Adults learned Dutch faster than young children

The most common reason I hear for not starting a language is "I'm too old for that. Kids just soak it up." The best-known study on the question found the opposite, at least for the first year.

In the 1970s, Snow and Hoefnagel-Höhle (1978) followed English speakers who had recently moved to the Netherlands and were learning Dutch by living there, in age groups from three-year-olds to adults. Most of the children were in Dutch schools. Everyone was tested three times, about four to five months apart, on pronunciation, telling sounds apart, word forms, repeating sentences, translation and more.

The twelve- to fifteen-year-olds learned fastest. Adults came next. The three- to five-year-olds were slowest, and the adults were ahead of them on almost every test all year.

The only measure where the youngest held their own was pronunciation. The authors concluded that their data did not support a critical period closing at puberty, at least for how fast people learn.

Here is the honest reading. This is about the speed of the first year, not the ceiling.

Children who keep going tend to end up more native-like, especially in accent, and the gaps were starting to close by the last test. It was also a study of people living in the language, not of anyone studying at home for twenty minutes a day, so it says nothing about any method.

But for an adult who wants to read a novel or hold a conversation, the first year is the year that matters, and in that year the adults were not behind. They were ahead. The thing they had that the small children lacked was a head full of concepts and a first language to hang the second one on. You have that too.

What the newcomers also had was Dutch all day, which is the part to copy: a story in the language, every day, with the meaning within reach. That is what I built Aloglot for. It reads you a book at your level, in 93 languages, and explains any word you tap.

Sources

• Snow and Hoefnagel-Höhle (1978). The critical period for language acquisition: Evidence from second language learning. Child Development, 49(4), 1114–1128.