Post: #1

I feel like I'm starting to really understand the phrase "can't teach an old dog new tricks." I totally get why the parents of some of my latino friends still don't speak much English after having been in the country for decades. I feel like trying to learn a new language as you're getting older is tough. I don't know why that is, it's not like I'm senile or something, but I can learn some vocabulary, then damn near have forgotten it and have to look up the words again a few weeks later. And having to decode different word orders and tenses and verb conjugations in real time is just daunting. I seriously wonder if this is just out of my capability at this point. Now if someone is speaking to me in Spanish or Portuguese using very basic sentences with no fancy tenses and irregularities, I can get the gist of it, but I don't know if I have any hope of ever being fully fluent in these languages.

I feel like the same in other areas of life too. Something like a programming technology I might have picked up in a snap in my mid 20s I have to really struggle with now. It's kind of depressing.

Post: #2

Less brain plasticity.

Younger brains are more fluid. Easier to grasp abstract concepts and learn new languages and words.

Older brains should be wiser.

That's why I tell guys not to fuck around when they are younger.

You can't just "start over" at 35 or 40.

In middle age you need to start integrating everything you've learned and be wise rather than brilliant.

Post: #3

I met a Dutch guy in Brazil. He spoke English perfectly fine, so he obviously didn't have trouble learning languages when he was younger. But he said he moved to Brazil in his 50's and couldn't learn Portuguese for the life of him. He was even married to a Brazilian girl, he said it didn't help that she spoke fluent English.

Post: #4

While there's an element of truth to the notion that you get less sharp as you age out of your 20s (most great achievements in the sciences are made when men are young), part of it is probably expectation bias on your part.

Learning a language is hard, especially when you're not immersed in the environment and you have other things going on like a job.

As you get older you accumulate more knowledge and wisdom, like MikeCF said.

Sometimes the hardest part is to unlearn, not to learn. For example, I would probably not do as well on the SATs now as I did as a high school junior because I would be tempted to use Calculus where it's unnecessary. Similarly, being an adult as opposed to a young child, your foreign language acquisition skills may be impacted by your tendency to process information first in your native language--slowing down the long term learning process.

Post: #5

It's actually easier for me to learn things, because I already have so many connections and experiences that when I see a new Polish word, there is something already in my brain that I can anchor it to for a mnemonic.

How many hours a day are you studying the language? Are you also practicing it? Are you using spaced repetition? It's probably your learning technique, not your brain (unless you're letting it degrade by watching a lot of television). The brain is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. If you study a language only 30 minutes a day, of course it's going to be hard, no matter what age you are.

Post: #6

I also think once you learn a language or multiple languages, it makes it much easier to learn others.

Post: #7

(04-13-2013 06:04 PM)InternationPlayboy Wrote:  I also think once you learn a language or multiple languages, it makes it much easier to learn others.

Absolutely. Speaking different languages builds neurons in your brains and challenges you. You get better at it as you speak multilingually more and more.

I find it much easier to learn other languages as I am already fully bilingual.

Not only that, but it just makes you smarter overall.

Post: #8

Some things get much easier to learn, and some get more difficult. I find that I'm better with learning new words and math than I've ever been.

New math in general is much harder to pick up after 18 or 20, I believe. Public education cheats you out of a good math education, since most of them eat shit after trig or pre calculus and set theory/proofs are never addressed, not even once. It's possible to go through highschool and two years of college (!) without ever being broached the subject of non-computational mathematics.

I really wish that I could have had a two month introduction to set theory when I was 14 and digested all this shit without effort or questioning it because an hour or two of studying back then was probably work six or eight hours of studying it now.

Post: #9

Shit, back in highschool (all of 5 years ago) I could look at something once and remember it, and I still remember it.

Post: #10

Brain elasticity obviously helps, but there is no substitute for motivation.

Common thing that I hear is that young children (0-7) learn language a lot faster than older people.

This is stupid, because while, yes, a youngster's brain is better equipped to pick up a language, a 7 yr old is not capable of studying a language intentionally.

Sure, a 6 yr old can pick up a language in a hurry, compared to an adult, IF he is in a immersion environment. Even then, even a native speaker of a language at 6 yrs old doesn't not have anywhere near the sophistication of a fluent adult speaker of the same language.

You are still developing your vocabulary through high school and possibly into university. My mom learned a new word at age 51 that she had never learned before in her life.

If an adult buckles down for five years and studies intentionally, he can be completely fluent in Chinese at the same level that any native speaker of Chinese would be proud of at 15, which given his immaturity takes him longer to develop.

So, I'd rather be a motivated adult studying something new than a lazy kid that only learns what his mind naturally picks up in daily life.

At 30+ yrs old, you are at a disadvantage, but that doesn't mean you can't do stuff any more. My mom significantly improved her Dutch between 30-40. At 25, no one would have thought of her as a fluent speaker. She'd heard it a lot from age 0-3, but couldn't speak Dutch at all when she was 10. She studied for two years in college, but her skills didn't really pickup until she was in her 30's and got motivated and started reading Dutch books from the library with the book in one hand and a Dutch-English dictionary in the other.

At 45, people who had recently immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands started asking when she immigrated. They spoke Dutch with her and concluded that she was a native speaker, based on her fluency.

Now, my mom is really smart, but the moral of the story is that despite the advantages of your brain state when you are older, there is nothing more powerful than being motivated and getting down to business learning something.

Also, being in the habit of learning helps.

I've spent the last 8 yrs of my life going in and out of college and after I've been away from school for a year or more, it's really hard to do it again. Even writing a one page essay is really tough.

But once I get back into the mental state of being a student, I can do it again.

So, if you want to learn things, do it as young as possible, but if you are 35, don't assume that your life is over.

(04-13-2013 05:55 PM)Roosh Wrote:  It's actually easier for me to learn things, because I already have so many connections and experiences that when I see a new Polish word, there is something already in my brain that I can anchor it to for a mnemonic.

How many hours a day are you studying the language? Are you also practicing it? Are you using spaced repetition? It's probably your learning technique, not your brain (unless you're letting it degrade by watching a lot of television). The brain is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. If you study a language only 30 minutes a day, of course it's going to be hard, no matter what age you are.

Post: #11

I learned most of my math and programming in my late 20's and I'm learning python now. I feel I got better at learning because I have a good method of doing it.

So no excuses. This is like people making the excuse about their metabolism is slowing down and thats causing them to be fat.

Post: #12

I think another factor may be how much booze you drank and drugs you consumed in your 20s, I know some guys who were sharp as tacks and fit as fiddles in their younger years but the hard living lifestyle caught up with them in their 30s.

Post: #13

Significantly harder? No.

Even if the hardware isn't quite what it used to be, you should be able to more than make up for it as your learning skills and problem solving semantics and heuristics should be much more refined by now. You should have also developed an intuition for zoning in on the important points in information and not wasting too much time on filler. I've noticed uneducated and unintelligent people seem to lack the ability to distill the essence out of knowledge and focus way too much on the irrelevant stuff which is just there to provide a context. Also, most people just stop learning for the sake of it once they have finished their schooling, and then when they forced to learn something new, they find it difficult. I've never heard a lifelong autodidactic learner complain that he was getting mentally slow.

Mature students who go back to college in their thirties more often than not, perform very well compared to the youngsters. I realise that older students are usually more motivated and are more driven and determined, but this just goes to show that raw brain power isn't everything.

The exception comes when learning human languages, because our brains are optimized to pick up that stuff with far less conscious effort when we are young, but in adulthood we usually have to fall back on traditional study skills unless we are gifted in language acquisition.

Post: #14

if you stop working out, your gains will vanish, but muscle memory makes it easier to rebuild muscle (or build some new). In my opinion, learning gets harder because most people aren't forced to learn a lot of new stuff in their daily adult work life.

Post: #15

is it your first serious attempt at a new language?
things should get progressively easier until say, mid 40s.
i speak english and chinese. if i were to take up spanish, already knowing those two languages will not help. its not as of the language part of the brain gets better with practicr, its that you find the most efficient method of doing things and apply them to a new stimulus.

Post: #16

Here's a study on how aging affects the insulation of our nerves that allows us to perform skills easily. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14501200


If you are contending with Myelin breaking down and also dealing with the brain not being able to learn new things as easily, it's going to get harder retain and build new knowledge or skills.

Post: #17

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Post: #18

As I'm getting older, I'm definitely noticing its getting harder to learn things

Post: #19

You know what the main difference between now and in my teens/20s was? Back then my schedule was figured out, my life was in a relative order, and I had plenty of mental free time to learn whatever I want.

Now I work 8+ hours a day and have to spend mental energy on stupid bullshit just to live a regular life. My brain isn't any worse than before, but it's a hell of a lot more distracted.

Post: #20

As you get older your ego is less in control.

For me, that means if I apply myself to learning something, I'm willing to fail over and over until I get it right.

The downside of this is I find it harder to learn stuff that has no immediate value, like languages where I'm not planning to go and immerse myself in using them.

I think people often use age as an excuse when the problem is they never figured out a learning method on their own after having everything presented to them in their youth.

"I'd hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak." - Arnold