Funny, in my own bygone days of taking language classes, the assumption tended to be that anyone who was obviously much better at it than the rest of the class had had some previous exposure (or a lot of previous exposure) to the language beforehand, and was for whatever reason taking a language class that was too easy for them.
Which goes right along with your idea—not only would we assume that the standout no more gifted in language acquisition than we were, we’d also assume that the standout was too lazy to do any more studying than we felt like doing ourselves.
Then again, in the vast majority of cases the hypothesis was true.
Funny, in my own bygone days of taking language classes, the assumption tended to be that anyone who was obviously much better at it than the rest of the class had had some previous exposure (or a lot of previous exposure) to the language beforehand, and was for whatever reason taking a language class that was too easy for them.
Which goes right along with your idea—not only would we assume that the standout no more gifted in language acquisition than we were, we’d also assume that the standout was too lazy to do any more studying than we felt like doing ourselves.
Then again, in the vast majority of cases the hypothesis was true.