Well.. I didn't really get proficient in English until I was in my thirties. I learned another language around that time as well, though not to full fluency (on

Well.. I didn't really get proficient in English until I was in my thirties. I learned another language around that time as well, though not to full fluency (only because the option of continuing went away). And absorbing and understanding of German too.. The actual point is only that I remember how it felt - how listening and other kind of input molded my brain, relatively quickly (and sounds and words started echoing around in my brain). Now, thirty years later, it feels like my brain is much stiffer and everything takes much longer, when it comes to injecting a language (fortunately everything else still works as it should). So, 'adult' isn't really right in my opinion / experience - I know many people who were adults and could absorb another language relatively easily. What seems to happen is that it does change for the worse as the decades go by. But it's not as simple as adult vs child. And it's not by orders of magnitude in any case, it's more linear than that.