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wnoise comments on Rationality Quotes: January 2011 - Less Wrong
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Pretty much true.
There's probably some fading of plasticity, but there's lots of other explanations too. Children learning languages are surrounded by it, and spend all their time learning it. Almost all adult language learning is part time, rather than full time immersion. Fluency in either case requires several years, but "can get by in" is plausibly shorter (weeks to months, say) for an adult learning secondary languages as compared to a child. An adult also often has the advantage of being able to discuss the structure and vocabulary of the target language in already acquired language.
What is nearly universally true is that people's ability to make and distinguish between phones not present in their early environment is very weak. I will probably always have a difficult time distinguishing between "cot" and "caught" because they contain allophones of the same phoneme in my dialect. Same for "merry", "mary" and "marry".
When I took a college phonetics course, I and a classful of other students more than doubled the number of distinct sounds we could distinguish and produce. So it can certainly be done. I think adults normally don't because they don't need to, since mapping to their native language's phonology is so much easier. Also, when I took a foreign language in high school, there was no IPA and none of the teachers had the linguistics training necessary to explain the cause of an accent even if they took the time to do so.
But it's certainly true that language learning is automatic for children, and not so automatic for adults.