How old can you still be in a foreign language?

A new study shows that we will take longer than we think to master something new - for example, learning a new language.

Children can perceive languages ​​much easier than adults, a typical example is any child who grows up from a bilingual home; But when does the opportunity to dominate a language disappear? At what age can we no longer absorb enough to achieve proficiency?

According to the research team: New analysis shows that we are still very good at learning the grammar of a new language until age 17 or 18 , and that is greater than the expected age.

However, if you want to be as fluent as a native, you need to start at a much younger age.

A researcher, psychologist Joshua Hartshorne, who studied at MIT, said: 'If you want to have knowledge of native English grammar, you should start around 10 years of age.'

'We do not see much difference between children who start learning a language from birth and those who start at 10, but we start to see a decline later.'

If you want to be as fluent as a native, you need to start at a much younger age.

To get these conclusions, the researchers looked at the results of a grammar test conducted by nearly 670,000 people. To encourage more people to take tests and share it on social media, the group tried to make it as interesting as possible.

That means combining questions that highlight English dialects as well as questions that highlight grammatical errors. For example, in Canada, the phrase 'I have finished dinner' will bring about a perfect feeling, but will not bring a similar feeling to any other English speaker.

At the end of the test, a short test will try to guess your language and dialect, another trick that will make it widely shared.

Hartshorne said: 'The next few weeks will be spent to keep running this site, because the traffic we are getting is overwhelming. That also makes me know that testing is quite interesting. "

Participants were also asked about their current age and the age at which they began learning English, as well as other information.

A total of 246,497 survey respondents grew up speaking only English, while the rest knew two or more languages ​​from an early age. A total of 38 languages ​​are included by the participants.

The data is then pushed out through a series of computational models to determine the age limit of 17 or 18, when the ability to learn the grammar nuances of a new language seems to begin to decline.

What is unclear is why this decline occurs - it could be a biological, social or cultural change, according to the researchers. In other words, it may be something inherent in our brains, or something that changes in our life situation.

For this latest research, the team hopes it can eventually teach us more about how our ability to learn changes over time.

A researcher, Josh Tenenbaum from MIT, said: 'Until now, it is still very difficult to get all the data you need to answer the question: How long can it take to master a new language? ? '

'This is one of the rare opportunities in science, when we can make the effort to find the answer to a very old question, which many smart people have thought and written about this for a long time. already. But there is a new perspective opened and fortunately, we have seen something new that perhaps others have not yet seen. '