I know our brains are trained in a certain way from childhood, but could someone elaborate? It seems physically impossible yet it is very much possible
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As u/0rangy put it.. at birth we can produce more sounds but as we develop language we lose this because they are simply unnecessary.
You want to see proof of it in action? Find children who grew up bilingual since birth and see how they speak the multiple languages they know.
My Ex is Chinese and despite speaking English for over 20 years still has a very clear “Chinese” accent. It doesn’t lake long for anyone speaking with her to realize she’s not a native English speaker.. In fact you can quickly guess what her “native” language is because of how she pronounces certain sounds. No amount of “practice” seems to be able to overcome this as an adult.
The kids are bilingual and when they speak English or Mandarin you would be hard pressed to tell they speak another language.
Once at the Beijing airport my young daughter was bored and shy talking to me in English while a young boy played near by. I encouraged her to play with the young boy and the mother heard us talking and asked the boy to come over.
My daughter then switched to mandarin to speak with the boy and the mother was SHOCKED because while she was speaking English it was unclear she spoke mandarin at all. The woman told me that not only is her mandarin perfect, she can even tell me what province she is from as she has an accent from that area. The real kicker is they grew up in North America, they got the accent from their mother.
The brains of children are simply amazing..
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