Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens. As the author correctly notes one needs to know tens of thousands of words to have a reasonable chance of getting through a text without encountering an unknown word. To get to that number a spaced repetition system is much more useful than sticky notes, but it doesn't help much with the time needed for practice.
People forget how much time they spent learning something when they were younger. I feel like a lot of adults give up and use age as an excuse for not trying new things.
I think this is one of the biggest points. Kids spend all day in school being forced to learn, they come home and do homework, and everything they're doing day to day is exposing them to something new. Every little thing they know feels like a huge accomplishment.
Adults are generally getting paid to do things they can already do and when we get home, we tend to piss away our time with things we know we'll like and aren't too unfamiliar. We can spend a week learning something, but in terms of our gross knowledge, it's comparatively nothing at all.
I'm not quite middle aged yet, but I'm working on learning my third language and started just a few months ago. I'm setting aside a solid hour a day + small 2-5 minute intervals throughout the day, and I'm learning faster than my second language due to the effort I'm putting in. I won't deny that it does get harder to learn completely new concepts as we age, but one benefit we have over kids is we know how to learn effectively and we have exposure with wide arrays of topics. Try to find ways to apply your other accumulated knowledge and discipline to new topics and you can learn faster.
And I mean, shit, you ever see kids try to learn Spanish or French in middle school or high school? Most can barely put together a basic greeting at the end of 1 or 2 years. A 30 or 40 something who reads a phrase book during lunch break and watches some 5 minute grammar practice videos at night 4 days a week will learn faster than 9/10 teenagers.
> I think this is one of the biggest points. Kids spend all day in school being forced to learn, they come home and do homework, and everything they're doing day to day is exposing them to something new. Every little thing they know feels like a huge accomplishment.
You’re far too kind to school. You can teach an illiterate 9 year old to read English in 40 hours, about the same time as it takes to cover the entire primary school math curriculum with a 12 year old. Homework in primary school has nugatory impacts on learning; it’s a theft of time from children and their families for ~0 benefit. You can take a native speaker of Mandarin from completely illiterate to grade level in reading and writing in three years and that’s either the most difficult or the second most difficult language after Japanese to write. If children actually retained what they were taught in school maybe it would be worth it but the average US adult doesn’t know each state has two senators. People do not retain knowledge they don’t use or find interesting.
School before 12 years old is an exercise in teaching children things slowly and haltingly that they are capable of picking up quickly and easily in a fraction of the time two years later, and things that genuinely help children like play time, especially unstructured play are forced out to increase test scores in earlier age groups when the increase washes out to nothing compared to those of two decades ago by the end of high school.
You are all absolutely correct, that it comes down to effort and practice, for the typical adult. If you treat language learning like a serious hobby, and practice it several hours a week, consistently, of course you can learn to speak a language. Practice with an ear to eliminating your accent, and you can minimize that, too.
Most people don't, or they look at how "easy" it is for kids (it's easier, but kids are also more fearless for just saying stuff and making noise), and they give up and say it's hard.
Allowing for some broad exceptions for people whose brains aren't wired to pick up a language, like people who struggle to learn math or music or painting...
I'd add another factor. Young children love communicating. They (no offense) have nothing better to do than trying to find ways, sounds and words to exchange. My theory is that this level of mind/brain engagement toward language is unmatched after 4 yo. You have other center of interests later on that would make a kid go mad if they tried to learn them.
>Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens.
Depends on the person and their budget. There are well off people (and quite poor people) with all the time in their hands to practice, because they hardly need to work. Doesn't need to be a billionaire, having a few houses to rent can be enough.
one of these days i am going to write tmux macro that updates the bottom pane with vocabulary. there will be a cli command that corresponds with it, once i write in the definition, it will cycle to the next word instantly.
