At what age do you need to start learning a foreign language to succeed

If you want to have knowledge of grammar in English or any other language as its carrier, you should start learning it before 10 years.

Фото: Depositphotos

People have a high learning ability up to 17 or 18 years, after which it gradually decreases, writes with the BBC.

This is evidenced by the results of an online grammar test in English, in which almost 670 000 people of different ages and nationalities took part.

The test was published on Facebookto attract as many participants as possible.

Users were asked to evaluate the grammatical correctness of sentences such as, for example, “Yesterday John wanted to won the race".

Participants were also asked to indicate their age, how long they studied English, and under what conditions the training took place: school, tutor, moving to an English-speaking country, etc.

About 246 000 people who passed the test grew up in an English-speaking country and speak only English, while the rest were bilingual or multilingual.

The most common native languages ​​of the participants (with the exception of English) were Finnish, Turkish, German, Russian and Hungarian.

Most of the people who took the test were between 20 and 30 years old. The youngest participant was 10 years old, the oldest was almost 80.

When the researchers analyzed the test results using a computer model, they found that people learn language grammar best in childhood, fairly well in adolescence, and worse after age 20.

Learning a language is usually easy in childhood and becomes more complex with age. But scientists say that adult students can also succeed and learn to speak a foreign language fluently, although they need to make much more effort to do this.

It is not yet clear what causes the decline in learning ability observed around age 18. Researchers believe this may be because the adult brain is less variable and adaptable than a child's.

This is due to the fact that an adult’s life is more monotonous - daily trips to the university or office, etc., while he is already more experienced and much fewer things cause him questions, fears and attempts to understand and adapt.

This does not mean that learning a foreign language in adult life is useless. This process is an excellent training for the brain and slows down its aging.

In addition, linguists say that there are examples in the world of people who, in adulthood, managed to achieve a free level of proficiency in a foreign language.

In addition, the research carried out dealt with only one aspect of language - grammar. But a person can communicate fluently in a language and be an excellent communicator, while not always constructing grammatically correct sentences.

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