Chinese is actually much more similar to English (structurally) than a lot of people realize:
It doesn't mark case or gender like English (and it doesn't even really inflect verbs).
The word order is for the most part the same or similar (German has this verb-at-the-end construction that you not only have to learn, but you have to train somewhat to remember enough context to bind the verbs to the clauses they apply to; Japanese is SOV rather than SVO like English/Chinese).
The writing system takes a really long time and a lot of memorization, but if you're learning only to speak and listen, you don't really have to deal with it.
Chinese is basically English grammar with different words...Japanese on the other hand is much more weird. Getting tones right is key, but they are easy to practice.
Writing is quite hard; I'm conversational but basically illiterate.
Per hour, adults are more efficient at learning languages. But kids forced into another language typically get more hours of exposure than adults attempting to force themselves to learn a language.
Do you have anything cite for this claim? All the research I'm aware of strongly suggests (1) It's extremely hard for adults to learn new languages - usually requiring many more hours compared to kids learning second language (2) Brain circuitry to hear, distinguish and pronounce new sounds effectively gets shutdown in older age.
I too often read about research that suggests children are better at learning languages than adults, which may or not be true, but I am rarely convinced by these reports. Finding a correlation between the age a person started learning a language and their fluency, the reports then conclude that children are superior learners, without considering other factors like that bi-lingual children are exposed to their languages constantly and must learn them to communicate with others, while adult learners find 2 hours of study onerous and suffer few if any consequences from not learning.
Other studies are more scientifically rigorous, testing the aptitude of various language learning abilities with quizzes and games, but I think we can infer very little about the efficiency of long term studying from these narrow tests.
Just anecdotally, I live in Japan, and most foreigners I know who come as adults and work in a Japanese environment are conversational in a year, fluent in 3 or 4.
I only have this anecdote. My wife, two kids (3 & 5 years old) and I have been taking Mandarin classes for the past six months. My wife & I pick up the concepts, grammar/patterns and vocabulary about three times faster than our kids (we are also forced to work harder at it because we're constantly reinforcing the lessons to them, so that inherently biases this analysis). That said, their pronunciation is muuuuuuuch better than ours.
Kids learn by observing and interacting in the language. Adults usually learn the grammar and vocabulary directly, which is a slower mechanism for the brain.
Unfortunately I can't remember where I heard that recently. Knowing my own habits, it wasn't merely hearsay, and may have been from a podcast or other such non-fiction program, and still may have been a rogue opinion. I wish I could think of it. I'll Google around this evening.
For most people this is probably true, but I started learning Mandarin in college and now have a native-sounding accent, and I know others who have pulled it off too.
I think the key was that in the first few months of studying Mandarin, I listened to recordings of short phrases and repeated them back over and over again until I sounded exactly like the recording. I spent hours in my university's language lab with headphones on, doing this.
But you have to be able to imitate sounds that you hear, and I guess not everyone is naturally good at this. I'd imagine that people who are good at doing impressions, as well as perhaps people with musical talent, have an advantage at learning accents.
What I've gathered is that accents depend on your ability to distinguish phonemes - the classic example is that in western languages there is p vs. b sound - whereas in Tagalog there is also a pb intermediate sound.
If you have an ear for knowing that some languages use that phoneme, you will be more likely to be able to both hear and articulate these sounds (i.e., your aptitude for learning language accents is higher)
I was watching a reality TV show last week (flip this old beach house or somesuch) where a father and his toddler daughter had approximately this dialog.
I'm unconvinced that a school-setting can teach children languages vastly more effectively than an adult (or an adult can self-teach). Maybe for very young children, but even that I'm sceptical of.
Hmm dude, everybody here who is not a native English speaker knows at least a second language on top of his mother tongue. I'm French, fluent in English and conversational in Spanish and German and I don't think it's so impressive.
Chinese on the other hand is a bit tougher because the writing is so different.
You're speaking four related western European languages.
For example, when you learned English, notwithstanding the fact that you are surrounded by English since you're a child, you had from day one several thousands words of vocabulary and knew a superset of the English grammar (FYI, 45% of English words are of French origin).
I'm fluent in three European languages as well. I can feel that I could pick up Italian or Dutch very easily (I'm > 35 y.o.). When trying Russian with my gf, I don't have the same feeling.
It's impressive in America, where it's not needed, and moreso because Chinese is "exotic" and superficially less "practical" than learning Spanish, which is a useful thing to know south of New York.
