There are kids under 10 who can fluently speak/understand more than two languages. Mind blowing to me.
In: 9
Our brains change as we grow up. We have developmental periods where our brain is specifically good at learning certain things, and also just learning in general. E.g., if a child never encounters language, by the time they’re a certain age (idr the age, but say 8), they can never learn any language at all. They can pick up some words and stuff, but it just isn’t going to be possible to really get language.
Another fun fact, at birth we have the capacity to tell the difference between every phoneme (the unit of sound that makes up language, like the “ah” sound being different than the “oh” sound). But we lose the ability to detect the sounds we don’t hear as we grow up within the languages we hear. An example for English is that we differentiate L and R in our language, but in Japanese they’re not as differentiated. This is why some Japanese speakers learning English have difficulty pronouncing words with L or R in English.
To the native speaker, these phoneme differences “feel” like really obvious differences. But the truth is that the sound waves themselves are actually quite similar, and in fact many are connected along a continuum. It’s kinda like color. The wavelength of green is really close to the wavelength of cyan, but they simply look like “totally different” things, if you can see full color.
There are a lot of factors at play here, but two of the biggest are these:
1) Children, being children, are already approaching all language as something they still need to acquire and develop. Adults who grew up monolingual have had more time to approach language acquisition as something they did once when they were little but now no longer have to do. In other words, children are already used to language acquisition while monolingual adults are used to thinking that being an adult means no longer learning a language.
2) Generally speaking, it’s far more socially acceptable for children to learn languages than adults. Adults are expected to be proficient and competent in everyday settings, and people are less forgiving of adults struggling with a new language than they are of children, who are typically encouraged.
Adult learn most aspect of language faster than kid. They are just given a lot less resources. A kid get to play at home for years, while adults around them talk to them at appropriate level of difficulty, while patiently correcting them.
Kids, however, are better at a few things. Like picking up on the distinction between phonemes. This ability varies between individuals though.
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