garyb wrote: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.