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Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion
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As far as I know, the degree to which second-language speakers can acquire native-like competence in domains other than phonetics is somewhat debated. Anecdotally, it's a rare person who manages to never make a syntactic error that a native speaker wouldn't make, and there are some aspects of language (I'm told that subjunctive in French and aspect in Slavic languages may be examples) that may be impossible to fully acquire for non-native speakers.
So I wouldn't accept this theoretical assertion without further evidence; and for all practical purposes, the claim that you have to learn a language as a child in order to become perfect (in the sense of native-like) with it is true.
What do you mean by "theoretical"? Is this just an insult you fling at people you disagree with?
Huh? What a curious misunderstanding! The theoretical referred just the - theoretical! - question of whether it's in principle possible to acquire native-like proficiency, which was contrasted with my claim that even if it is, most people cannot expect to reach that state in practice.
I thought that my choice of the word "commonly" indicated that I was not talking about the limits of the possible.
You really think it's common for L2 speakers to achieve native-like levels of proficiency? Where do you live and who are these geniuses? I'm serious. For example, I see people speaking at conferences who have lived in the US for years, but aren't native speakers, and they are still not doing so with native-like fluency and eloquence. And presumably you have to be more than averagely intelligent to give a talk at a scientific conference...
I'm not talking about just any kind of fluency here, and neither was fubarobfusco, I assume. I suspect I was trying to interpret your utterance in a way that I didn't assign very low probability to (i.e. not as claiming that it's common for people to become native-like) and that also wasn't a non-sequitur wrt the claim you were referring to (by reducing native-like fluency to some weaker notion) and kind of failed.
Maybe I should have said "routinely" rather than "commonly." But the key differentiator is effort.
I don't care about your theoretical question of whether you can come up with a test that L2 speakers fail. I assume that fubarobfusco meant the same thing I meant. I'm done.