pdf23ds comments on Don't Think Too Hard. - Less Wrong

9 Post author: hegemonicon 05 October 2009 03:51AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 October 2009 03:33:25PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pdf23ds 05 October 2009 06:05:22PM 0 points [-]

A full-time effort to learn a language will allow an adult to learn a new language to fluency in a few months

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.