Language /
Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]
@Rich & Milo, all I'm saying is that twenty is bloody advanced to acquire something totally new, be it
a motor skill such as driving (most here learn by seventeen tops) or certainly a new language.
Sure it's done. It's done all the time. All I'm saying is that the younger, all the better for maximum success.
You were born in London, and so your English is obviously completely native, regardless of whatever
language was spoken at home. Rich was born in Poland, didn't even attend high school in a native English-
speaking environment. Naturally there's going to be second language interference in his English that will
probably last for the rest of his life.
My own grandfather arrived in this country at around twenty-one years of age, having never learned English
until arriving at Ellis Island from Germany. He had an accent you could cut with a machete. Meanwhile, his
children, my father, came to New York at age ten or thereabouts, surely not older, and spoke, wrote, and understood
English indistinguishably from a native-born American.
