There are kids under 10 who can fluently speak/understand more than two languages. Mind blowing to me.
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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.
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