Nearly every adult who books a first lesson says a version of the same sentence: I think I left it too late. It is worth separating what research actually shows from what people assume it shows.
What genuinely gets harder
- Accent. This is the real one. Acquiring a native-sounding accent gets substantially harder after adolescence. You can get to clear, pleasant and easily understood at any age. Indistinguishable from a Roman is unlikely, and does not matter.
- Raw memorisation speed. A teenager will absorb a vocabulary list faster. An adult compensates with better strategy, because you know how you learn.
- Tolerance for sounding foolish. Not a cognitive limit, a social one, and the single biggest brake on adult progress. Children are not better at languages; they are just less embarrassed.
What does not get harder
Grammar. Reading. Listening comprehension. Vocabulary size. Pattern recognition. The ability to hold a conversation. In several of these adults outperform children outright, and reach a functional level faster, because you already understand what a subjunctive is for.
Children are not better at learning languages. They are just given ten years, a hundred hours a week, and no fear of being wrong.
The advantages nobody lists
- A large first-language vocabulary. English is full of Latin. Necessario, importante, difficile, considerare — you already know thousands of Italian words and have not noticed.
- Knowing how you learn. You know whether you need to write things down, whether you learn from film or from lists, whether mornings work.
- Choosing it. Nobody enrolled you. Motivation is the best predictor of outcome in language learning, and adults who choose this have it.
- Time you control. Especially true after retirement, which is why retired students are often our most consistent.
What to do differently as an adult
Front-load speaking, even when it is uncomfortable, because that is the skill your age puts at risk and the one you actually want. Ask for the explanation, since unlike a child you can use it. And accept a clear, confident foreign accent as the goal, rather than an imitation. Italians do not mind your accent. They mind being spoken to in English.