No, it simply doesn’t. If one doesn’t want to learn a language, they simply shouldn’t (and this includes wanting to want to learn a language). This is a personal issue, and it should not be an excuse for spreading any kind of misinformation about the topic.
The problem with your first point is that in the case of language acquisition, there is no “aptitude” for it. The process of language acquisition is more or less the exact same in every person, the only exceptions being people with literal neurological disorders. And you don’t really need unlimited time for this process. It takes around 1.5 years of immersion at 18 hours per day to reach 10,000 hours, 3 years at 9 hours per day, and 6 years at 4.5 hours per day. The trick for reaching the 10,000 hours is just actively consuming compelling TL content whenever you’re free and would normally consume native language content (active immersion), and then listening to them once again while on your way to work or brushing your teeth or something (passive immersion). As an example for compelling content, what drew me to learn English in the first place was mostly popsci and video game content that I was really interested in and that were simply not available in Turkish. I would also recommend having smaller weekly goals instead of one gigantic goal that you are likely to stress over (like the 10,000 hours).
And the concerns you list are mainly time & motivation related, but the OP is asking if some people are literally worse at/incapable of acquiring a foreign language, which is not the case at all.
The guide I mentioned in my comment covers more topics than I could ever fit in a comment, including different types of immersion (passive and active), different types of active immersion (intensive and free flow), SRS, software, other helpful websites, techniques and much more so I would just recommend giving it a read if one decides on diving into language acquisition.
This thread is just bullshit.
No, pretty much everybody is able to acquire another language unless they have a neurological disorder that makes them unable to acquire any language at all.
You don’t need to be young or be a child to acquire a language either. The critical period hypothesis is a causation-correlation fallacy at best. It points out many issues directly related to traditional language learning methods and not acquisition of another language at an older age; the issues it points out are the resultant bad pronunciation, spelling errors, grammatical errors upon trying to output etc.
These do not result from “improper age” or “an inability to learn another language”, they result from how society as a whole has accepted “formal study” and “language courses” as the best ways to acquire a language, which they are definitely not.
Language acquisition is achieved first and foremost by comprehensible input in the target language. Hundreds and thousands of hours of comprehensible input. This can consist of any type of content a person enjoys watching, as long as it’s language dense, easy to understand at the start and slowly harder going forward. A good figure to aim for is 10,000 hours of this.
Production of language, or output, is not beneficial to the learner, especially at the first few thousands of hours where it can permanently damage the learner’s ability. The reason for early outputting being so detrimental to language acquisition is that as the learner doesn’t yet completely know how the target language sounds, and they don’t understand grammar rules intuitively yet because of the lack of input, anything they force out will in all likelihood be incorrect and they will unconsciously reinforce the incorrect grammar and pronunciation they just outputted.
So the best way to get to fluency is by doing as much input as possible and while starting out as much no output as possible. This is also usually called immersion learning.
You did mention immersion in your text, but considering that you live in an English speaking country you most definitely were forced to output early to at least survive, which damaged your speaking skills. The reason your reading may be bad is that you may not be reading enough English. If you’re talking about language courses when you say “formal study“ and not just skimming through a grammar textbook for an easier time with immersion, which you most likely are, that may have harmed your perception of how English sounds too due to toxic input (the incorrect speech/writing of other learners).
Tatsumoto‘s website is pretty useful for more information and resources on input-based learning. It is primarily for Japanese but as language acquisition doesn‘t differ from one language to another it doesn‘t matter and you can just skip the Kanji-specific parts. I would just think twice about joining their community though as they are pieces of shit, but the website is really well made for a complete language acquisition guide that only uses Libre tooling.
Edit: The amount of misinformation in this thread is just sad. I reached basic English fluency at around 14 and I’m currently doing Japanese immersion, with my comprehension rate of the Japanese content I consume being around 90%. And I’m not 9 months old, as you can also probably tell.
Edit 2: I forgot about Antimoon’s Learner Reports. Antimoon as a source is a bit outdated, but they have some interesting stuff in there as well.
I think Chromium based browsers had something where you’d need to open the homepage of the search engine (https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ in this case), right click on the URL in the address bar, and then click “Add search engine name”. Not sure if that still works though.
Yeah it’s a mistake in formatting lol, not sure how to fix it really.
Yeah, I’m actually surprised to see so many people agreeing with this bullshit on Lemmy.
Well…