Lvxferre

Fun fact: strawberry was admitted to the psychiatric yard once pepper and cucumber joined the berry club.

Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it’s all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.

The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn’t, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.

Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I’d be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You’ll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.

And then when you do show them a license in Spanish:

• “Nope, we don’t accept licenses in español, only in castellano”
• “Che, here’s your bloody license in cahteʃano”
• “Nope. It needs to be in casteyano”
• “Sos boludo?”
• “Sos? LALALA NOT LISTENING TO YOUR VOSEO LALALA”

Then they eventually give Spanish up, because there’s too big of a chance that people will actually show them a license in Spanish regardless of the arbitrary restrictions that they might put. They go for Majorcan instead. No, licenses in Catalan or Valencian are not to be accepted, they must be in Majorcan and only Majorcan. As they learned from German tourists: “zi us ploi, full una zeaveza”. (They also buried some clauses 30m deep in the sand. A good thing that they didn’t need to dig the holes, the tourists did it for them.)

But there’s still some chance that someone might enforce copyleft against them, so they stick to Portuguese instead. It must be spoken loudly, and you need to use the right rhotic. They never say which, but no matter which you use you’re doing it wrong, be it [ɾ ɹ ɻ r h x χ ʁ ʀ ɣ], you’re doing it wrong and thus you can’t enforce it.

And at the end of the day they switch back to English, and then they start “ackshyually” to prove that the free license was actually costless (free as in free beer), not unchained (free as in free speech).

Specifically about generative bots: the bots themselves are no threat. And they would be still no threat, even if they worked far better or far worse than they do - because they simply output text. The actual threat is some bloody irrational (assumptive, gullible, oversimplifying) individuals in positions of power might get really lazy, use the output for decision making, harm people with their idiotic decision, and then blame the tool for what was ultimately their decision. But frankly? This sort of trashy individual has been a plague to humankind since the dawn of time, with or without large language models.