pdf23ds comments on Don't Think Too Hard. - Less Wrong
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Comments (36)
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.