At what age do you think people should start studying a language? Why?
At what age do you think people should start studying a language? Why?
14 Answers
The best time is when your desire to learn is as great as the need to learn.
Combine that with a strong will, and a determination to succeed, and the age
that you are will be irrelevant. 
I suppose you are looking for a specific age but I can't give you one. The best time to study a new language is when you have a great deal of desire to do so.
Children don't learn faster than adults; that's a myth. But there are many reasons why they are much more successful than most adults:
1) In the first year of their lives, babies' brains focus on the sounds they hear, and literally prune away all connections involving all other sounds "they don't need", so later in life, they are almost deaf to them. Adults do hear all sounds, as fMRI scans show, but their brain treat the foreign ones as unimportant, and doesn't focus on them. Thus, training your ears to discriminate these sounds, although is possible, it requires adequate training and time.
2) Children learn without questioning or over-analysing languages, so the brain effectively induces the grammatical rules. Grammar in your native language is processed with the left hemisphere of the brain, where it works fast, but unconsciously. Adults learn in a different way, recruiting a much larger portion of the brain, especially on the right side. This cumbersome method is too analytical, and since it over-process, is too slow an ineffective... but conscious. Comparing your language and grammar with the other one, or attempt to translate in real time saturates the brain, which has to use every available resource to cope with all the demands. It is not efficient, and it slows down learning.
3) Children learn full time: eight, ten or twelve hours per day, with patient adults repeating the same sentences at slow motion over and over again, singing the same songs and rhymes over and over, with plenty of help from body language, always providing meaningful context. They get to hear hundred of thousands of correct sentences before they start producing their first words, and they always start with basic -if not incorrect- grammar, improving and trying more complex without rushing or external pressure. Adults generally learn a few hours a week, at most, without repeating endlessly the same words, without anyone who talks to them like children, without a context, and they rush to produce their own sentences before they've heard enough correct ones, so they start building up bad habits before they know what the language is really like.
4) And most importantly: learning can be severely impaired under stress. The brain blocks the memory and you just don't learn. If you lack confidence about your ability to speak, if you think your pronunciation is bad, if you are afraid of making mistakes... your will not learn, or you'll do it very bad and extremely slow. Children couldn't care less about making mistakes or looking like fools saying nonsense words; they are relaxed, so they learn fast.
Adults are not less capable (except maybe in terms of hearing); they learn the wrong way.
I think this answers the question.
Best time?
Now - it is never too late - or too early.
Do you mean learning as when a child learns a language almost as if by the process of osmosis: soaking it up like a sponge? Or do you mean through a more formal approach to learning?
If you mean the first: I would say as soon as possible! Children begin learning their native language from birth through interaction with their parents and close family .
If you mean learning through a teacher I know of effective after school clubs where children as young as 5 enjoy learning a second language using counting songs, and games and other enjoyable methods.Some parents even enroll their children in pre-school /nursery groups using the immersion approach where everything is spoken using the new, target language. This happens in Canada where children learn French from as young as 3 years old.
Ideally, the younger you can learn a second language the easier the experience is likely to be and the shorter the length of time to reach fluency providing the young person is instructed by a native teacher.The process usually takes longer as an adult .
I began Spanish lessons with a native Spaniard from Barcelona when I was ten years of age I wish I could have started earlier.I had a strong motivation to learn Spanish: the language of the country of my birth, which is vital As Fatcho said above the desire has to be present to learn a second language.
I hope that helps 
From birth because that's when you learn the fastest and the easiest. If your parents speak, say, Spanish and English to you from your birth, then it will be much easier for you to become fluent in both those languages.
Well, irregardless of what maybe said, my children will learn English & Spanish from birth. I want my home to be a bilingual household.
From personal experience - As early as possible. I learned English from the age of 2, having arrived in the USA with my parents as refugees from Hungary. I don't remember learning English -- I just remember speaking with my neighbor playmates at age 4, in English, with perfect fluency. At that age, it's not learning - it's soaking up.
I was unaware that I knew two languages until well into my first year of public school. I had assumed that everybody else went home like I did and spoke to their parents differently, just like I did. I was shocked to discover a friend's mother actually spoke like my first grade teacher (in English!) 
I say from birth. Although, the more languages that the parents speak, the more confused the child gets (I began speaking at the age of two). If you mean by lessons and studying, I also say earlier before the grammar of your first language makes it hard to grasp another language's structure.
Studying? 23 Learning? 0
Language classes in schools are the biggest jokes ever. Kids learn in 3 years what an adult can learn in 3 months. Adults enjoy it. Adults are motivated. Adults know why they're doing it. I teach children and adults English, you should see the difference between the books! The beginner's adult books have about 300 pages and get you from A1 to A2 in a year by themselves. (You can go faster if you study a lot at home as well) The children's books have about 100 pages and get you from A1 to A2 in about 5 years! It's a waste of their time and mine. (Of course some children progress faster than this, but it's because of what their parents do with them at home.)
The way to do it is to have all the subjects taught in a second language except for English. This is the way it's done in Gaelscoils (Irish language schools) in Ireland and the kids that go there are fully bilingual in a very short time. And no, their standard of English isn't any lower because they are surrounded by it in the rest of their lives. In fact kids from Gaelscoils routinely do better in all subjects (though I can't be sure exactly why this is)
Having said that, I did learn Irish the traditional way for 17 years (where you study grammar, never speak, and hate every second of it) and while it didn't leave me able to speak any Irish or understand much, I find things like conjugations a lot easier to learn than people I know who didn't study a second language as children. Learning something like "in this language you pronounce P like an R and B like a V" isn't really a problem for my brain, it happens very quickly. I know this is because I learned 2 different ways of pronouncing the Roman alphabet as a child. (Though swapping an English sounding R to a Russian sounding R isn't easy at all!)
I think anyone can start learning a language anytime they think is right for them...as long as you are the one that decide to learn then you won't have a problem with coping. age is not a problem if you were not forced.
Children don't learn faster than adults
The rate at which people learn diminishes with age, not just for language, but for everything. For many things, this is counterbalanced by having more prior knowledge--in fact, learning some things requires so much prior knowledge that they are not taught until graduate school. Children also have to learn a lot of other things that adults hopefully already know--this is offset by adults having more responsibilities.
I saw a program on television about this. I cannot remember specific ages, although our brains are actually wired to learn a language from birth, and as we learn, we re route the connections making it ever harder to learn a new language.
That being said, like the other posters here, desire can make it easier. Also at some age our brains begin to function less well in general. I notice my short term memory is not as good as it once was.
I guess I would say, the earlier the better, yet it is never too late.
Most people who start learning a language after the age of 12 never make the sounds correctly. I've known people who moved to the US in their teens and started learning English right away that still had accents 40 years later that immediately identified them as non-native speakers.
