This is from another thread.
This was what I was referring to. Do they vary greatly in efficiency? I don’t know.
On a more practical level, there are definitely some efficiency gains to be had not necessarily by choosing a technique per se, but rather by removing non-language time during your studies. For instance:
- Having a private tutor instead of a group class to avoid mindlessly waiting for your turn (to speak or for the rest of the students to finish an activity you already have finished or for the teacher to kick out the kid distracting everyone, etc.).
- Removing your non-language time of searching paper dictionaries or waiting for dictionary webpages to load (which adds up over the thousands of uses).
- Taking language learning serious enough to remove other distractions. Eg. Send your kids to their friend’s house during your study time.
If efficiency gains do vary greatly (do they?), would this be the major variable? That is, by removing non-language study. If efficiency of technique actually exists, does this explain the majority differences in efficiency? Is the main reason you learn your second L2 faster than your first L2 merely this simple, rather menial answer?
Or is it mainly that these Internet polyglots we are exposed to (selection bias) now have a larger basis for cognates? It’s common that they are Westerns learning more Western languages, such as Lydia. With Lydia’s mother tongue of Slovenian, she learnt English and German going through the formal education system. After that, all of her better auto-didactical languages are similar to languages she already knows - Spanish, French, Esperanto, Polish, Russian. This is definitely a factor to some extent.
There is also a serious survival bias in auto-didactic polyglots though - they are the people who have not given up.