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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

It goes deeper than amount of time spent. There are differences in the MRI scans of people who have spent time doing substantive work in music before the age of 12, and those who started much later. I've also taught music, and let me tell you, the difference is stark! It's much the same as learning a spoken language. There is a big difference between 10,000 hours spent learning spoken languages during the K-12 years, and 10,000 hours in your late 30's!

Teaching adults who had no exposure to making music as a kid is like trying to teach someone who can't see color to paint a sunset! There are some adults who can't keep rhythm with any meaningful accuracy, and can't hum a tune back at you. There is some entire facility which is missing. I've had similar experiences teaching programming.

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I've recently wondered, is the common knowledge that kids pick up languages quickly and better than adults really true?

Adults have a much wider range of skills and far more knowledge than children, adults already have some of the most important aspects of thinking down: a set of concepts about the world. Yet many struggle to learn a second language past a certain time in their life.

Clearly children learn languages better than adults, a near 100% success rate for children picking up their first language, to what may be something less than 50% success rate for adults (guessing these numbers, but its clearly lower for adults).

As a child though, what do you spend nearly every waking minute doing? practicing and learning language, usually from their mother. Where as adults, usually they give up not because its impossible, but because its too hard -- and they have better things to do!

Is ten thousand hours of language study as a kid really worth ten thousand hours of language study as an adult?

I would be interested to hear if anyone knows of research looking into the actual hours/work put in to study a second language to get to some certain level of proficiency where the subjects started learning at different ages (5 years, 10 years, 15, 30 years old etc.)

I've recently wondered, is the common knowledge that kids pick up languages quickly and better than adults really true?

The question is insufficiently precisely formulated to be answered. Unreferenced BS follows.

As you pointed out children don't actually pick uplanguages that fast. It takes a motivated English native speaker about 600 hours to achieve near native fluency in German if they have any gift for languages. That's just classroom and home study, not talking immersion. It takes on the order of 10,000 hours for children to learn a language with native fluency.

Even for children who started learning a language by immersion before 14 (approximate cut-off point for native fluency) there's a decent statistical relationship between vocabulary and the age at which they started learning. Obviously if you moved with your parents to X at ten and are a voracious reader you'll beat the deprived kid from the slum estate, statistical relationship.

Learning a language that's closely related to one you already speak isn't that hard if you are totally immersed. Grammar books, vocabulary lists, dictionaries, helpful native speakers all help tremendously. It is possible but incredibly hard for an 'adult' (14+) to learn a foreign language natively, unless they're a biological freak (hyperpolyglot, remembered from SciAm, treat with appropriate caution)

Yes, being quite fluent in a language is just a matter of effort. But really speaking like a native -- this is exceptionally hard. My dad's English is incredibly good for someone born in Korea. His grammar is impeccable, and he's completely fluent. But I still catch that he still has to think a little bit about L and R sometimes. (And he's been at it for 60 years!)

A measurable difference in brain scans does not by itself amount to enough evidence to claim that programming and musical ability are intrinsically linked.

All I'm saying is two things:

a) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (note: neither a vague, nice-sounding theory that everyone would like to believe to be true nor anecdotal evidence qualify) and b) I feel an application of Occam's Razor is in order.

There is a very important scene in "Tous les Matins du Monde" where Gerard Depardieu is pretending to play a Viola de Gamba. (Ancestor of the Cello) It's the climactic scene, actually.

This scene works very well for most people who have never played an instrument. Gerard Depardieu is considered a good actor by many, and he's doing all sorts of things right as far as that goes. However, people who have played an instrument often cringe when watching that scene, because it's glaringly obvious that Mr. Depardieu is not playing the instrument. He's faking it so badly, it makes many musicians consider the scene hoky and disappointing. (It's still a great movie, though.)

What's really interesting, is that musicians who know nothing about playing a Viola de Gamba can still tell. I play wind instruments, and my fingers are doing nothing that resembles what a bowed string player has to do. There is no resemblance at all -- some things are diametrically opposed, and while I do nothing like bowing, I also need to incorporate breathing to play, in a way which is not at all needed for playing a string. Yet I can still tell immediately. This difference is very stark, and you'd probably see much better discrimination in a double-blind test than with 128 bit MP3's versus 320 bits. Note that there is a well known mathematical and physiological basis for the latter.

Yeah, I play strings and I hated that scene. You can even deduce from this scene that Depardieu hasn't learned to play any type of instrument, which can be said for a lot of Hollywood actors faking it on camera.

Although, there is the rare breed of actor that plays an instrument.

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