Eli5: What causes babies/children able to learn their first language and become fluent a lot faster than learning a new language
In: 4
Learning a second language with a very different set of vocabulary rules is difficult, and most kids haven’t been taught/learned all the language rules for the first one yet, so they haven’t had years/decades of rules that get broken regularly anyway.
Babies have no choice.
People really over estimate how “good” kids are at learning a language.
The trick is that they have no other choice, if anything they suck just as much as anyone else, forgetting words and phrases for years and years.
But when you’re young and learning a language, it’s the only language you’re exposed to and your only option is to learn it to communicate. So they have to learn.
When you’re an adult, you are rarely in a situation where you are FORCED to learn a new language to communicate with no other options, human translators, translation apps, all exist and make it so you don’t really have to ever learn a new language.
But if you were dropped off in a foreign country with no resources and no options besides learning the new language to live, or starving and suffering and not being able to communicate, you would learn the new language basics in only a few months and be pretty fluent in a few years.
There’s actually a great example of this, there was a Spanish Missionary who was sailing in the Caribbean, got ship wrecked, and washed ashore and was rescued by Central Americans (can’t remember maya vs Aztec but one of the two).
With no other options, he learnt their language starting with just pointing at things, and in just a few years he could speak it fluently.
Then, I think it was two years later, the Spanish conquistadors show up, and since the natives had only ever seen one other white man, they brought the two together, and this Spanish missionary was able to translate for the conquistadors.
It takes something like 5-7 years for a child to learn a language from birth, then build out vocab from there.
Imagine we were able to teach adults in the same way children learn their first language:
Year 1: You are paired with two people who are charged with teaching you. They also take care of all living costs and cares. You spend probably 8 hours a day every day solely working on learning and repeating the basic sounds of the language. For a full year. Your personal tutors are with you at all times, or other delegated tutors.
Year 2: You are expected to start to learn basic vocab. This is after approximately 3000 hours of instruction in the language phonetics in Year 1. You are possibly placed with a group of other Year 2 language learners, all also being helped at home by similar tutors. Your teaching circle starts to work on basic vocab and more advanced phonics along with rudimentary verbs and grammar. You spend about 8 hours a day on this. For another year.
Years 3-5: You progress, with your class of similar language learners, to being tougher wider and wider vocab and more advanced language and phonics. Your primary tutor group is supplemented with additional professional tutors at “school” who aid your learning similarly. You are given many many opportunities each day to practice your language skills, with tutors available to correct and aid you with any difficulties, and lots of pairing with other language learners to practice your language skills together in a teaching environment. You do this 8-12 hours a day every day.
At the end of year 5 you have received approximately 15,000 to 20,000 hours of tuition, much of it is one-on-one and are expected to be mostly proficient, but with a lot of vocab development expected still, and are not expected to be able to read the language – that’s something you learn over the next 3-4 years.
If wager an adult put through that program would be pretty adept at whatever language was being taught.
Babies (and children generally) have a much easier time rewiring their brains to learn new stuff than adults do. It’s why we tend to teach so much at schools.
Are they faster though? Children spend years just listening before they can even communicate a thought and then they still spend many more years refining their use of language.
They hear the language they are learning ALL DAY and it still takes them years. Give yourself the same benefit (total immersion and time) and you will find yourself learning a second language soon enough.
That said, there are differences that do matter.
We have some reasons to believe that the language acquisition mechanisms are much more active during early ages, this might be related to plasticity of the brain or maybe be its own thing, but similar to other difficult to learn skills, a background in languages during a early age is a huge advantage later. (You can give your kid a good advantage in life by letting them watch their TV and kids shows in a target language, they won’t learn everything from just that but it will help a ton) if you speak more than one language then exposing children to both is also great. It might seem like the child is developing language slower at first, but they will grow up fluent in both and will not mix them up after they are mature enough to understand they are different.
As an adult, you can still pick up languages, but unless you have access to full immersion of the target language at all levels of mastery, it takes a mix of learning (concious, hard) and acquisition (subconcious, happens naturally through exposure)
I suggest you watch some of stephen krashen’s explanations of the natural approach to get a gist of the “acquisition” aspect of language, which should still be the largest part of your learning experience.
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