Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

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Not to argue with the sentiment -- you can and should always learn new things -- but I wonder... How true is it?

In linguistics, the conventional wisdom is that native-language acquisition is fundamentally different from non-. Anyone besides a small child will quite likely never develop native fluency in a new language, no matter how long they speak it.

I often feel that way about programming-- I started learning C at an incredibly young age, and while I sure wasn't very good at it, I do think it patterned my brain somehow.

I get the sense when I work with other developers, people who learned to code in their teens or twenties, that there's something different going on. They're fluent in the language, they probably know more about it than I do, but they're thinking differently. I'm certainly not a genius or a savant, I've never taken a programming class in my life that taught me something, and I don't brag about my code, but I often experience a near-effortless acquisition of new languages, styles, even paradigms that other, talented devs seem to struggle with. I'm sure there must be many other people out there who share this experience.

So this is just speculation, but is it possible there's some underlying aspect of code-thinking which, sadly, it is too late to learn?

I am not a linguist, but I have been working on learning Portuguese, and based on what I read the conventional wisdom among laymen is that native language acquisition is different for children, but the research actually shows the opposite. The only thing I've seen research suggest children are different at is accents. Furthermore, I think many of us know Americans who immigrated in their teens and have been here for a long time and really are indistinguishable from native speakers.

I also am highly skeptical of your claim you are more native in programming, but I started when I was in my early teens so I'm not sure I can comment.

I think your skill at learning languages rises when you are very young, and you face diminishing returns after that, so adults never get that much better at learning a language than when they were young. With other things you begin later in life, you start at the bottom of the learning curve and improve much more. So adults and kids are usually about as good at language learning, unlike most things, so people think kids are magically gifted at learning languages because they are about as good as adults. And of course, adults are actually much better because they already know all the real world concepts from their L1. I've also seen it asserted many times that children learn languages faster, and I've only seen research supporting the opposite, so I think your claim is just the programming version of that fallacy.

I'll believe you've seen people saying that kids learn languages faster, but I'm not :) There's a lot of research both ways, and second-language acquisition is very similar to first-, but there's definitely something different going on or we wouldn't have any idea how a baby can learn a language starting from knowing none.

There's also solid evidence that learning two or more languages as a child, while being slightly slower, sets you up better to learn more as an adult, as well as just making you a cooler person overall.

That aside, though, I share your skepticism. I was just relating my experience, and hoping maybe we could, you know, have a conversation about it :)

It takes longer, but if you stick with a new language full time eventually you start to think and dream in it. Also, don't adults can stay ahead of the language curve at the start, baby's often take 3 years to say the first few words but adults can become fairly fluent in 6 months. I suspect the real problem with leaning something latter in life is not that it takes slightly more time time, but you have less free time to learn.

I think you're mistaking "native fluency" for just fluency, which is probably my fault. Of course adults can become fluent in new languages relatively easily with full immersion, but the simplest things for native speakers can be the hardest to acquire. For example, before a baby can talk, they will babble in the intonation of their native language-- it's the first thing they learn. It's also the last thing a non-native speaker picks up, happening well after they've acquired full fluency, or indeed never in many cases.

Now it may be that's more about our techniques for second-language acquisition than brain structure differences, but it's sure interesting, innit?

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