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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Don't Think Too Hard. - Less Wrong
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What evidence do we have for it? There seems to be gradual deterioration of language learning facilities, and at very old age mental facilities are generally diminished, but other than that, is it true than children learn significantly faster than non-senile adults?
Even for language learning, it doesn't seem that children learn faster. They just have nothing else to do, while adults typically only work on language some portion of the day/week. A full-time effort to learn a language will allow an adult to learn a new language to fluency in a few months, that is much faster than children do. Another matter is anchoring created by previous languages, that results in accent and other linguistic quirks.
I have no doubt this is true for especially talented language learners. I am not one of those people, and most people aren't either. Language learning ability has a very high variance. 1-2 years seems like a reasonable median.
Have you actually tried this?
If I did, it wouldn't be a particularly useful piece of info (anecdote). I didn't, and I read about such programs.
I was conversationally fluent in Spanish after traveling in Spanish-speaking countries for six months, despite studying the grammar for only a week and spending most of my time speaking English. I can only imagine how fluent I'd be if I had actually devoted myself to learning instead of, well, doing what I like to call "stupid things in dangerous places". (In all fairness, Spanish is pretty easy to learn from an English base, especially if you've studied Latin. I imagine Chinese or Swahili would be a lot harder.)
It would be nice to know, eirenicon, whether you had any competency in any other languages besides English before you learn Spanish.
Ah, of course. No, English was my only language at the time. I studied French in grade school but have no more than a few words of it left - that said, the underlying grammar, which is similar to Spanish, probably didn't just disappear. I also took a couple Latin courses in high school, but never became very proficient and again, only retained a few words and a rough understanding of structure. When I began learning Spanish it was all very new and quite difficult at first. I do think my strategy was a good one, though. The week I spent taking private lessons was devoted to grammar and grammar alone, on my insistence, and it paid off. En mis viajes fue muy útil.