, so I make an effort to take her to France on her Summer or Winter school breaks. I also enjoy having exposure to the living language, so the endeavor is all worth to me.

I am going off-topic here, but the point is that I don't see anything wrong to learn a language as an adult. I am excited about learning German because it takes me out of my Latin-based comfort zone, and I find it stimulating.

Adults learn new languages, no doubt about that.
I believe there are estimated timetables already established as a guide for an adult language learner to have an approximation of how many hours will take to learn the language. For example, the approximate amount of hours it will take for an American Adult language learner to learn another language.