> I suspect these two put together are actually the reason why it's easier to learn languages as a child. This is a difficult comparison to make. When we say e

> I suspect these two put together are actually the reason why it's easier to learn languages as a child. This is a difficult comparison to make. When we say easier, I think we mean without conscious effort (e.g bilingual kids). How old were you when you would consider yourself fluent in your native language? Suppose you compared an adult with five years of Spanish lessons versus a five year old bilingual Spanish speaker. Almost certainly the child will have better conversational fluency and will be better at aural comprehension, but the adult is likely to be able to express more complex things. For example I'd expect someone with 5 years of regular Spanish lessons to be able to mostly comprehend a newspaper, ignoring specific vocab. I'm not sure I'd expect the same of a 5 year old. But now imagine an adult with 5 years of (buzzword) immersive language training. You move to the country, you speak every day (and ask people to correct you), you watch TV shows and listen to the radio, you read the newspapers. I think you could easily be comparably fluent to a 5 year old bilingual. What you're saying is true - kids have the advantage of parents correcting them constantly, if they go to a school in their second language they'll have teachers and classmates correcting them. Though I'd argue that hanging around kids will only make you as good as those kids. That is, you will become very fluent using the language simply (which is probably the hardest to learn as an adult), but it will still take years to know concepts that adults already know and can transfer.