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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I'm 45 and it doesn't seem hard. I think adults have a lot less time and more stress rather than some hobbled brain.

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Very few people can achieve fluency in 2 or 3 years.

Children do it naturally, given a right environment, and simultaneously for two or three languages.

That doesn't mean it's impossible. "Hard" is relative. But, children's brains quite clearly have abilities that are lost later on.

The fluency achieved in even four years is very very limited: very correct from the point of view of how well the grammar used by adults work (better than adults over that period), but the range of the things they can express is much smaller than adults learning the language over those four years (several hours per day).

To add to this, the vocabulary and the types of sentences that children will construct are much simpler. They may talk about animals, what they've done at school and what to play next. An adult reading a foreign newspaper, by contrast, has to be able to understand language around current affairs, politics and socio-economic events and structures. A very different side to any language.

Absolutely. I have lived in places where the main language is not in the family of those you speak and I have experienced two situations: a) you have to work every day and there is little to zero chance of being exposed to the language at work, plus, little over the weekends, no possibility of finding courses outside working hours, etc. and b) spending the first months six hours a day exclusively learning the language. Well, in my unscientific experience, with b), in months you get the fluency that adults typically get in about two years.

I can absolutely believe that. I'm a relatively recent transplant to a new country and though I fall into your category A and am nowhere near fluent, I could conduct basic daily affairs (ordering at restaurants, pay bills at a post office, make basic appointments) in about 2 months or so of being here. I think adults don't give themselves enough credit in language learning.

Children are nowhere close to fluent after 2-3 years. It takes children 10+ years to reach fluency. Just Google "myth of children language learning" for dozens of peer reviewed references. Here's just one example:

"Research comparing children to adults has consistently demonstrated that adolescents and adults perform better than young children under controlled conditions (e.g., Snow & Hoefnagel-Hoehle, 1978)."

Thanks for citing this, and clarifying my ignorance! Your point is so obvious to me now.

I wonder about those "controlled conditions"... I know its anecdotical evidence, but this really contradicts everything I have ever seen after years ans years of interacting with immigrant families (and being a immigrant myself). Kids are usually perfectly fluent after a couple of years of school while parents are still struggling, even if they are also totally immersed. It really surprises me this is considered a "myth".

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