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Comment by comrade1234 | Hacker News Reader

I have a Finnish friend here in Switzerland who believes Finnish is impossible to learn as an adult. I think because of the conjugations. She has a son and she is divorced from a Spanish man who remarried a Greek woman. Her son speaks German (Swiss school), French (Swiss school), English (Swiss school and all the other children at school), Spanish (father), Greek (step-mother and step-siblings), and because she makes a point of speaking Finnish with him at home, Finnish.

He has no problem with any of the languages including Finnish but she's still convinced that she needs to force it on him before he's an adult so that he can... well, I'm not sure why.

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I have a(n English) friend who moved to Finland as an adult (in her 30s) and is now fluent in Finnish (and English, just the two languages for her) so it is certainly possible.

I have very jealous of your friend’s multi-lingual son though!

> He has no problem with any of the languages including Finnish but she's still convinced that she needs to force it on him before he's an adult so that he can... well, I'm not sure why.

Seeing your kid speak your native language is a delight regardless of the circumstances.

In the end, all cultures in existence are very sticky and want to survive and replicate. The ones that don't didn't make it into the modern age.

For an English speaker it would be difficult. It is a highly synthetic language (meaning the markers which tell you which parts of the sentence are doing what), compared to English which is an analytical language (meaning there are extra words like prepositions which tell you which part of the sentence is doing what). This is why Finnish (and other Uralic languages’ words) look so long to us, because where we in English would use prepositions and word order to denote object, subject etc., much of that is expressed in Finnish through suffixes.

Perhaps for a speaker of another synthetic language like Polish it might be easier to learn Finnish as their brain might would already have the wiring but even then, as the article notes Finnish is not an Indo-European language so it is further removed still.

The joke goes: There are 3 kinds of people

The pessimist says: Finnish is too hard for an adult to learn, mission impossible.

The realist says: With 10 years of hard work, it's doable.

The optimist says: I can do it in 5 years.

Myself I was an optimist and I kind of did it in 5 years, but it was tight. However, after having spoken it daily for 25 more years I get more and more pessimistic: There are several aspects I will not master in this life.

English speaker living in Finland (15+ years) checking in. It’s doable but very difficult. I haven’t succeeded and of all the foreigners I know - only a handful have learnt the language to the point of being able to function. Most of them Germans - interestingly.

Finnish or not, it is orders of magnitude harder to learn any language as an adult.

IMO the hardest parts of learning a new language as an adult is

a) convincing yourself its worth the effort: almost every time an adult runs into a confusing element of a new language, they find themselves calculating how many people in the world speak this language, probability they don't speak english and likelihood of running into this person and circumstance, and it's easy to justify giving up and moving on

b) avoiding forcing it into the framework of your first language: if you have one distinctly favored language already, it's very hard not to try shove the new language you are learning into the former's mold, and this can be counterproductive in learning most languages that don't share an ancestor with your favored one.

a) is greatly mitigated by forcing yourself to be in said context by living in a place prioritizing that language. b) is greatly mitigated by already being bilingual+ with languages from distinct origins (eg: mandarin chinese and english) before learning a new one, so you can place the new language on a spectrum with the ones you already know instead of confined by the rules of just one.

longtime lurker first time account maker. i wouldnt say this was the first time i was tempted to express what felt to me as due acknowledgment nor was this the most compelling, but personal circumstances aligned with the what is apparently a "universal" (as far as human cognition is phenomenologically similar at least among a normal cluster) applicability of your observation on learning as we age, specifically the transactional social/market value of investing one's remaining lifetime. i especially loved the quasiglobal (euro.. swiss euro your emphasis) scope of the swiss school polyglot generator, definitely captured a sense of immensity in your narration (at least to me who understands how one language i dont know is a huge chunk of a known universe i am blind to) so ye anyway thanks, your post was a welcome dose of motivation to learn something complex yet relatively inane but ultimately disproportionately interesting tonight guiltfree not necessarily a new language but something i can brute clone in a childlike brain without the overhead of integrating it with the collective garbage ive recorded of my pov of the history of the universe so far. (i wish)

I think this is literally just a function of time and exposure oppirtunity and nothing else.

An adult studying a language is spending like maybe 1% of the time studying that a child learning a language spends.

I get your point about time availability. This however doesn't explain why it's common for young adults to learn faster than older adults. Often young adults are even more time constrained than older generations (new family, young kids, possibly less stable job situation, etc.) and yet older adults are usually the ones who have a harder time learning a language (as a "serial" migrant I have experienced this personally). So I don't think that time is the only factor.

No, brain plasticity is real. Even people who move to another country as adults and spend 100% of their time speaking that country’s language almost never learn to speak it with native-level intuition and a native-sounding accent (though they can reach pretty high levels). Children do, without even trying.

I feel you are both having very similar views, just your somewhat bad-faith interpretation of their words makes this unnecessarily complicated: the person you are responding to is probably largely talking about those who "don't even try", while you are talking about the thin margins towards perfection.

To me, they both seem to be talking about what explains the perceived difference in effectiveness and efficiency between children and adults when they learn a new language.

The first comment seems to be arguing that the difference is "literally just a function of time and exposure opportunity and nothing else" (explicitly ruling out a significant effect related to a difference in brain plasticity related to age), while the comment you're answering to argues that brain plasticity, even under the same conditions of time and exposure opportunity, makes a significant difference.

I really can’t understand how you think we’re saying the same thing. He’s saying age doesn’t intrinsically matter and I’m saying it does.

But you also implied that it's a question of being and adult or not, as if it's a cut-off. It isn't.

If you watch people and you know when they started to learn a new language you can see a pretty strong statistical trend (what I've been exposed to is lots of immigrants who came to the country at various ages): The youngest children learn the language relatively quickly, and there's no accent. If they're around 9 or ten they still learn the language quickly, but the accent may remain for several years. And this gradually "worsen", in a way, as they start learning the language at a later age.

But there are lots of outliers, both ways. There are a few people I know who learned my language to absolute perfection, 100% native in every possible way, in their late twenties.

On the other hand there are also a large majority of people learning my language as mature adults and becoming fluent to the extent that nobody really cares about accent or way of speech - they're not sounding "native", but it's perfectly fine and doesn't matter. People stop noticing, it's just part of who they are.

Though when you get to around sixty it's definitely harder, but still doable. And it varies between people and it matters a lot what language you're trying to learn.

> But you also implied that it's a question of being and adult or not, as if it's a cut-off. It isn't.

No I didn't. I never said anywhere that it's a sharp cutoff rather than a sliding scale.

If I say Canada is further north than Brazil, it doesn't mean that latitude isn't a continuous spectrum.

You may have meant it like you say but in fact you did write

"..Even people who move to another country as adults and spend 100% of their time speaking that country’s language almost never learn to speak it with native-level intuition and a native-sounding accent (though they can reach pretty high levels). Children do, without even trying"

You simply differed between adults and children. If you meant "it gets more and more difficult the farther you move from childhood".. well fine, but you didn't write the equivalent of 'further north than Brazil' so you should expect to get questioned about that.

If you have learned a few languages when young, learning another language as an adult is much easier.

Learning a new language as an adult is brutally hard.

I spoke four languages by elementary school, including learning a new one (portuguese) in fifth grade. It was all seamless, zero effort, perfect local accent. So I have plenty of language background.

I've spent almost 20 years now as an adult trying to learn french and find it impossible. Still speak it at a 2-year old level, at best. I have constant daily exposure to french, it's just an impossible language. Or that learning a new language as an adult it impossible.

Well.. I didn't really get proficient in English until I was in my thirties. I learned another language around that time as well, though not to full fluency (only because the option of continuing went away). And absorbing and understanding of German too.. The actual point is only that I remember how it felt - how listening and other kind of input molded my brain, relatively quickly (and sounds and words started echoing around in my brain). Now, thirty years later, it feels like my brain is much stiffer and everything takes much longer, when it comes to injecting a language (fortunately everything else still works as it should).

So, 'adult' isn't really right in my opinion / experience - I know many people who were adults and could absorb another language relatively easily.

What seems to happen is that it does change for the worse as the decades go by. But it's not as simple as adult vs child. And it's not by orders of magnitude in any case, it's more linear than that.

Hey neighbour!

Growing up bi-(or even multi)-lingual is always a good opportunity when it comes to speaking, especially here in Switzerland.

There are 51 declension types that are not taught to natives. You're either born Finnish or you'll have to learn them on a case-by-case basis.

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