No but at this age you should probably ask yourself at what point in life did you stoop so low as to want to communicate with the French.
/s
It’s never too late to learn a language but it’s a bit of an uphill battle, and you’re not going to learn it by just watching shows. You need to practice regularly and understand the grammar and sentence structure. You also have to speak it with other people to get feedback, you can’t only learn to listen.
It’s about brain plasticity and 25 is kind of the same as 45…
So they can learn French in an “anything is possible if you try” kind of way, but realistically unless they straight up move to France and completely dive into it, it’s going to be a massive struggle to get to where they can even understand French shows without English subtitles.
Like, at a certain point people should realistically evaluate the amount of work and payoff they get from stuff.
Marrying a French person and wanting to learn their language? Yeah. That’s probably worth the work.
Wanting to watch French TV without reading? Not so much
Yeah, no.
This is bullshit.
(Especially the stuff about brain plasticity and learning capacity)
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/review/30/neural-plasticity-dont-fall-for-hype/
Can you please just edit and rephrase so its obvious as to what direction you are indicatingn in terms of BS?
Sure, but just to be clear, it’s about the brain plasticity and diminishing returns. That stuff just isn’t true.
Here’s what the British academy has to say on the subject:
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/review/30/neural-plasticity-dont-fall-for-hype/
That example about London cabbies is actually one of my favorite studies…
But changes to certain structures in the brain isn’t what I was talking about. And I’ve never heard of that being categorized as neuroplasticity.
Which makes it even weirder that the article is about how we should differentiate more.
So let’s stay specific?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2021.666851/full
Learning a language has benefits beyond that, it can be it’s own reward to have dedicated time to something and have it pay off and it is good for brain health. Bilingual people suffer less from dementias.
Bilingual people suffer less from dementias.
Pretty sure that’s people who were bilingual their whole lives, not people who learned another language later in life. It’s about how the brain deals with thinking in both languages.
Once you’re older it’s the same benefit as sudoku, which is still something
Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it’s all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.
The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn’t, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.
Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I’d be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You’ll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.
Hah, babble, more like Babel, amirite?
Never too late. Rote memorisation becomes more difficult as we age, but it’s not impossible. I’ve been learning one of the more difficult languages (Finnish) in my 40s for about 300 days now, and I am making progress.
Look into ‘active learning’, it’s far more effective than apps like DuoLingo (which I use heavily, it does have its place)
Yes you can, with one caveat.
According to Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, compelling, comprehensible input is sufficient to acquire a language. That means input that you find interesting and that keeps you engaged, and which you can understand at least in part. That evolving sweet spot can indeed take you from complete newbie to fluency without ever speaking.
In my experience, though, being able to speak with other native speakers is a huge source of motivation and creates its own compelling input. So I wouldn’t discount that.
I personally know someone who went from no English to being able to converse just by watching The Simpsons.
Anecdotally, I know a few immigrants that learned English through TV at a later age. If you’re interested, don’t let your age hold you back!
As others have said it is never too late to learn a language. Our brains are just as capable, if not more, when we’re adults.
I’m also a firm believer that comprehensible input (listening and attempting to understand) is the best way to learn a language. You can’t start with high level speech though. You need to start with speech that is aimed at beginners or you won’t understand enough for it to be effective.
Studying vocabulary in parallel helps a lot because it helps you learn niche words that don’t come up often in normal speech.
The typical recommendation with comprehensible input is to listen for around a thousand hours and then start practicing with conversation and books as well.
Good luck! Remember that with enough dedicated time you can learn anything. :)
The answer is someplace in the middle. It’s not too late, but a year of sitcoms isn’t going to do it.
It’s likely too late to speak without an accent unless you already speak multiple dissimilar languages fluently.
What I’ve found to be helpful is to not learn the words first, but rather learn the sentence formation, and find parallels in your own language. Understanding sentence structure would really help in learning the language, and you can always substitute unknown words with English until you learn them. See how a sentence in your language is translated to that language, and see how the structure is different. Building parallels like this for different types of sentences would really help you learn the language better.
Don’t be ridiculous, you also have to watch Candice Renoir!
I would say you probably won’t have as much success just listening to something than you would communicating back, no matter how much you immerse yourself. My spoken French is godawful, but my comprehension is good so I can follow along with tv shows and such, but my communication doesn’t improve much as there is no back and forth.
