This blog post from Hacking Chinese touches upon something I feel very strongly - learning languages as an adult. Yes, certain things are harder than they were as a kid but on the other side of the coin as an adult one know so much more about the world.

@tkoola Good article. Re pronunciation though: as adults we’ve had years or decades of placing our tongue and lips and mouth in particular patterns, so we have well-developed muscle memory. It's very hard for us to make the sometimes small changes to match another language. Plus we hear what we want to hear rather than necessarily what is there to be heard. Our brains like to match what we hear to what we already know so we don't always hear sounds accurately in order to mimic them.

@Miraz Yes, we have these kind of fossilized patterns that take a lot of work to break (oh, man these Russian sounds that we only have letter “s" for in Finnish are hard for me), and we don't have the time to repeat endlessly before we get it right. It takes repetition, repetition, recording yourself, native teacher, yet more repetitions 😀

@tkoola Thank you for sharing the link! I've read similar remarks by other people, often in Reddit discussions about being too hard on yourself for not speaking a language perfectly after however many years. While children acquire good pronunciation way faster than adults, they do also have the advantage of seeming amazing at a language just because our expectations of them are much lower :)