how can babies/toddlers learn virtually any language on earth from easy ones such as spanish or english to hardcores like chinese or arab? Why is it so difficult when you are an adult?
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There’s a whole field of study around this but the short answer is we don’t really know but we have a few ideas. Linguists don’t kill me but here’s my best attempt at an oversimplified layman’s overview:
1. Babies in general are wired to pick up certain sensory inputs at certain ages. Anyone who’s had kids can attest to how their baby suddenly seemed to notice light / food / colours / textures / etc right at certain milestones. Their brains are probably set up to pick up linguistic input in stages too.
2. The evidence we do have shows that adult brains are wired to pick up linguistic input but mostly in the form of new vocabulary, not phonology (pronunciation) or syntax (grammar). That’s why your vocab suddenly gets more complex in adolescence and continues to develop throughout your life, but learning how to speak full sentences in a new language is hard.
3. Evidence also shows that adults who do learn new languages do it best through full immersion. That is — moving to a new country, consuming all your news, entertainment, social and work life, etc through that language. As needs must. If you think about it this is exactly what babies do. They don’t take a 2 hour English class every Tuesday evening. They are living in a 24 hour English class, and even then they don’t get super fluent until after about three years.
If you’re really interested in this subject you can deep-dive ad nauseam, but that’s my best summary 🙂
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