i read almost no books throughout my entire education. the median number of books i have read per year in my life is probably literally zero, maybe one or two at most. i don’t feel like this substantially hurts my ability to do the things i care about. though tbc maybe this is a bad decision and i’m just incorrectly evaluating the counterfactual
Less bluntly: native language proficiency is one of the most obvious cases of, “you need to have started this at a very young age for it to have worked well,” and if you did then either you were goaded into doing so, or had an astounding amount of personal responsibility and interest in studying as a child
This is maybe offtopic to the thread, but I think the impression of language proficiency depends a lot on accent, and adults learning a foreign language don’t spend nearly enough time on accent. A few weeks of watching youtube videos in the target language, trying to imitate the sounds exactly right, is a small effort which will yield amazing results at any age. But for some reason adults don’t do it.
I think it is good and necessary for education to involve some amount of compulsory book reading.
i read almost no books throughout my entire education. the median number of books i have read per year in my life is probably literally zero, maybe one or two at most. i don’t feel like this substantially hurts my ability to do the things i care about. though tbc maybe this is a bad decision and i’m just incorrectly evaluating the counterfactual
who made you a polyglot?
Less bluntly: native language proficiency is one of the most obvious cases of, “you need to have started this at a very young age for it to have worked well,” and if you did then either you were goaded into doing so, or had an astounding amount of personal responsibility and interest in studying as a child
This is maybe offtopic to the thread, but I think the impression of language proficiency depends a lot on accent, and adults learning a foreign language don’t spend nearly enough time on accent. A few weeks of watching youtube videos in the target language, trying to imitate the sounds exactly right, is a small effort which will yield amazing results at any age. But for some reason adults don’t do it.
Because it feels low-status. Imitating sounds is what small children do.