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Originally Posted by steven
Wow, thanks for that breakdown. What you're saying makes a lot of sense to me.
However, I have a question about this:
"And there's pretty strong evidence for a point of no return as well; children who are never exposed to language at all and reach pre-teen age pretty much never learn to speak with normal clarity or use grammar correctly..."
By this do you mean that it's a point of no return for an L2 or a point of no return for language aquisition alltogether (as in an L1 is never completely formed)?
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He means for language in general. Google for "wild child" cases to see what happens.
But there's generally a point of no return for attaining native fluency in an L2 as well. You can get good, but not perfect. And eventually it will become pretty unrealistic to acquire it with any decent level as you age.
An 80 year old is not going to be able to attain fluency in a totally foreign language no matter how hard he tries.
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I agree with Columbine's notion that most courses are very "artificial". That's a very good way of putting it. No matter how good something looks on paper it's not a guarantee that it will work in the real world. Japanese courses seem to be a great example of that in my opinion.
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I think you all just have had terrible classroom experiences. My university traditionally produces very skilled speakers of Japanese. However, to be fair, there are some outside-the-classroom opportunities to move from conversant to fluent. The students who end up majoring in Japanese have traditionally tended to participate in these extracurricular opportunities.
Regardless, if you get As in my alma mater's Japanese classes, after four years you
will be conversant.