The age limit for studying....

[Iversen]

From years of following this forum (and its previous incarnation) and attending language meetups, I've consistently seen young people learning much faster than older ones. The middle-aged eternal beginner/intermediate is pretty much a language learner archetype.

I have been reading this forum and its predecessor for something like 16½ years now, and I can still not say whether age has something to do with learning speed. I can only look at myself and see what I have done and what I have achieved at different ages.

And just to mention one thing: up to 1981 I studied languages without internet access, but with teachers and other students around me plus free access to an academic library. I followed a standard university curriculum in French, I followed some classes in Italian, Romanian and Catalan plus one semester of Old Norse/Icelandic, but NO courses in Spanish at all let alone any Germanic language - just home study in those- and close to nothing in Portuguese (not even home studies). Then full stop: from 1981 to 2006 I didn't study languages at all, but I did travel around a month or so every year. And since 2006 I have relearnt the old languages, added Dutch and Portuguese and to some extent Afrikaans, Greek and the written versions of half a dozen Slavic languages plus Modern Greek and a smattering of Irish and Albanian and Bahasa Indonesia.

The situation is now that I can speak and write at least all the Romance languages I mentioned at more or less the same level (also Portuguese and Spanish, maybe slightly lower in Romanian) - well enough to improvise a one hour lecture if I had to - and on top of that I have gained a fragile foothold in at least half a dozen new languages. During this third phase I have had access to the internet (including Google Search, Google translate and Wikipedia), and I have refined my home study methods with green sheets and triple column wordlists, but I hardly ever speak any of my foreign languages except during holidays abroad. So my learning situation now is totally different from what it was during phase one until 1981, and the consequence has been that I have become even more skewed towards the written languages - but it would be absurd to say that I have learned less - or slower for that matter - since 2006 than I did up to 1981.

But but but ... I began painting oilpaintings, baking cakes AND composing music in the mid 60, and soon after I also learnt to study languages by homestudy (Spanish and Italian). I cannot start doing those activities from scratch again since I already have started them once, and apart from programming it's hard to find totally new things which I have started doing since 1981. So maybe I have actually become just as inflexible and grumpy as the stereotype claims, but this old and grumpy fellah can still add new languages and polish the old ones a little bit more.

[Picaboo]

I'm 60. I'm a life-long learner. This is what I've noticed.

My memory for learning new names and remembering old names is now completely rubbish. It hit its peak at around 16, probably. Then I could hear a TV stars name once and remember it with no effort.

My ability to learn new controls on video games gets poorer and poorer and it takes me longer and longer to get good. My skill ceiling doesn't seem to be much lower when compared to my mid-twenties, however.

Both of the above are probably a result of retroactive interference with a life-time of stuff in my head competing.

The only "troubling thing" I've discovered is that in my mid-forties my ability to hold vast amounts of logic in my head diminished. I actually had to learn to code properly to mitigate this.

Overall, aging is not at all bad. Compared to when I was 18 I learn new things a little more slowly. But compared to when I was 18 I have multiple fields of expertise and it would take that 18 year old years or decades to catch up. Also I outwork that 18 year old me by a factor of 10.

In terms of language learning, a younger me would be better at memorizing individual words and might be faster at skill acquisition. But the amount I've declined with age is tiny when compared to the individual differences between people.

Age is a non-issue. (But health and medications can be, for many).

[Picaboo]

I'd add a little rant to my last post. Anyone who uses age as a reason to not learn something is simply making an excuse.

Imagine a person at 20 and we hand them a rank. Compared to all the other people in the world, what percentile are they for "ability/speed to learn" in a particular domain. Let's say,
Math 85%
Science 65%
Language 75%
Music 35%

Now imagine they lose some as they age... so they are old (assuming some loss) we re-rank them:
Math 60%
Science 55%
Language 60%
Music 30%

If the old person then says "I shouldn't learn a language because "I'm too old" by that logic 60% of the population, including many in their prime, should never learn a language because they will be worse at it than the old fart.

All humans have limits. Just because you aren't in the very elite class doesn't mean you shouldn't learn something. Just because others on this forum are way better at language learning than I am, what does that matter to me and my experience? And just because I may be worse at it than previously doesn't mean I shouldn't do it, either.

[Lisa]

There were some papers (serious, not youtube) referenced elsewhere on this forum not too long ago that suggested learning other scripts to fluent reading ability (50 words per minute) was unlikely after a fairly low age (somewhere like 18). I'm not sure this applies to e.g. russian and greek which look much like latin characters, and possibly some on this forum have counterexamples for semitic or south/east asian scripts.

One learns to hear/not hear sounds as a very young child and "they say" that you just can't hear some sound differences once you're past childhood. Fluent forever (I think it was) suggested that using minimal pairs you could retrieve the ability as an adult. My one foray into that with a french sound was unfortunately a failure; it may have been the details.

[Iversen]

There are no nasal vowels in Danish, but then I just learned them as a teenager when I started to learn French. Nullo problemo. There is no nasal " ĩ " French. Nullo problemo, I just added it when I learnt Portuguese many years later (-im, -in). And now I study a host of Slavic languages with new and weird sizzling sounds. OK, I may not pronounce them correctly, but I can distinguish them and that's already something. So if people can't 'hear' new sounds then it isn't something in their brain physiology that is amiss, it's that they haven't tried to listen for the real sounds - they rely on their own homemade reductions to something they knew beforehand. And why do they do that? Well, because reductions are necessary because of all the minor speech variations within their own language (not only between dialects, but also allophones). But you have to learn to disregard that temptation.

The cure: learn something about phonetics and listen closely to some tiny fragments of speech that contain the relevant minimal pairs - preferably with repetitions. And do I do that myself ? Well, not nearly enough - I spend too much time listening to music.

And I have not learnt to really use new alphabets since Greek and Russian, shame on me. I knew some Greek letters from my physics in school, Russian letters came when I was around 22 years old - but I only studied the languages behind them from when I was in my mid fifties. However now I can write as fast in both as I can in Danish with Latin letters. I did also learn Korean Hangul in 1999 and the Georgian alphabet in 2001, but in both cases without studying the respective languages so that doesn't prove anything.

The solution: accept that the claim is false and just go for it

My one foray into that with a french sound ....

I'm slightly curious - which French sounds did you try to distinguish? The distinction could be one that has collapsed, like the one between "brin" and "brun" in some variants of Parisian

[Lisa]

I'm slightly curious - which French sounds did you try to distinguish? The distinction could be one that has collapsed, like the one between "brin" and "brun" in some variants of Parisian

I don't remember where I found the recordings that sounded so alike, but this was the pair:
oui /wi/ w - voiced labial-velar approximant -as in boire, ouest
huis /ɥi/ ɥ - voiced labial-palatal approximant - as in nuit, fruit

It's not the things that are new; I had to learn to say e.g. a leading ng sound and a rolling r, but it wasn't an obstacle. It's the things you don't even hear. Allegedly. My mother said bayrische had some specific sounds, and she had me repeat words after her and I never got them right and I could not hear the difference. I suppose that could have been her pulling my leg. This particular example probably doesn't matter... especially for me since I'm also making plenty of errors that I can hear. But I do have trouble with close vowel sounds, which is affecting the meanings.

[Elsa Maria]

I’m 58 and that can be an advantage when traveling and meeting people.

“Everyone speaks English there” sometimes really means everyone under 30 or 40. Well, lucky me because I actually enjoy talking to people who are 50+, and they are less likely to immediately switch to English on me.

[Irena]

And I have not learnt to really use new alphabets since Greek and Russian, shame on me. I knew some Greek letters from my physics in school, Russian letters came when I was around 22 years old - but I only studied the languages behind them from when I was in my mid fifties. However now I can write as fast in both as I can in Danish with Latin letters. I did also learn Korean Hangul in 1999 and the Georgian alphabet in 2001, but in both cases without studying the respective languages so that doesn't prove anything.

The solution: accept that the claim is false and just go for it

I don't think the claim is false at all, though you may still choose to go for it if you want to. You can certainly learn to read in a new script, but you probably cannot become a fluent reader (able to read quickly and scan texts). For people who learned the Roman script as children, this luckily doesn't apply to Cyrillic and Greek, though, because those are similar enough to the Roman script.

As for writing: Helen Abadzi (who's written extensively about problems with learning new scripts) did say that reading issues with new scripts didn't extend to writing. That's not surprising, since writing is essentially a fine motor skill, which reading is obviously not. And that was indeed my experience with Hebrew. I quickly (within weeks) got to the point where I could write it with no difficulty at all (I cannot anymore, but that's because I haven't practiced in years), but reading remained a problem, even with very simple texts in which every word was familiar. I could decipher texts, of course, but that's precisely the point: deliberate, letter-by-letter reading/decoding.

Edit: And there's something about Hangul. People keep telling me it's easy. Abadzi mentioned her own and other people's difficulties with all sorts of new scripts, but I don't believe she's once mentioned Hangul. Fascinating omission. And maybe it's not a simple omission. Maybe our Korean friends somehow managed to invent the one adult-friendly phonetic script, in which case, congratulations to them and we should all go learn Korean to show our appreciation. It also seems not to extend to pictographic scripts, which in the modern world means Chinese characters, precisely because it's one image = one word (yes, I know it's more complicated than that, but that's the idea). But stuff like Hebrew, Devanagari, Georgian, or (Allah help you) Arabic is really tough on the adult brain.

[anitarrc]

When I studied electronics at an open university (no you can't "read" that) we were 1600 at the beginning, but only 40 made it to master.
None of those who made it in the end was under 30 and studying full time. Although most of us were from 30-45, 2 were actually past 60.

Electronics is actually specialized maths.. so don't give me "you need to be young".

Languages.. I find that learning good pronunciation can be a struggle at a certain age (that is me) i think kids learn it easier than anybody else. On the other hand, the older you get, the better you are at retaining slight differences in terminology. As a technical translator, my life experience is quite helpful there.

Now, at 62 , at last I see some progress in my Russian, which never happened when i was 20+ years younger. I worked for a year on my portuguese and am quite confident now when writing Brazilian PT.

Struggling with my Russian pronunciation.. yes, terribly. I had an invitation to stay with an academic lady friend in Ufa to improve that, but then the war started.

[rdearman]

When I studied electronics at an open university... Electronics is actually specialized maths..

now I know who to ask all those questions I have about karnaugh maps and boolean logic gates ...