There's No Speed Limit (2009)

I am interested in languages and have learned a few. It takes time to learn a language. When asked how much time, one can look at the estimates from the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center on how long it takes to become proficient in a language, starting from an English-speaking background.

Those estimates sound reasonable and make sense. Then you travel the world and see people learning languages much faster, and others never learning.

I was listening to the audiobook of the book "The Empire of the Summer Moon", and it was reported that Bianca “Banc” Babb (age 10, to be fair), learned the "[she] learned the [Comanche] language quickly and so well that, after only seven months of captivity (which she believed was two years), it was hard for her to “get my tongue twisted back so I could talk English again to my folk and my friends.”

She was 10, and we know that the ability to acquire languages decreases with age, at least until puberty. But she was not a 3-year-old kid, and we would expect a 10-year-old to take longer to pick up a language so different than the one she was using up to that time.

As we know, there is huge variability in aptitude; nothing surprising there. But there is also variability in confidence in oneself, and there is variability in trying to be better as quickly as possible, using our aptitudes and confidence and effort to their full extent.

So, instead of saying, on average it takes x time to do this, when there are no physical/physiological limits involved, we should strive, if we want, if our interests and needs are there, to see how fast we can go, instead of accepting the average as our destiny manifested.

(2009). Previous discussions:

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