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I learned French in my 30s, through a mix of immersion and an overly large Amazon.fr bill, and I speak it a bit below a "professional" level. I agree that if you "burn your ships", language learning can be surprisingly easy and natural. If your brain can't retreat into an English bubble, it will suck it up and internalize the new language.

One other interesting wrinkle: I know quite a few bilingual families. It turns out that kids are only amazing language learners when they have no choice. Kids will master the languages used on the playground and in school. But they don't always learn their home language to an especially high level.

So both children and adults seem to best when they don't have much choice. Or when all the cool books and TV shows are in another language.

Great way of thinking of it. Adults may have different brains for learning languages than kids, but I’d argue the problem adults have is more that they have more "ships to burn" (and are more hesitant with the torch).

> It turns out that kids are only amazing language learners when they have no choice. Kids will master the languages used on the playground and in school. But they don't always learn their home language to an especially high level.

Two additional factors: 1) Language aptitude is a continuous range, not discrete and 2) unused/unpracticed skills can atrophy. This is particularly evident in very young immigrants who exhibit "receptive" skill in their mother tongue even though they may have had fluency in earlier years. Immerse them in the native language, and they'll often pick up much much faster.

> This is particularly evident in very young immigrants who exhibit "receptive" skill in their mother tongue even though they may have had fluency in earlier years. Immerse them in the native language, and they'll often pick up much much faster.

Do you have any cites for this?

I suspected it might be true, and tried actually putting together a paper on this for a class in the early 90's, but pretty much ran into a dead end looking for literature to review at the time.

Mother tongues are special. Generally immigrants will do better at foreign language(s), if also getting proper education in their mother tongue. There's also been studies with brain scans showing that even "bilingual" people usually have one mother tongue, and treat all other languages as "foreign" (separate parts of the brain deal with the two "groups" of languages).

On a more anecdotal level, I had a funny experience when I went to Japan -- I was somewhat passable in French before I went, and after about half a year of being in Japan (before I had really become fluent in Japanese) I tried speaking some simple French with a French teacher. It was impossible -- every sentence started in French, and ended in Japanese :) After I got better at Japanese, my French started coming back too -- but I'm still hoping to spend a month or two in France to really get it up to a usable level. Interestingly, I didn't have any problems with my English while there -- probably because I was already fluent in English (my mother tongue is Norwegian).

I, too, was starting mixing up French with Japanese. I learned French in school and Japanese on my own.

I agree that if you "burn your ships", language learning can be surprisingly easy and natural.

This is one reason I think there's a relatively low level of Danish proficiency in adult immigrants: it is virtually impossible to burn your ships in that manner, because ~all Danes speak fluent English, and generally prefer to speak English to foreigners vs. attempt to understand poor Danish. If someone explicitly asks to keep the conversation in Danish, then people will typically oblige and attempt to understand the learner's Danish, but as soon as the person goes to a restaurant or even a government office, it'll be immediately English again unless they ask each time this happens (and even then the person may just honestly not understand them, because Danes are not good at understanding mispronounced Danish).

The only part I would disagree with is the assertion that learning a second language "isn't really different" than learning a native language. My wife, who has a masters degree in theoretical linguistics and teaches English as a foreign language, has spoken to me several times about the differences between first and second language acquisition.

(Many ESL teachers are simply English speakers living in another country, but many of them are also like my wife, doing what is essentially applied linguistics.)

Other than that, I completely agree. The notion that you are simply doomed to only have one language after the crucial period is exaggerated, and the key to learning another language is immersion.

It's a controversial matter, to say the least.

Kids will eagerly engage in language acquisition activities that few adults are willing to do. For instance, a child will happily watch the same DVD many times, until he can repeat the dialogue word for word. Their urge to do these things seems to disappear with age, along with their aversion towards bitter flavors and playmates of the opposite sex.

So should we say that kids are more talented language learners? Or should we say that they are more enthusiastic about language acquisition?

There's much more to it than that, but that gives you a flavor of the debate.

For reasons I'll skip, I've watched a fair number of contemporary Swedish mystery shows in the past couple of years. I came to them with no training in Swedish, and I'm not living in Sweden nor with any Swedish speakers.

For a LONG time, I didn't have a single Swedish reference text nor other book, although I recently acquired a few by chance at a second-hand bookstore.

Adjusting to some of the spelling requires some conscious effort, but otherwise, I pretty much "just know" how the words are pronounced.

So much of language acquisition is not a conscious exercise in memorization. Whether simply listening, speaking, or both, language acquisition occurs through ongoing exposure and use.

This is one more event in my own life that pits me more and more against over-reaching and, I increasingly find, counter-productive IP law. Many of these shows I cannot even purchase through "normal" channels. I am viewing them legally, but through what is something of a fluke -- chance -- of my Internet connection and associated -- along for the ride -- basic cable subscription.

(And I suppose I'd better shut up about this, as the cable provider seems bent on consciously eliminating anything and everything from that basic service that I actually enjoy.)

If this kind of exposure had been available to me "back in the day", when I was learning my first couple of foreign languages, the process would have gone a lot quicker and smoother. Instead of struggling to remember what I heard once or three times, I could simple "soak it in".

Artificial scarcity... It is a large, open question whether this is going to be allowed to dictate and constrain our capabilities to educate and learn.

Do we really want a more capable society, overall? Perhaps implying a smaller slice of a larger pie? Or do we simply want to be king of the hill, however much smaller that may be?

Came here to say this, and also add that this entire effort rests on the assumption that "natural" ability or "talent", in this case predisposition to language learning, actually exists. While certain people are no doubt born with enhanced cognitive abilities and all of us have genetic predispositions, the validity of this idea that people are naturally predisposed to acquire certain concrete skills is tenuous at best.

At least to me, a much better approach would be to test changes in your SYSTEM for teaching languages, rather than trying to select the inputs most predisposed to your system. Selecting "better" inputs might improve your success rate, but is it the most effective method of achieving the outcome you're looking for? Probably not. Most likely, the main failure is in the method of teaching languages, not the people being taught.

Well said. To take things one step further, I’d suggest the main failure may be the claim that we desire to learn languages in the first place, when we’re not willing to integrate a language into the things in our lives that motivate us.

With the exception of Japanese (with Anime‎ etc.) I can’t think of a single door that a foreign language opens, which we can truly expect the representative American high school student to be interested in.

What is the "representative American high school student"?

Your last statement assumes that no high school student has ever left the country. Actually going abroad, using what little of the language I knew and having an amazing time were huge motivators. But the biggest was the frustration I felt when I realized how little I knew. In my case I studied Japanese, but by the time I got to high school my interest in anime was already fading and most of it was way too hard for a high schooler to get much if anything out of it. My high school held trips And home stays to most of the languages that taught and nearly everyone I knew that went came back with a huge desire to learn more.

The hypothesis I've heard that supports this point of view is that your language center is single threaded. You can either comprehend in your native language or you can comprehend in a different language, but not both. That said, the value bindings are arbitrary. So when you are naturally a single language person (aka an American [1]) that language binding monopolizes the language center. And trying to go through it to learn a new language is like trying to learn to program in C by using the C pre-processor. Everyone I know though who knows 3 or more languages has said that after 3 its much easier. I have heard people compare to learning "binding arbitrary sounds to language" rather than learning a new language.

[1] Old joke which goes - "What do you call people who speak two languages? Bilingual! Three languages? Trilingual! One language? American!"

I don't think 'single-threaded' is a good model. multilingual people often code-switch[1] during conversation (when talking to other multilingual people who understand the same languages).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

They have decoupled the language center from specific sounds associated with language.

Our neighbor's raised their kids tri-lingual and it was amazing to watch in action. Especially the pipeline stalls when a language concept had a word in one language but not another, (the foreign word would be injected).

Yeah! I speak English and Spanish fluently. I often listen to music in Spanish while working, because I can easily tune out the words, and it's not distracting. ...as long as I'm working in English. If I get an email in Spanish, I have to turn off the music, because it interferes too much.

I’d echo your intuitions about learning, drawing on my experience learning a second language (German) to fluency in my late teens, and comparing them to my half-hearted, dead-ended attempts with a few others (Chinese, French, Ancient Greek) afterward.

To me, it seems the most important factor in learning a language is exposure (à la Gladwell’s 10k hours, and 1 hr in classroom counts far, far less than 1 hr of watching a trashy soap opera). Related and also important is motivation.

Excelling at the classroom model might provide a foundational excitement or make talking with natives less humiliating or help with grammatical minutiae (in German, irregular verb stems and modifier declension, which just take more hours to get intuitively), but has nothing directly to do with how fluent you end up.

I’d guess this test serves more to reinforce an already prevalent, toxic fatalism about learning languages (in particular as adults) than to teach us about our selves.

Could this have any implications when it comes to learning new programming languages?

For example, is it better to just dive into existing code in the language and play around with it, as opposed to picking up a book on the language and first understanding the theory and the idioms behind it end-to-end?

Yes. As I mention above, I find motivation to be extraordinarily important in learning languages of all kinds. Diving in implies you start with some task you’re already motivated by.

A crucial, well understood advantage with PLs is that they are well documented (both officially and on Stack Overflow), making minor successes with little previous exposure more likely, which can provide constant reinforcement.

In fact, natural languages are far better documented than people believe. Armed with a few electronic unabridged dictionaries, translation corpora, and conjugation tools, you can make text chatting with a native speaker motivating in the same way as diving into a new programming language, even without having ever composed a sentence before.

>Could this have any implications when it comes to learning new programming languages?

I doubt it. Even programming languages with very large 'vocabularies' are tiny compared to natural languages and the grammatical rules of any natural language are much more complex than the syntax of any programming language.

Realistically, when you learn a new PL, how much time goes into learning syntax versus other things?

I see the classroom format as a much more inefficient way to learn a language than in an immersive environment. If you can become fluent in a language in the classroom, then you should be able to do so even faster in an immersive environment, though the converse isn't true, as in your case.

The traditional American Spanish classroom is probably at least 80% English, and students are in it perhaps 5 hours a week. = 1 hr/week total

Compare this with the experience of a Spanish native speaker dropped into first grade in America, and not knowing a word of English. They have school for 6 hours a day, every weekday. = 30 hr/week total

These are not comparable, even by volume.

When you account for the burden of code-switching among languages, and the disconnection from what interests them of what little Spanish the Americans hear, it’s even more obvious why we Americans don’t end up learning Spanish, and Hispanic immigrants who go to school in the US speak English with fluency and ease, even when they first encounter it only late in life.