Making a top level comment cause lots of people in this thread just spreading blatant misinformation regarding the ability to learn languages as a child versus an adult. No investigation no right to speak.

https://www.nature.com/articles/1301553

Unique childhood plasticity has been demonstrated particularly in the areas of vision, audition, motor, and language abilities

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10149040

The ability to learn certain aspects of language, however, is limited after early childhood. This sensitive period for language learning makes it an important model system for the study of developmental plasticity in children.

Another clarifying example is when people who immigrate to a new country at different ages attempt to learn a second language. When the amount of experience with the new language is held constant, there is an advantage to being younger than 8 years old for acquiring the second language to proficiency.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2920538/

Test performance was linearly related to age of arrival up to puberty; after puberty, performance was low but highly variable and unrelated to age of arrival. This age effect was shown not to be an inadvertent result of differences in amount of experience with English, motivation, self-consciousness, or American identification. The effect also appeared on every grammatical structure tested, although the structures varied markedly in the degree to which they were well mastered by later learners. The results support the conclusion that a critical period for language acquisition extends its effects to second language acquisition.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/427544/

Synaptic density increased during infancy, reaching a maximum at age 1--2 years which was about 50% above the adult mean.

[–] ClimateChangeAnxiety@hexbear.net 9 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I’m not disputing any of this, however a lot of this is balanced by the fact that babies have to learn how to learn and what language is. You do not.

If you moved to China, and your full time job was learning Chinese, and also your household chores were taken care of so you could focus on learning Chinese, by the end of the year you would be better at Chinese than a 3 or 4 year old born in China. You have a base understanding of how language works and don’t have to relearn the existence of grammar and sentence structure.

If you and your 7 year old child were both put in that environment, the child would probably learn faster than you, I won’t dispute that. But the larger limiting factor is time spent.

[–] Sulvor@hexbear.net 7 points 18 hours ago

Yeah sorry if it felt like I was jumping on you, the only comment that bothered me enough to do this was the .ml user calling Saeculum a liar/making excuses

[–] JustSo@hexbear.net 3 points 17 hours ago

3 months is enough to learn enough to bully fellow gwailos. Set realistic goals. ;D