What is your opinion based on ? Seems like you’ve just decided 40 based on picking it out of thin air. Why is 40 any different to 25 ?
First, I want to say sorry for your family member. I’ve lost my father and the father of my daughter in the past two years, and I understand the problems of serious health issues. I hope what you do will help. Helping a close family member can be very satisfactory.
What you should consider in your decision is which material you can easily get back again if you ever want to. I’ve the problem of limited space too. But I found that a lot of books and language material is available at our public library or as an eBook. Audios are also available as mp3 files. Digital data doesn’t need much space 
I’m sorry to hear you’ve lost people 
It’s very true about MP3s being so much more practical. In recent years I actually did digitise almost all of my audio, so that tapes, CDs and some records (in the case of older Linguaphone courses) which take up maybe a whole square metre of space are now stored on one tiny USB memory stick (well, two including a backup!) But the books, still remain…
“…why is 40 any different to 25?..”
In truth there are other issues too (which I wont go into.)
But I do think age is a real factor for most folks (leaving aside evergreen silver fox learners like Steve K, of course.) There’s a reason why athletes generally retire from top competitions at about 35. There’s a reason why the military retires front line infantry at 39. The older we get, the less inclined we are to stand up and fight - which is what I’ve always had to do to master complex grammar and learn copious amounts of words, etc.
Whenever I hear people moaning about how they are getting old and acting like life is over, which I hear people do at ages like 30, 25, and even 18yo who smoke cigs, with a bored expression and talk as if they’re a veteran, who has seen everything, I think of our dear rational optimist Steve in his 70s, racing around in the hockey rink like a 10yo and killing language after language.
Although I second the opinion that a ritualistic shedding of superfluous stuff is a good spiritual cleansing.
Best whishes for your relative Prinz!
Athletes and military, ok, but language learning is a purely mental activity (yeah, speaking needs some negligible physical input), but have a look at this: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/laureates_ages/all_ages.html
Even though it’s a long way to correlate the average age of nobel prize laureates to the age of potential peak brain capacity/ability, I think there is some connection. We get smarter as we age:) (at least until 60-64)
I mean, the last thing I want to do here is discourage anyone who is a little older from learning a hard language. Sure there are guys like Steve Kaufmann who have learned their first Slavic language at age 65 or whatever - it can be done. So if that’s what someone wants to do, if they are motivated - go for it!
I’m just speaking for myself here. When I was in my 20s languages were a real passion for me. That sounds like an easy cliche - but I was literally the student who would just as soon stay at home and read ‘Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage’ as go out carousing girls, etc. But then again, when I was a young man girls came to me! 
(Again, I’m only half kidding here, BTW.)
Some of us need to move on, need to refocus. I should have realised this when I was 30, in fact.
I’m not saying I want to go monolingual, or anything! I want to go on reading German as long as I live. I want to build up Italian. I may want to learn another Germanic or Romance language at some stage. I may want to learn some more Greek and/or Hebrew. But beyond that, nope, for me it’s a pointless distraction. It is indeed (as King Solomon might have said) a vanity.
Sure. But I think mental energy and drive decline too - for many people at least.
I mean, what about professional snooker players? Snooker isn’t exactly a physical activity. But past titans of the game like Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry, etc…they all faded drastically after turning 40. I think someone once said, to be a top world class snooker player you need to spend many hours every single day at the practise table. Youngsters with talent and ambition have the fanatical drive and determination to do this. But there comes a point in life where people say “why the bankety-blank am I actually DOING this?”
Maybe it’s similar with language learning too? At least for some people (like me) there comes a point where I have to have a darned good answer to the question “why?” if I am going to put myself through hours of intense study, etc.
EDIT
I guess some non-British readers have never even heard of snooker? Millions of people in the UK stayed up very late to watch the conclusion of this epic encounter!
We are, I suppose, a strange people
Your post makes me remember this beautiful song. Thanks
Lyrics
Even when everything asks for a little more calm
Even when the body asks for a little more soul
Life does not stop
As time accelerates and hurries
I refuse, I make time, I go in the waltz
The life is so rare
While everyone waits for the cure of evil
And madness pretends that everything is normal
I pretend to have patience.
The world is spinning faster and faster
We wait for the world and the world expects us
A little more patience
Is it time you need to realize?
Do we have this time to lose?
And who wants to know?
Life is so rare so rare
Even if everything asks for a little more calm
Even when the body asks for a little more soul
I know life does not stop life does not stop
Is it time you need to realize?
Do we have these time to lose?
And who wants to know?
The life is so rare
So rare
So rare
The life is so rare
I do know snooker and when I was 10-15 I was watching it on eurosport quite often:) I believe it’s more of a physical activity than language learning and what you described (why?) has to do more with your motivation than actual ability or age. That’s all ok of course, you will probably find sth else that will drive you
It would be “Life is so strange / Life is such a curious thing” , rare just means infrequent
Tighter time constraints, decreasing motivation, progressive disease, substance abuse - just some of the many reasons why an older person might have difficulty learning a language compared to herself at a younger age. But old age in and of itself has little if anything to do with it imo. Is my mind a little less sharp? My memory not quite as good? Possibly, but this is negligible.
Great post, I dropped a lot of languages projects due to basic practicality (time consuming) and focused on those languages that I actually use in my daily life (only 4, excluding my native English). Language learning is extremely time consuming and a lot of passion, patience and perseverance is required. Funny story but when I stopped learning new languages, I for the first time in 15 years read a book in English…felt strange but enjoyable since I was able to read it at lightning speed:rofl:
. Best of luck with whatever curve ball life has thrown your way:call_me_hand:.
One interesting thing about sorting through and reviewing my collection of old language courses is to see how the older editions are almost invariably superior to the newer ones. It almost feels like a cliche to say it, but I’m convinced it’s true - and across a whole range of different publishers too.
Are people getting dumber? Are people today naively looking for a (non existent) quick fix?
Or maybe it was always the case that most people aren’t terribly serious learners? Perhaps most people are only looking for souped up phrase books, and the publishers have merely gotten wise to this fact?
For my part, I sure wish someone would make updated yet non dumbed-down versions of the stuff being put out by Assimil and Linguahone in the 1970s…
(Saying that, I do love the older editions. The 1971 first edition of Linguaphone French, for example, has illustrations which are wonderfully evocative of France in the late 1960s or early 1970s.)
I totally agree with you. Just yesterday I was listening to my favourite hard rock bands Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. Suddenly it dawned on me that the singers were so young at time of recording their world famous hits. Stairway to heaven - Robet Plant 23 years old. Child in time - Ian Gillan 25 years old. This is so amazing! And then I’m watching a video of a vocal coach, somewhere in his forties, who teaches how to sing hard rock songs, and while he is definitely musically gifted as well and has years (decades) of musical training behind him, still he can’t match the youngsters.
As you said, young people can have a fanatical drive. It all starts with a dream - I want to be a world famous singer / snooker player / polyglot and then there’s a full and mad devotion to realizing it. Maybe the problem with adults is that they refuse those dreams right off the bat. We calculate too much. When I was younger I wanted to become a famous guitarist so I practiced all days long. If I started a new hobby now, I simply could not create such a determination, because I would rationalize that dream.
And then there is this matter of time … how much time can you devote to a hobby as an adult? Probably enough to feel a good progress. However, you just can’t beat youngsters in terms of length of free time.
Victor Davis Hanson somewhere describes how at the start of each year he used to time students reading a passage out loud. He would then adjust downward the amount of reading he assigned. That was in California, so there was some outside unfluence, but I think there is a good case to be made that we’re transitioning back to a more oral culture. Certainly a 3 hour podcast is easier for many people to fit into their day.
But old books are great, I still have my Soviet era Russian for Everybody and an earlier edition of Political Russian that Steve rightly complains about in one of his videos. I love them for the snapshots that they are, now that I know what is in them.
No, but the focus is on selling units, not making a good product.
Marketing, sales analytics, all sorts of device are used to make an eye catching, psychologically satisfying purchase
“8 minute french”
“Fluent German in 3 months”.
“Learn to speak right away”
“Master Russian Grammar in 5 minutes a day, using this program”.
If you go to a big book seller, that’s the majority of the stuff you see on the shelves these days.
I don’t know if it’s the same in the US, but one thing I’ve noticed about big chain bookstores here in Britain is that the whole volume and range of stuff they carry has markedly decreased across all subject areas - and that goes for their larger branches too. I’m guessing it’s the “Amazon effect” or something?
I remember when I was in my 20s I would quite often go into Waterstones of Bath (Waterstones is kind of like Barnes and Noble in the America, BTW) and they had a truly humungous range of language courses, dictionaries, foreign literature, and the like, taking up a whole wall down at basement level. I remember even seeing resources for relatively minor and obscure languages. The last time I was in that store, about 6 months ago, I was mildly sad to see that they had just a small fraction of stuff - mostly for French, Spanish and German.
(I still didn’t come out of there empty handed though! Ho hum.)
Probably just as well you never got to Toronto’s ‘World’s Biggest Bookstore’. It was finally shut down a few years ago, but it was quite something to wander about in.
I find I can come out of most chain stores empty handed, it was a odd little second hand store in Hastings I couldn’t get out of. Otherwise its amazom, indigo online and abebooks
for me.