Adult ability to learn a new language??

[Dinosaur]

I have read somewhere that it is almost impossible for an adult to learn a second language as well as a person raised from infancy in a culture speaking that language. Actually, I think the article stated that the ability to learn a new language deteriorates sometime prior to a person being ten years old.

What about a person born in a culture in which there are two or more languages spoken? For example: Canada, Switzerland, & Belgium are multilingual countries. I am sure there are others.

Would a person raised in such a culture, be able to learn an additional language as well as a native speaker of the language?

When I was in 10th grade, I had a French teacher who was alleged to be able to speak French, German, English, & Hungarian without an accent in any of those languages. I would have no way of knowing about the other languages, but I know she spoke English without an accent and was born/raised in Germany. I think she learned English as an adult.

I once knew a woman who was a translator at the UN. She spoke at least 5-6 languages. She once said that on a 6-week vacation, she expected to learn the Serbo-Croatian family of languages well enough to be certified as a UN translator for those languages. Her salsry would increase quite a bit when/if she learned additional languages well enough to be certified.

My experience in learning French made me realize that she had linguistic skills far beyond mine.

BTW: I learned zilch French in school, but became able to cope with it when I spent a lot of time working on a programming project for NATO in Belgium. I am sure that I did not learn it well enough to be certified as an English/French UN translator, and it took more than 6 weeks to become intelligible as well as being able to vaguely understand the native speakers of Belgium French. .

[Nasor]

What about a person born in a culture in which there are two or more languages spoken? For example: Canada, Switzerland, & Belgium are multilingual countries. I am sure there are others.

I'm not sure how it would impact adult ability, but there are studies showing that young children raised in households where two languages are spoken usually learn BOTH languages just as well/quickly as a child who is only exposed to one - even if the languages are completely different (e.g. Chinese and Spanish). If you have the ability, exposing your kids to several languages as they grow up really does them a big favor.

But as a similar anecdote, there's a guy I work with who speaks virtually perfect English, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. His father was German and his mother was Argentine, but he was raised in Brazil. So he was exposed to German and Spanish all the time while growing up at home, and learned Portuguese at school (and from TV, radio, etc). He learned English when he was much older (in Brazilian highschool/college), but he speaks it without any hit of an accent. Even most people who have spent years studying a language will have SOME trace of an accent, but this guy doesn't. Maybe learning more than one language at once while growing up wires your brain to be very good with accents?

[Fraggle Rocker]

The key is to study a second language during childhood, even if it's in a classroom and not the home. I haven't seen any scholarly analysis of this phenomenon, but it's generally accepted as true that the younger you start, the easier it is and the better you'll do. I think it is both psychological (accepting the validity of an alternate way of communicating without objection) and physical (your vocal apparatus is still flexible enough to make the new sounds).

Yes, obviously children who learn two languages at home are more likely to master them than children who start studying the second one in school, but they all have an advantage over the person who waits until adulthood.

Not to say that there aren't exceptions, some people are just gifted. No matter what their background and how many languages they already know, most people could not reach a professional level of fluency in Serbo-Croatian, Slovene AND Macedonian in six weeks.

But there's an additional point lurking here. Knowing two languages is a tremendous advantage when studying the third. For the same reasons: You already accept the possibility that there are strange and exciting new ways to communicate, and your vocal apparatus is more flexible than everyone else's.

Spanish was a mandatory class in my school in the 7th grade and even though I didn't learn very much of it then, I got over the mental and physical hurdles and when I picked it up in high school it was a breeze. I became very interested in languages and from that point on the others were much easier.

I don't speak any of them like a native, except perhaps Esperanto, which was designed to be easy and besides there are only about five "native" speakers. I'm only an 8 on my own scale in Spanish, and my next best would be German or Mandarin, closer to 6. But I do have good pronunciation; people compliment me on my tones in Chinese and I amaze the Czechs with my Ř. I do my best to think in the other language, rather than composing my thoughts in English and translating in real time.

But except for Chinese, which has a low syllable count and is therefore spoken slowly, I can't speak any other language at the proper speed, and I have great difficulty understanding the high-syllable-count languages like Spanish and Italian when spoken at normal machine-gun speed.

Still I'm better off than most Americans. I can carry on internet chats in several languages, and both Spanish and Chinese speakers give you a lot of respect for even trying. (That's not universal, e.g. the French and the Japanese can't stand the sound of it.)

Regardless of the level of skill you achieve in a second (or third or fourth) language, there is an incontrovertible benefit:

Most people frame most of their thoughts in words. (Obvious exceptions are musicians, sculptors, etc.) It stands to reason that our thoughts are constrained by the paradigms of the language in which we frame them. For example, Chinese has no tense, number, person, gender, mode, etc. You discover that half the time those things aren't important enough to add to a sentence. (That's one reason it's so economical with its syllables.) And when they are, you have to be specific. Instead of saying "I went to school," you're more likely to say something like "Yesterday (or last year, or for the past five years) I attend school."

Chinese also doesn't have prepositions, those stupid little words which you have to get right or you sound like a foreigner, yet they have virtually no meaning. (What's the difference between getting somewhere ON time and IN time?) If you want to express a relationship between two things, you're not limited to a set of two dozen prepositions you inherited from your Stone Age ancestors. You have thousands of nouns and verbs to choose from and you can say exactly what you mean.

Thinking in Chinese is a challenge. You have to organize your thoughts differently, and you have to be conscious of things that you would normally say by rote.

[kmguru]

IMHO, the interesting part is the brain does not store information in specific languages. It stores information in a picture like fractal mathematics (some say hologram). Hence irrespective of the language shortcomings, one can be very innovative and solve highly complex and systemic problems.

[Fraggle Rocker]

IMHO, the interesting part is the brain does not store information in specific languages. It stores information in a picture like fractal mathematics (some say hologram). Hence irrespective of the language shortcomings, one can be very innovative and solve highly complex and systemic problems.As a linguist, I'm sure that the way the brain organizes the information it stores, and even the decisions about which information to store in the first place, are highly shaped by the language in which we think.

[kmguru]

As a linguist, I'm sure that the way the brain organizes the information it stores, and even the decisions about which information to store in the first place, are highly shaped by the language in which we think.

If that is the case, then can we conclude that one group of people will be smarter (better decisions, innovations etc.) than the other due to their language characteristics?

[Fraggle Rocker]

If that is the case, then can we conclude that one group of people will be smarter (better decisions, innovations etc.) than the other due to their language characteristics?In general, no. Language evolves right along with culture: philosophy, technology, economics, politics, religion, art, as well as, obviously, the influence of the natural environment on all of those things. So each society ends up with the language that is best suited for making decisions and being creative in their own specific circumstances.

So of course you get mismatches in today's world of highly mobile populations. People whose languages are adapted to the culture of nomadic hunter-gatherers will find it a bit cumbersome when they emigrate to a city. We would have the same problem going the other way, with no concepts in our language or our thoughts for a hundred different nuances of blood relations and with only arcane polysyllabic Linnaean Latin names for every species of mushroom that might or might not be edible.

Of course we city folk look down on the nomads as being incapable of making smart decisions and innovations due to their "inferior" languages, because we're in charge of the world and we get to decide who's superior and who's not. But that's strictly a value judgment. If the USA and Russia decide to destroy civilization with nuclear weapons in their dispute over the Georgian gas pipeline that bypasses Russia, the people with the Stone Age languages will probably fare much better in the resulting devolution than we will.

That said, I think that once a society progresses through several stages and its language undergoes a series of adaptations, that language acquires the attribute of adaptability and becomes better suited to the future advance of civilization. I'm thinking of Chinese, the language of the world's oldest continuous civilization. The Chinese have never been overrun by people who impose a new language on them and make them start over--as the British people have, first by the Anglo-Saxons and subsequently by the Norman French. Chinese has been adapting smoothly for something like seven thousand years or more, since the Agricultural Revolution occurred there a little later than in Mesopotamia, whose languages have been discarded and supplanted multiple times.

As a result, as I have written here before, I think Chinese has become a language that can handle just about anything, and equips its people to make better decisions and innovations--to be "smarter"--than the rest of us. It doesn't immunize them against the ravages of history so they've had their wars and their periods of foolish leadership, but they always seem to come out of them pretty well. They absorbed both the Mongols and the Communists, and turned them into Chinese versions of themselves. Every day I hear Americans struggle to come up with terminology for information technology concepts, and I don't think the Chinese, with their streamlined grammar and monosyllabic morphemes, have that difficulty. The Chinese term for "computer, dian nao, has one-third fewer syllables than our word, and that ratio carries over into the entire language. It was also formed without borrowing any clumsy, unfamiliar foreign words.

[Walter L. Wagner]

The Chinese term for "computer, dian nao, has one-third fewer syllables than our word, and that ratio carries over into the entire language. It was also formed without borrowing any clumsy, unfamiliar foreign words.

You're talkin' 'bout my 'puter?

[synthesizer-patel]

I have read somewhere that it is almost impossible for an adult to learn a second language as well as a person raised from infancy in a culture speaking that language. Actually, I think the article stated that the ability to learn a new language deteriorates sometime prior to a person being ten years old.


I think this is right in some respects, but I also think that the ability to learn new languages can be fixed into the wiring of our adult brains, if the ability is used enough during childhood - I have no evidence for this other than personal experience.
In my late teens I went travelling around europe with a girlfriend of mixed indian / british heritage - she was brought up in india and learned two indian languages (hindi and urdu I think - can't remember) as well as english from her father - she then moved to italy where she learned italian - she was fluent in 4 languages by the age of 9, and by the time I knew her she could also speak german and french very fluently - during our travels I noticed that she had the uncanny ability to pick up languages with apparent ease and could hold basic conversations in spanish, greek, flemish, dutch and danish in a very short time - in fact within abaout a week week her danish was almost as good as mine - and my mother is half Danish!!!

[Orleander]

so if new languages are easier to learn as a child, what is easier to learn as an adult?

[temur]

drinking?

[CutsieMarie89]

I believe the current consensus is that small children as in infants to about the age of five learn very quickly and the memory is more permanent than it is in older children and adults. The brain is constantly creating new synaptic connections and destroying ones it does not use and it can do this at an alarming rate. When you think about it, it makes sense. Children learn how to control their bodies, interact with their environment, how to interact with other people, how to speak and understand whatever language they are exposed to and much more. I mean they start from zero and change quite a bit by the time they are five years old. But after that the brain stays pretty static and the changes become slower and slower until about the end of puberty when the brain starts to do something similar letting useless connections die and brain density increases, until about 25. Which I suppose correlates with the amount of learning one has to do as the enter young adulthood. At least thats how my professor described it. But I also think some people just have a knack for learning languages, like I can learn a few phrases just by watching a movie in another language w/subtitles. But I don't have much interest in learning new languages.

[kmguru]

In my travel to China for marketing activities for a major U.S. company, I took a 28 year old technician from my company to babysit the stuff we sold the Chinese. My follow up visit in two months found Steve speaking 80 words. In about 8 months, he was able to act (with a lot of chega chega) as a translator between myself and the Chinese. Amazing...

[OilIsMastery]

I have read somewhere that it is almost impossible for an adult to learn a second language
Complete nonsense. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton learned 36 different languages fluently with native speaker qualities.

Actually, I think the article stated that the ability to learn a new language deteriorates sometime prior to a person being ten years old.
And he only learned a few of them before he was 10.

[EmeraldAxe]

Fraggle,

Can you recommend some books that specifically deal with the brain's ability to learn and the language it uses during its learning (neuroscience + linguistics)? I understand neuroscience fairly well, but I know next to nothing about linguistics, so bear that in mind with your recommendation. Anything too technical will probably be lost on me.

[Fraggle Rocker]

Can you recommend some books that specifically deal with the brain's ability to learn and the language it uses during its learning (neuroscience + linguistics)? I understand neuroscience fairly well, but I know next to nothing about linguistics, so bear that in mind with your recommendation. Anything too technical will probably be lost on me.Sorry, I've never gotten into that side of linguistics. I only pass for a linguist because these days there's almost no competition for the title on SciForums. But except for classes in specific languages, random readings and bull sessions with people from several continents who share my interest, I have almost no formal education in the subject. Ten years ago there were several members who could teach me.

[CharonZ]

I have read somewhere that it is almost impossible for an adult to learn a second language as well as a person raised from infancy in a culture speaking that language.

This is partially true. More precisely one should add that it is harder and almost impossible to learn a different language accent-free, if the phonems of the language are significantly different. From what i recall about early childhood language learning, an infant is able to distinguish all possible phonems in the human language. However, while learning a particular language, the brain (probably the Wernicke area, but don't quote me on this) gets trained to distinguish sounds associated with the learned language more effectively, but due to this it becomes less proficient in distinguishing elements not inherent to the language. After around 5-10 of age this is almost hardwired and with exceptions usually only able to be retrained with a disproportionate effort. This is the reasons why e.g. Chinese native speakers (who have not learned English as a child) have a hard time to distinguish between r and l, whereas people with a non-tonal language will have trouble to distinguish the different tones.

[Billy T]

CharonZ is 100% correct.*

There were two Indian grils in JHU's cognitive science department's graduate seminar, which I sat in on for a year. Some words in their language differed only by one phonem that is never used in English. I.e. there is a pair of never used in English phonems -one in one word and the other in the other word as the only differences between the two words. (The PS has my atempt to illustrate this in English.)

We non-indians made a list using a pair of these words, 20 words long, using each word 10 times in sort of random order. One Indian girl read list to the other who wrote them down. About 20 of us non Indians listened and some tried to write "1" or "2" down as the words were read.

I gave up after about 10 had been read as even with very careful attention all 10 sounded exactly a like to me. Needless to say, the Indian girl listening and writing a list of 20 made a perfect copy of the list being read by the other Indian girl.

If you can not even hear any difference when phonems new to you are switched, how can you learn to discriminate them?
--------------
*Perhaps not on his Wernicke's area guess. Certainly that is were the meaning of words (and their role in sentences) is determined and it is at least near earlier stages of accustical processsing, but perhaps the discrimination of phonems to determine the words is earlier. - Just guessing too, as I do not know.

PS I am not sure as it has been 30 years, but to illustrate with two English words: Bat & Pat - They differ only, I think, in that the two different phonems the first leters represent are alike in all characteristis (for example both are "plosivies") except one is "voiced" (vocal cords vibrate) and the other is a non vocal phomem. As I recall every phonem is a construct of about 7 "characteristic"- if that is correct, there are 49 different phonems but most languages only use about half of the possible ones. If you have a young child, let her/him hear very strange languages I think is a good Idea. Not necessary for you or him to know what the word mean, I think, only to hear the non-English phonems when the child still can disciminate them. Check all this PS out as it is only my ideas from memory - Not my field.

[Fraggle Rocker]

If you have a young child, let her/him hear very strange languages I think is a good Idea. Not necessary for you or him to know what the word mean, I think, only to hear the non-English phonems when the child still can disciminate them.I can attest to that. Although my mother was born in Chicago her parents only spoke Bohemian ("Czech") so she grew up fluent in the language and always spoke it with her friends and family. I think most people would agree that Czech is a "very strange language." It crams impossible combinations of consonants together with no vowel: Plzeň is a city and vstup means "entrance." And it has one phoneme that does not occur in any other language I've ever encountered, and for good reason: Ř is a J and a trilled R pronounced simultaneously.

She never taught it to me because back in those days people actually thought it was a handicap for a child to grow up bilingual. (No, Momma was not very good with introspection.;)) Nonetheless she continued to speak it when friends and family came over and I spent many hours hearing it without understanding it.

When I began studying foreign languages I noticed that I wasn't having nearly as much trouble with the strange sounds as all the rest of the students. All those non-English phonemes were rattling around in my head even though I'd never used them.

I can even say Ř. When I was in Czechoslovakia my friends said that if I ever wanted to immigrate, they were sure I could be granted instant Czech citizenship by walking into any government office and pronouncing that letter.

Now if only I could master the aspirated BH in Hindi. I can do GH pretty well and DH acceptably, but I just can't get BH.

[Nasor]

Children obviously have certainly special abilities to learn new languages that people rightly make a big deal out of, but it seems to me that adults have advantages over children in many ways when learning a language.

I'm pretty sure that when I spent a year studying French for perhaps 10 hours/week in college, my French ability improved far more than the ability of a young French child would over any given year. After that year I probably had a vocabulary roughly equivalent to a French 2nd or 3rd grader, and the ability to compose sentences that were grammatically on par with a 4th or 5th grade French elementary student. The major hole in my ability was that I probably couldn't pronounce the words nearly as well as a French child. But I got there in a year, while it took the hypothetical French 10-year-old that I'm comparing myself to many more years of studying his own language to reach that level of ability.

I would pretty routinely sit down and systematically learn the spelling and definition about 40-50 new words (the new week's worth of vocabulary for the class) in just a few hours using a combination of flashcards and repetitively writing the words over and over. Could a young child do that? Perhaps they could, but I recall having a relatively hard time learning the spelling of equivalently-complicated English words in school when I was young. Of course it's possible that I could indeed have learned new words as quickly when I was young and it simply seemed harder then because I wasn't making a serious effort at it, but as best I can tell I am genuinely better at memorizing new words than I was when I was very young.

So when you consider the overall change in ability to use a language vs. time spent studying, it seems to me that again adults have an advantage over young children. I don't really know for sure, but I strongly suspect that if you took a random sampling of adults and young children and gave them both the task of learning as much of a foreign language as they could in a month, the adults would probably smoke the children in terms of final absolute ability. The children might be better at pronouncing things properly and perceiving different phonemes that were alien to them, but the adults would probably end up with a much larger vocabulary and significantly more sophisticated understanding of the language's grammar etc.

[Billy T]

...the adults would probably end up with a much larger vocabulary and significantly more sophisticated understanding of the language's grammar etc.That would depend upon what you mean by "grammar." If you mean, as I bet you do, some rules that some English (or French) teacher taught you such as: "don't split infinitives", "don't end sentence in a preposition", etc. you are correct.

As Shaw (I think it was) said to observe the second above English teacher's rule:

"Up with cheating I can not put."

But if you mean the fundamental grammar all humans are born with and gets restricted down to a "correct set" by hearing their native tongue when young, no. Then the child will "cream" the adult who has learned a second language with a fundamentally different grammar. That child will instantly tell you when a sentence is "grammatically correct" in that sense of grammar. The Child has a knowledge (that grammar) which even linguist can not fully describe about when a sentence is "good English" (or "good French") or not for millions of English teacher grammar correct sentences which the child has never heard before.

For example "Up with cheating I can not put." is not good English, but is "English teacher grammar" perfect as it avoids the terrible sin of ending a sentence" with the two prepositions "up" and "with" as in:

"Cheating I can not put up with."

If you are a native speaker of English, and not too abused by English teachers grammar, you know this last version is "good English" and the first above attributed to Shaw, is not.

If English is not your native tongue and you have only as an adult learned English, then Shaw's version, being English teacher grammar correct, would be your choice. If your native tongue were German, perhaps Shaw's structure is "good German." Except possilby "not" is error sort of like spliting the infinitive, I think. (As I recall from 50 years ago, "Nitch" should be at or near the sentence start if it is to be negative.) Once I realized how stupid many English teacher rules were, I stopped being very concerned about them. I bet French Teachers are equally dumb about what is good grammar.

SUMMARY:
The grammar teachers teach is not the real grammar of a language. The real grammar is UNDESCRIBABLE KNOWLEDGE* developed from your innate / genetic gifts in early childhood by hearing it. With that childhood grammar you can instantly judge and automatically tell with zero conscious thought whether or not an entirely new sentence is properly formed in your native tongue or not.

--------------------
*According to Chomsky and his followers, you are born with the ability to learn / develop any of the world's true grammars. Hearing your native tongue sets you up for life to recognize sentences in your native tongue as "well formed" (grammatical) or not. You need not ever have had any teacher beating a set of arbitary** rules into you and calling sentences that follow them "grammatically correct."

** 300+ years ago, when educated Europeans learned at least Latin, they tried to make their native languages have similar structure. In latin it is impossible to "split the infinitive" as it is a stem of the verb. That blind copying of Latin form is why that it is bad English today, but few English teachers know this "monkey see, monkey do" behavior is the basis of their rule.

If you don't get it now, it ain't my fault.

(BTW almost all, if not all, languages use double negation for emphatic effect - I.e. it is grammatically correct, but logically wrong.)

[Fraggle Rocker]

Children obviously have certainly special abilities to learn new languages that people rightly make a big deal out of, but it seems to me that adults have advantages over children in many ways when learning a language. I'm pretty sure that when I spent a year studying French for perhaps 10 hours/week in college, my French ability improved far more than the ability of a young French child would over any given year. After that year I probably had a vocabulary roughly equivalent to a French 2nd or 3rd grader, and the ability to compose sentences that were grammatically on par with a 4th or 5th grade French elementary student.Nowhere in your post did you mention fluency. Fluency comes from being able to think in the target language. If you can't do that, then when speaking you have to form your sentences in your native language and translate them. That merely slows you down, but going the other way is a killer, because you have to translate the sentences you hear fast enough to keep up with the conversation. Only professional interpreters can do that.

And that's the problem adults have. If you have a special aptitude you can get to the point of thinking in the language pretty quickly, but most people need a few years of practice before they get there, unless it's by total immersion. Even then they don't usually master the nuances, the slang, the clever plays on words that even the dumbest of us comes up with once in a while. Children do all of those things, which is what they're learning holistically with all the brain tissue that's not being channeled into organized vocabulary building.

It's a rare adult who can appreciate poetry, puns and sophisticated humor in the language of a foreign country until they've lived there for a decade or two, no matter how many words they know. There's much more to language than vocabulary and grammar.I would pretty routinely sit down and systematically learn the spelling and definition about 40-50 new words (the new week's worth of vocabulary for the class) in just a few hours using a combination of flashcards and repetitively writing the words over and over. Could a young child do that? Perhaps they could, but I recall having a relatively hard time learning the spelling of equivalently-complicated English words in school when I was young.Well geeze dude, when it comes to spelling you picked the two hardest languages on earth (that claim to have phonetic writing systems). Neither English nor French orthography has ever been reformed so we're still spelling words the way they were pronounced 700 years ago. In a sane world, forcing an eleven-year-old to spell "thoroughly guarding my garage" or qu'est-ce que c'est que ça would constitute child abuse.;)Of course it's possible that I could indeed have learned new words as quickly when I was young and it simply seemed harder then because I wasn't making a serious effort at it, but as best I can tell I am genuinely better at memorizing new words than I was when I was very young.But can you carry on a conversation in French? Do you speak as fast as they do and do you never have to ask them to repeat something because you couldn't keep up?

And French is one of the more phonetically compact languages, like English and Chinese, requiring relatively few syllables to express an idea, so it is spoken slowly by international standards. Try it with a mile-a-minute language like Italian or Japanese!As Shaw (I think it was) said to observe the second above English teacher's rule: "Up with cheating I can not put."Some variation of that has been attributed to every English orator at one time or another, but "From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put," is a documented quote from Winston Churchill. Unfortunately these orators are not grammar scholars, or they'd realize that "up" in that sentence functions as an adverb, not a preposition. "This is something with which I shall not put up," sounds perfectly old-school without being stilted.

But you can come up with some fun stuff if you're willing to overlook that distinction and count all words as prepositions which can be used as prepositions, even if they are not so used in the sentence in question. The longest sequence I've seen is:

Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of about Down Under up for?

Obviously in this case neither down nor under are used as prepositions, but it's less obvious that up and out are adverbs.

It illustrates an interesting point which makes it clear that we absolutely must allow sentences to end in prepositions. You can reorder those words and connect the prepositions to their objects... until you reach "to." "I don't want to be read to," is a simpler version of the sentence, and there is absolutely no way to move that preposition away from the end.300+ years ago, when educated Europeans learned at least Latin, they tried to make their native languages have similar structure. In latin it is impossible to "split the infinitive" as it is a stem of the verb.The up side of that was that they were all bilingual. It's alarming how many university-educated Americans I meet who have never studied a foreign language. I insist that, because unless you're a musician, sculptor, etc., 99% of your thoughts are formed in words, your language shapes your thoughts. Being able to think in a second language permits you to review those thoughts from an outside perspective.That blind copying of Latin form is why that it is bad English today, but few English teachers know this "monkey see, monkey do" behavior is the basis of their rule.The unsplittable infinitive was not the worst of their folly. They actually taught children to decline nouns.

Nominative: the boy
Genitive: the boy's
Dative: to the boy
Accusative: the boy
Vocative: O boy!(BTW almost all, if not all, languages use double negation for emphatic effect - I.e. it is grammatically correct, but logically wrong.)I think it's not allowed in any of the Germanic languages. And I would also add French. Ne... pas, ne... rien, ne... personne, etc., are not really double negatives.

[iceaura]

yet they have virtually no meaning. (What's the difference between getting somewhere ON time and IN time?) As someone who finds the difference in meaning between on time and in time both apparent and significant, I'd miss them (along with the distinctions of for them/ to them/ with them/ near them/ under them/ etc) And I have a feeling the Chinese do, as well, occasionally - along with the past and imperfect tenses, the ability to shade with tones, and other compact means of getting a lot said.

It's not all advantage, this Chinese setup.

The most desirable state in a language's grammatical evolution being, I suspect, not the simplest, nor the most ornate, but a point in the middle when the language is most adaptable and flexible, with the right number of features and resources - most capable?

Meanwhile: intuitively, adults without childhood exposure seem to have trouble picking up musical instruments and similar things that resemble language, as well. But another phenomenon exists: in some fields, people seem to need a certain amount of maturity to learn certain new things. For example: I have met several high school math teachers who have mentioned, separately, that the concept of a "limit" seems very difficult to grasp before a certain age - an age that varies by student, of course, but in most is at least mid teens. Before that age, great effort produces meager and unstable results; after it, careful study of the definition with a couple of weeks' practice and the student is good to go.

Are there features of language that are usually learned more easily by an "adult" - say, someone older than eighteen ?