> social aspects of learning another language

Maybe if you are near the native speaking country, or potentially if there are significant numbers of immigrants.

But knowing Spanish adds nothing social within New Zealand.

I had a Spanish girlfriend when 30, which made learning Spanish rather incentivised, and I embedded overseas for many months to learn conversational Spanish.

However I rarely hang out with South American immigrants in New Zealand, and those I have met (say at the pub) often prefer to stick with English.

Knowing Spanish is fantastic when travelling - the months spent learning have led to way more enjoyment when subsequently travelling to South America or visiting friends in Spain. Spanish also helps a little in France, Italy, Portugal and Brazil.

I intend to spend a few months in South Korea so maybe I'll try and learn Korean (without a girlfriend). However I'm now older so I suspect it will be much much harder.

I am an actual linguist, in a subfield that requires me to continually learn new languages, and there are no social benefits. I definitely don't get out there. Once one is a man over the age of 40 or so, local people are rarely willing to talk to you at any length, you are not interesting any more (in fact, in some cultures, local people will have heightened suspicion of you). Language learning becomes more a passive endeavour with few opportunities for real-world speaking.

Learning another language is difficult, but never occured to me to think it would be somehow impossible to anyone. It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position as it is the default international language. World is getting smaller and people coming from smaller languages usually also learn the local international language as well. If you are born to family speaking estonian today you probably pick up also english or otherwise you spend your life surfing only estonian websites. It requires no special talent (although some people are fast at picking up new languages)

And it is only getting easier to learn a language now too. What FINALLY got me over the hump with Spanish was YouTube and discovering resources like Dreaming Spanish (leveled content for comprehensive input that probably exist in most major languages). Content that was fun and at my level.

Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.

> The confounders on the group of people who are able to learn a second language

Unless you have large learning disorder, you can learn second language. It is not some kind of rare talent

Well, now that everyone has had it several times, including you, it’s probably safe to go to a language meetup.

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In my opinion it is necessity and immersion that drive language learning best.

If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.

For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.

Yes. Started Japanese for the first time in my late 30s. I am currently around CEFR B1, working toward B2.

> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.

Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.

As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.

A friend learnt French and piano in her mid 30s and later. Then she went lazy as potato and pretty much is horrible at both. Never practised. Now she is in late 40s and rather spends time scrolling Twitter (yup!), Instagram, and Youtube or overworking. So, I seriously doubt the true brain capacity is the problem in 30s or later. She also had somewhat of a life in her 30s and then she never made an effort to keep having that life (something I am inching towards in my late 30s now; also in the geography we both are this is inherently difficult - no, it's not an excuse) and that also contributed to losing a lot of her personality, or that's how she puts it. So I think to use the brain the brain needs to be primed and well oiled et cetera.

I've done that with Russian, got around level B2 so far. But I had quite a bit of experience with language learning before that (mainly easy-ish languages: Spanish, Portuguese, German, etc).

Russian is tough nut to crack, and it does require above average dedication. As a matter of fact, I'm currently in Kyrgyzstan for a few weeks to get some immersion and hopefully break out of the level I'm currently in.

You'll need loads of time, but for some languages you really do need to find grammar interesting.

I have learned all of my Spanish since I turned 30?

If you’re immersed and just use anki to build out your vocab it isn’t that hard. Tbh, it’s kind of easier than when I was learning languages as a teen.

you need serious motivation to learn a new language. First ask yourself if you have a really good reason otherwise you will give up. I, for example learned english because I needed for work. But I wouldn't dive into learning another language unless I'm going to engage with it in some form every day

Yep, I learned Spanish, then French.

The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn.

Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.

Yes, it's possible. For me it went like this.

1. I learned enough vocabulary in a very short time to be able to more or less be able to read with the assistance of a dictionary on an e-book where you can click on a word. I spent ~2 weekends of Duolingo 8 hours a day, but I'd use flashcards in the future instead of that. It sounds a bit crazy in hindsight, but I feel like it was easier to stay strongly motivated for a short period of time than drizzling the words over a period of time. All other attempts where I did not do this, failed.

The limit of learning words for me is ~50-200 words per hour if using flashcards. It depends a lot on the language and how similar it is to the languages one already knows. 200, if it is similar to my native language, ~50, if I don't know anything similar at all. I'm also almost guaranteed to forget 80% of the words, if I don't use them in the next day or two, but its possible to cram a lot of them very fast and then move on to stage 2 to use them.

Important catch (for me at least), is that I can remember nouns far more easily than verbs or other more abstract/structural words. Those absolutely need to be in a sentence when learning. There's pretty much no point for me in trying to cram them on their own. I just cannot remember them in isolation at all and also which words they are used with differ per language anyway. Eg "to put" won't necessarily be used for all nouns in a different language even though a dictionary might say that's what it means. The good side is that knowing the nouns helps a lot in deciphering.

2. After the initial cramming I read a couple of short/simple books over some months in the evenings before sleep. I tried to listen to videos & to talk to some people a bit now and then, but it was extremely hard and boring as I understood too little. In hindsight I should have listened more to videos, but the good ones are surprisingly hard to find, if you don't live in the country that already speaks the language one is learning.

3. I tried several options for getting conversational after that. First a private teacher who knew the language well, but was not experienced enough (a university student) to teach somebody who tends to use weird methods for learning. She kept getting confused about why I understand complex words that were basically the same in English, Spanish and other European languages, but why I struggled with the basics when talking at the same time.

I also tried some learning groups. They were fine, but it's very difficult to find people at the same level after starting to learn a language and not following a preset path. I was felt either far ahead and far behind at the same time.

Eventually I found a native speaking private teacher who had years of experience. He could make the classes interesting and after ~1.5-2 years of talking with him 1-2 times per week for an hour about pretty much anything, I can hold a conversation and handle things in general. I still kept learning vocabulary in parallel and I'm not quite fluent as I don't use the language daily, but I'm not too far off either. Overall it took maybe 2-3 years, because I wasn't very consistent at the beginning.

If I were to change anything, it's getting the private teacher way sooner, skipping the learning groups entirely and using flash cards + asking for verbs/structural words as parts of sentences from either the private teacher or finding some other resource for it to start with. Using AI is possible too I guess for that purpose, but only with more common languages. Most AIs completely mess up my native language and invent words that don't exist, so I wouldn't trust them much when learning.

I did with what I consider a success. Basically, duolingo and then some beginner podcasts and then netflix with language reactor. I do understand pretty well, did not do much to speak - I dod not cared.

The key in our age is to NOT listen to pointifications about how you need to spend hours a day, are lazy if you dont grind flashcards or grammar.

My rule was "doing something every day 5 min counts" and focusing on what I actually liked. That way, it was not a burden. Maybe took longer, but I dont care.

Good point about the different language groups. I wonder if there has been any research on measuring the scale of the effect by including some sort of distance metric between the languages. Let's imagine your primary language is Spanish: What's the gain if you learn Italian (Romance language) vs German (non-Romance Indo-European) vs Hungarian (non-Indo European same alphabet) vs Japanese (non-Indo European different alphabet)?

These researchers probably forgot to factor in the brain's disk size bottleneck. Maybe they will get there.

I do think that practicing different programming languages should have a corresponding brain benefit as well.

The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less.

As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is).

But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc..

The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media.

It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning.

It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know.

English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.

I think ultimately the highest barrier is looking stupid. I try not to care, like how kids do not and simply try. People underestimate you all the time when you do not speak a language, or do it badly.

Immersion, unfortunately.

You put yourself in a situation where nobody understands you in your native language, nothing helpful for your daily life is written in your native language, and you must constantly try to comprehend and produce the target language if you want to accomplish even basic tasks.

If you can't up and move, then studying a language with a lot of cultural export helps a bit, if you can get into the habit of switching all of your media consumption to the target language. It's not the same, though.

I watch and read different things. I like different things in foreign language - stuff that is simple or kind of cringy in my own. So I rarely ends up comparing it.

Second, I rewatch things I liked a lot. Watching them dubbed with more need to rewind makes me notice different stuff about series - how they are composed. So it is a bonus.

Go somewhere you are forced to learn and speak it.

Defaulting to your native language will get zero comprehension, which is much more frustrating than some.

Also wondering about instruments and learning to read sheet music.

probably if you don't program already, unlikely if you do, they are more similar than different once you know the three classes (imperative, functional, logical)

I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin

similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain

Is a programming language a language?

I think it probably exercises some of the same cognitive skills, but the vocabulary of a typical programming language is tiny.