On my recent trip to Japan, I notice my memory is already going downhill. I have trouble remembering new Japanese vocab even after they have been repeated half a dozen times.

Learning any language requires it to have meaning - if you repeat words like a parrot it won't sink in in my opinion - but if you really want to learn of course you can.

i didn't get married until i was 31, and most of my friends, japanese and others, were the same age or older. get married when you meet someone that you want to get married to- that can be at any age- although i personally think the early 20s is a bit young, i know way too many people who married at that age and are now divorced.

I hope Japanese is different. I did learn (but not seriously at all) Japanese at 13-15 in high school. I still remember hiragana & katakana, have a vocab of a few hundred words. As I didn't take it seriously then, I have a hard time speaking grammatically correct simple sentences. I have a hard time understanding a question that is longer than 4-5 simple words. I am nervous as I probably have to start from scratch again.

i didn't get married until i was 31, and most of my friends, japanese and others, were the same age or older. get married when you meet someone that you want to get married to- that can be at any age- although i personally think the early 20s is a bit young, i know way too many people who married at that age and are now divorced.

i'm still learning japanese quite successfully in my mid 30s- perhaps it does get a bit harder, so what? if you stop using your brain now it's going to be an even faster downhill slide.

Kai-Tea: Yes, certainly. Well, maybe. If your goal is to become a translator in 6 years or so, you should absolutely be studying at least 2-3 hours a day, 7 days a week. Not necessarily in a class or with a tutor, though, since self-study can also be very effective and certainly very economical. Building even a decent fluency takes a lot of time and effort, no matter what your age is.

Similarly, Jenny, I think that your problems with listening and speaking Chinese have more to do with the large difference between Chinese and English, and less with not having started studying it seriously before 20. Studying on and off for 5 years and then 2 years abroad isn't really that much when it comes to languages not in the same language family with your mother tongue.

The research doesn't disagree that there is a golden age of language learning, but that ends already at 3-15 (depending on which study you look at), and that your overall mental skills start to deteriorate at your early twenties. Yet, there are plenty of people who've built excellent language skills at adult age, and even learning your mother tongue as a kid wasn't that easy. Just think about how long it took until you could properly write and speak the refined "adult language"...

You can often express yourself quite well with just a few words or phrases. Practice is needed but it can be done. Also, as I'm finding out, even native speakers make mistakes when they speak or write all the time. It's similar to being a bad speller in English.

Pronunciation is much easier than a tonal language like Chinese. I have studied Thai for almost 2 years and while Thai is a fun language, I have to really concentrate to while speaking to get all the tones right. It gets better with time but it�fs still a challenge.

I am 24, and personally wouldn't consider studying a foreign language at this age. But a lot of ppl have minimal probs learning a new language well after 24.

I studied Japanese during my first 2yrs in uni. During my 2nd year, I had to study at least 10h/wk to do well. Understanding a comic book is about my level now.