Adults learn language to fluency nearly as well as children: study
The trouble is the near-impossibility of controlled studies. Has there EVER BEEN a study where adults not only had immersion but went through the child&#x27;s experience of having some parent-figures and teachers care for all their needs while constantly correcting and helping them with every bit of language and reading picture books or otherwise engaging with the most basic nouns and verbs (perhaps otherwise playing and engaging with mainly peers who are going through the exact same process) over about 2-3 years before being expected to grasp any really abstract concepts???<p>I&#x27;m pretty damn certain that I could go anywhere in the world and learn all the names for stuff in a house and basic actions and syntax in any language if I got to role-play as an 18-month-old 24-hours a day for a year, and I could go on to have 4-year-old near-native ability (even in pronunciation) in just 2-3 years and on and on.<p>Except there&#x27;s no way I could ever get that experience and unlikely I would ever commit to it anyway. The only people who could ever even approach this are already outliers in massive ways.<p>But it&#x27;s always seemed to me that people are crazily overconfident about what we know about child vs adult learning.