The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a Parisian. But no one knows exactly what the cutoff point is\u2014at what age it becomes harder, for instance, to pick up noun-verb agreements in a new language. In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted\u2014a viral internet survey that drew two thirds of a million respondents\u2014researchers from three Boston-based universities showed children are proficient at learning a second language up until the age of 18, roughly 10 years later than earlier estimates. But the study also showed that it is best to start by age 10 if you want to achieve the grammatical fluency of a native speaker.<\/p>\n
To parse this problem, the research team, which included psychologist Steven Pinker, collected data on a person\u2019s current age, language proficiency and time studying English. The investigators calculated they needed more than half a million people to make a fair estimate of when the \u201ccritical period\u201d for achieving the highest levels of grammatical fluency ends. So they turned to the world\u2019s greatest experimental subject pool: the internet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So I guess starting Norwegian a year ago February isn’t going to get me there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The good news:\u00a0 research shows that the old theory that “if you start leaning a language after age eight, you’ve got no chance of reaching fluency”.\u00a0 (I started German at fourteen). The bad news:\u00a0 The new cuitoff is 18. The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66755,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66754\/revisions\/66755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}