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Yeah people love to go on about brain plasticity but few people actually know much about it (for instance how you can re-induce said plasticity in adults), let
by throwaway5778 6y ago
Yeah people love to go on about brain plasticity but few people actually know much about it (for instance how you can re-induce said plasticity in adults), let alone how it relates to language learning as an adult.
>Also, your rebuttal does not consider the fraction of those adults who learned those languages when they were young.
That still includes:
-Pretty much all immigrants
-All populations using a regional lingua franca (Modern Standard Arabic, Swahili, Indonesian, French, English, Russian, Portuguese)
-Everyone who learned English as a requirement for their job (that's everyone in business, research, the tourism industry, the software industry and probably a few others I'm missing)
-Everyone who learned another language as part of their higher education (usually English, but can also include languages like French, German or Russian)
Of course the language acquisition is usually far from perfect. You probably won't get rid of your accent as an adult, and your writing may be rife with mistakes. But as a communication tool, most adults manage just fine, because communication is part of being human and humans are naturally good at communicating.