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)
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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