I don’t think so. This looks like an empirical question—what do you mean by “extremely hard”? Any evidence?
I don’t know if anybody has ever studied this—I would be surprised if they had -, so I have only anecdotal evidence from the uncertainty I myself experience sometimes when choosing between “will”, “going to”, plain present, “will + progressive”, and present progressive, and from the testimony of other highly advanced L2 speakers I’ve talked to who feel the same way—while native speakers are usually not even aware that there is an issue here.
She speaks better English (with some accent, to be sure) in the usual sense—she has a rich vocabulary and doesn’t make many mistakes.
How exactly is “rich vocabulary” not high-status? (Also, are you sure it actually contains more non-technical lexemes and not just higher-status lexemes?) I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “mistakes”. Things that are ungrammatical in your idiolect of English?
While that is true, your claims weren’t about averages. Your claims were about impossibility—for anyone. An average person isn’t successful at anything, including second languages.
I actually made two claims. The one was that it’s not entirely clear that there aren’t any such in-principle impossibilities, though I admit that the case for them isn’t very strong. I will be very happy if you give me a reference surveying some research on this and saying that the empirical side is really settled and the linguists who still go on telling their students that it isn’t are just not up-to-date.
The second is that in any case, only the most exceptional L2 learners can in practice expect to ever achieve native-like fluency.
It seems you are talking about being self-conscious, not about language fluency.
I didn’t say it was about fluency. But I don’t think it’s about self-consciousness, either. Native speakers of a language pick the appropriate tense and aspect forms of verbs perfectly effortlessly—or how often do you hear a native speaker of English use a progressive in a case where it strikes you as inappropriate and you would say that they should really have used a plain tense here, for example?* - while for L2 speakers, it is generally pretty hard to grasp all the details of a language’s tense/aspect system.
*I’m choosing the progressive as an example because it’s easiest to describe, not because I think it’s a candidate for serious unacquirability. It’s known to be quite hard for native speakers of a language that has no aspect, but it’s certainly possible to get to a point where you don’t use the progressive wrongly essentially ever.
What possible mechanism do you have in mind?
For syntax, you would really need to be a strong Chomskian to expect any such things. For semantics, it seems to be a bit more plausible a priori: maybe as an adult, you have a hard time learning new ways of carving up the world?
Well, let’s get specific. Which test do you assert native speakers will pass and ESL people will not (except for the “most exceptional”)?
I don’t know of a pass/fail format test, but I expect reading speed and the speed of their speech to be lower in L2 speakers than in L1 speakers of comparable intelligence. I would also expect that if you measure cognitive load somehow, language processing in an L2 requires more of your capacity than processing your L1. I would also expect that the active vocabulary of L1 speakers is generally larger than that of an L2 speaker even if all the words in the L1 speaker’s active lexicon are in the L2 speaker’s passive vocabulary.
I don’t know if anybody has ever studied this—I would be surprised if they had -, so I have only anecdotal evidence from the uncertainty I myself experience sometimes when choosing between “will”, “going to”, plain present, “will + progressive”, and present progressive, and from the testimony of other highly advanced L2 speakers I’ve talked to who feel the same way—while native speakers are usually not even aware that there is an issue here.
How exactly is “rich vocabulary” not high-status? (Also, are you sure it actually contains more non-technical lexemes and not just higher-status lexemes?) I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “mistakes”. Things that are ungrammatical in your idiolect of English?
I actually made two claims. The one was that it’s not entirely clear that there aren’t any such in-principle impossibilities, though I admit that the case for them isn’t very strong. I will be very happy if you give me a reference surveying some research on this and saying that the empirical side is really settled and the linguists who still go on telling their students that it isn’t are just not up-to-date.
The second is that in any case, only the most exceptional L2 learners can in practice expect to ever achieve native-like fluency.
It seems you are talking about being self-conscious, not about language fluency.
Why in the world would there be “in-principle impossibilities”—where does this idea even come from? What possible mechanism do you have in mind?
Well, let’s get specific. Which test do you assert native speakers will pass and ESL people will not (except for the “most exceptional”)?
I didn’t say it was about fluency. But I don’t think it’s about self-consciousness, either. Native speakers of a language pick the appropriate tense and aspect forms of verbs perfectly effortlessly—or how often do you hear a native speaker of English use a progressive in a case where it strikes you as inappropriate and you would say that they should really have used a plain tense here, for example?* - while for L2 speakers, it is generally pretty hard to grasp all the details of a language’s tense/aspect system.
*I’m choosing the progressive as an example because it’s easiest to describe, not because I think it’s a candidate for serious unacquirability. It’s known to be quite hard for native speakers of a language that has no aspect, but it’s certainly possible to get to a point where you don’t use the progressive wrongly essentially ever.
For syntax, you would really need to be a strong Chomskian to expect any such things. For semantics, it seems to be a bit more plausible a priori: maybe as an adult, you have a hard time learning new ways of carving up the world?
I don’t know of a pass/fail format test, but I expect reading speed and the speed of their speech to be lower in L2 speakers than in L1 speakers of comparable intelligence. I would also expect that if you measure cognitive load somehow, language processing in an L2 requires more of your capacity than processing your L1. I would also expect that the active vocabulary of L1 speakers is generally larger than that of an L2 speaker even if all the words in the L1 speaker’s active lexicon are in the L2 speaker’s passive vocabulary.