Only online (written) and a very occasional call back to the states to my parents or friends. All my communication on a daily basis was 100% Spanish. I definitely qualified as immersed. Enough that when I'd visit the United States once or twice a year, it'd literally take a couple of days to get used to speaking English again--I'd have a conversation and start speaking Spanish until someone let me know I wasn't speaking English. And even today, after living back in the U.S. for a year, I have to re-read what I write because sometimes I write something in English that is syntaxically Spanish and has to be fixed.



The difference between the errors made by a 10-year old Mexican and me after 10 years in Mexico go beyond just "sounding funny." Like I said, it's the little grammar errors that a child leaves behind but an adult that learned the language may well fumble pretty much forever.





You're misunderstanding the differences that I'm talking about. Our English might be different, but one isn't right and the other wrong. They are different styles. That's most definitely not what I'm talking about.



Fair enough. Maybe 10 years isn't enough years to make the case, and measuring a child's time-to-learn from day zero probably isn't reasonable either. But I know for a fact that a 20-year old Mexican speaks better Spanish than someone that learned it as an adult and has been speaking it for 20 years. It's entirely possible the adult knows more vocabulary, but that doesn't mean he speaks Spanish better than the Mexican.



That's kind of a pointless point. Earlier in your message you said that how each person "sounded" wasn't important. Now you seem to be making the case that I (and Mexicans) don't speak Spanish because we speak it differently than in Spain. Whatever.



You're thinking of exceptions rather than rules. In the case of exceptions such as George Burns, I'll grant that other parts of his body deteriorated faster than his mind, but I seriously doubt Burns was as mentally agile the day he died than he was at 30. I don't have evidence to support that, but I believe it is logical to believe it.



That's a fact of life. Hopefully I will be faced with it. That said, I don't think older people are "feeble-minded." Many are very sharp. But I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of them were even sharper when they were younger. Obviously not as knowledgeable, but more agile.



Like I said, I used it for 2 or 3 years until March of last year and it was the only thing I used on my desktop. Linux is the only thing I'd use on a server, but it's not ready for my desktop--and I feel that the 2-3 years I gave it was a reasonable effort. When I went back to Windows, I was just overwhelmed by how things just work. That doesn't mean I like Windows and, believe me, I'd love to use Linux instead. But after 2-3 years, it was still a drain on my productivity.

When that changes, I expect to go back to Linux; unless I've moved to a Mac. I can't imagine myself doing that, but I know some people that couldn't imagine themselves doing that and now they're using the Mac and lovin' it.

Regards,
Craig Steiner