It’s never too late to learn a language but it’s a bit of an uphill battle, and you’re not going to learn it by just watching shows. You need to practice regularly and understand the grammar and sentence structure. You also have to speak it with other people to get feedback, you can’t only learn to listen.
It’s about brain plasticity and 25 is kind of the same as 45…
So they can learn French in an “anything is possible if you try” kind of way, but realistically unless they straight up move to France and completely dive into it, it’s going to be a massive struggle to get to where they can even understand French shows without English subtitles.
Like, at a certain point people should realistically evaluate the amount of work and payoff they get from stuff.
Marrying a French person and wanting to learn their language? Yeah. That’s probably worth the work.
Wanting to watch French TV without reading? Not so much
Learning a language has benefits beyond that, it can be it’s own reward to have dedicated time to something and have it pay off and it is good for brain health. Bilingual people suffer less from dementias.
Pretty sure that’s people who were bilingual their whole lives, not people who learned another language later in life. It’s about how the brain deals with thinking in both languages.
Once you’re older it’s the same benefit as sudoku, which is still something
But that study was done on people aged 65+ for 11 weeks? I mean, sure, they didn’t measure any significant changes to the brain, but that doesn’t preclude changes forever. 11 weeks is not long to practice a language
French is tough, but I’d argue it isn’t that hard compared to some other languages. Grammatical gender and conjugation are a pain in the ass, but the vocabulary is very familiar to a native English-speaker because of the languages’ common history (thanks, William the Conqueror)
Im Canadian and also already have a significant french education, just never got “conversational”, def have since like age 3 exposure if only Ontarioish
If you want a rough comparison of the relative difficulty for a native English speaker to learn different languages, the US military’s Defense Language Institute’s guidelines are well-regarded, and they consider Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese to be the easiest.
As others have said it is never too late to learn a language. Our brains are just as capable, if not more, when we’re adults.
I’m also a firm believer that comprehensible input (listening and attempting to understand) is the best way to learn a language. You can’t start with high level speech though. You need to start with speech that is aimed at beginners or you won’t understand enough for it to be effective.
Studying vocabulary in parallel helps a lot because it helps you learn niche words that don’t come up often in normal speech.
The typical recommendation with comprehensible input is to listen for around a thousand hours and then start practicing with conversation and books as well.
Good luck! Remember that with enough dedicated time you can learn anything. :)
Adults are worse at passive learning than kids, but focused learning works just fine. You’re probably better off buying/pirating something like rosetta stone than you are watching sitcoms.
According to Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, compelling, comprehensible input is sufficient to acquire a language. That means input that you find interesting and that keeps you engaged, and which you can understand at least in part. That evolving sweet spot can indeed take you from complete newbie to fluency without ever speaking.
In my experience, though, being able to speak with other native speakers is a huge source of motivation and creates its own compelling input. So I wouldn’t discount that.
I personally know someone who went from no English to being able to converse just by watching The Simpsons.
I work for the Federal Government of Canada, and for reasons that are hopefully obvious, it’s important that they are able to have a pipeline that teaches French to people over the age of 25 in about a year. It’s not as simple as just watching media though. The French training for public servants starting at 0 French is a full-time job. People literally disappear from their jobs for a year or more in order to learn French.
Never too late. Rote memorisation becomes more difficult as we age, but it’s not impossible. I’ve been learning one of the more difficult languages (Finnish) in my 40s for about 300 days now, and I am making progress.
Look into ‘active learning’, it’s far more effective than apps like DuoLingo (which I use heavily, it does have its place)
Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it’s all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.
The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn’t, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.
Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I’d be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You’ll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.
I’m in my mid-40s, already speak English and Spanish, and I’m picking up Portuguese just because I’m around Brazilian people so damned often up here in Massachusetts.
Of course it’s not too late. Having actual conversations in context is the easiest way to kind of passively pick up a new language. You can use apps or Google translate for vocabulary and details
I went to Germany for summer work while I was at University; I was 24 at the time, due to military service prior to college. I spoke no German when I landed in Munich.
By the time I left Germany, I was 26 and spoke fluently enough to pass as a German from “some other state.” So I have some observations about this.
For Americans, German is an easy language. Count the number of credits your college offers for language courses. Spanish will be 2 (maybe 3) credits; German will be 3. French is 4. Russian and Japanese are 5; Mandarin may be 6. That’s directly proportional to how hard the language is for native English speakers; it’s how many hours of classes you’ll have to attend per week for the language. You’ve picked a moderately hard one, with French.
A month of immersion is worth a year of classes, with a caveat. If you want to learn French, find some temp work in France (or Quebec) and go spend a year working and living there. It will totally pay off.
The caveat? I didn’t study German, so I couldn’t really write it, and if I had to speak formally the facade would have collapsed. Immersion + study is the best combination.
Such that, when I got back to university, I tried to enter German language courses, and failed. 101 was absurdly easy, and impossible to take. 201 was absurdly hard, and impossible to pass. I could speak fluently, I just couldn’t do any bookwork. So, I ended up taking 3 years of French, instead.
Consequently, today - decades later - I can hold a passable casual conversaion in German, but not write letters in it; and I can read French pretty well and make myself understood through writing, but I’ve yet to find a French person who will acknowledge that they cam understand my spoken French. So, again: immersion plus study.
By the time I finished my last French class, and had my minor in it, I was 28. My advice there is that you should still be able to do it. It just won’t be as easy as when you were younger.
IME, you won’t pick much French up from sitcoms, and self-directed language courses are best as supplemental material. Move to a French-speaking country and work, and enroll in language classes there immediately. In a year, you’ll speak French. In two, if you have a good ear, you might be accused of fluency.