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Comment by nojs | Hacker News Reader

I think people often forget how much time kids actually spend learning their mother tongue. They don’t go to a night class a few times a week, they spend hours each day for several years, both at home and then later at school, before becoming “fluent”. How many adults truly do that, and can’t speak the language afterwards? Brain plasticity is definitely a thing but it’s not as big of a dealbreaker as people often make it out to be.

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You're right, and kids are so successful because they simply have so much time into it. (And literally everyone around them is a free language teacher, correcting mistakes.)

Adults don't have those luxuries; however, we can be taught and easily comprehend rules that kids don't get. Since I'm familiar with French, one such rule might be that you use a pronoun before the verb but a noun goes after. « J'aime ma femme » compared with « Je t'aime ». The contractions here, too, are things that you are likely to very easily understand (je + aime = j'aime; te + aime = t'aime, and 'je' isn't contracted).

People will actually effectively say j't'aime when speaking fast. But yes, the written form is always je t'aime.

Conversely, people often forget how few children are actually good at foreign languages.

It's this. Anything else is mostly copium, you can probably learn a new language faster as an adult. But you can't do it if you only have 1h each week.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis

There has been and continues to be a lot of research behind that cope. The effortless mastery over e..g. phonology that children emerge with is very difficult to replicate in adulthood, even after decades of speaking.

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