Comment by jacalata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacalata | Hacker News Reader

There are some languages that are so difficult that they have never been successfully learned as a foreign language and are only spoken by native speakers who started at birth.

I am enormously skeptical of this claim, and would like to see evidence for it - and it would have to show that people had made significant efforts to learn the language, had access to a level of resources similar to those available for other languages, etc. I suspect that the examples that would actually come up would be some dying tribal language where nobody has been able to learn it properly from the remaining three grandparents who speak it, which is in no way evidence for 'the language was simply too difficult'.

Although you are right to be skeptical of this claim because near-native competency is always possible, L2 competency (learning a language as a foreign language) will always be less than L1 competency (native). For instance, there are grammatical constructions with very low input frequency about which native speakers have strong intuitions, which L2 speakers will not have. The difference in L1 and L2 intuitions may be remarkably subtle, often semantic/pragmatic, but you don't have to work in the linguistic community for long to come across them.

I vaguely recall watching a program on tv in which there was an African tribal language composed of clicking sounds and other sounds that were claimed to not be able to he repeated unless learned from birth. I'm not entirely sure of the specifics but I remember it being cited as an "unable" to learn language

More likely, no one cared enough to make the effort to become fluent in the language.

I would say that if it can be categorized as a language, it can be learned, because categorization would require the observation of patterns of cause and effect.

(I know they're illusions, but they're useful illusions.)

Then it's just a matter of gathering data, developing hypotheses, and testing your interpretation of the data by asking someone if their hovercraft is full of eels.

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