Like, we have a frame of reference (first language), so why is it so hard to learn another language after that?
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If you spend every waking moment for ~three years straight in a total language immersion course, including one or more personal tutors who’ll spend hours a day working with you on everything from basic sounds to sentence structure you’ll be able to speak that language pretty damn well.
This is the environment most people learn their first language in. It’s a lot of work, but they have few responsibilities distracting them from it.
Different languages have different sounds, so if you were brought up with those sounds around you, you’re able to recognise and differentiate them more easily. For instance, English doesn’t have tongue rolling or the ‘ucht’ sound as the German language does, etc. So asking with a new language, you’re learning new sounds that aren’t usual for you.
It’s not about first vs second language chronologically speaking, it’s about what you were most exposed to by a certain age. Around age 8-10 there’s a part of our brain that basically turns off. This part of the brain is very closely associated with language learning, and is capable of learning via immersion alone, without studying rules or grammar or pronunciation.
If you are bilingual from birth you will basically be fluent in both languages, provided you don’t let any atrophy for a long period of time
Before the age of 12 our brains are basically just set up to take in communication to learn language no matter how many if you learn 5 languages under the age of 12 the language part of your brain would be like a nice bubble. If you learn a second language after 12 that language portion will have a little finger sticking out of the main language area. So once the Jell-O turns from liquid to solid your brain has a harder time making changes. But it doesn’t mean it’s impossible it just means it’s not as easy. Plus you have to remember that from the ages of 1 to 5 you didn’t really have much going on in your life besides trying to learn how to communicate. Add in social pressures of high school and peer pressure everything gets harder.
It isnt harder. But the belief that it is harder is enough to stop most people from trying. If someone really wanted to do it, and committed the same amount of time to their 2nd language as they did their 1st, there are many things we already know that we dont need to relearn. Things like language and grammar components. Sentences needing subjects and verbs. Most people dont actually want to learn Spanish in middle school, and not wanting to learn makes it much harder to learn.
There’s been a lot of study on this in linguistics and some incidental (and horrific abuse) experimentation performed on this. Like a child who has been locked in an attic for the entirety of their life by their parents and discovered by the authorities when they’re 12. The parents never spoke to the child, and that person lived out the rest of their life without any language. They could make sounds, but nothing intelligible. Another child, lost in the forest and raised by wolves, is recovered at the age of six and quickly picks up a full languages grammar and lexicon, so there’s real world, empirical evidence to support these theories of language acquisition, though not traditional experimentation because that would be monstrously immoral. Theres other stuff too, like a Caucasian kid brought up amongst the Xhosa can readily produce the click phonemes that make up Xhosa speech, but an eighteen year old brought in to the society has trouble with them.
Any language I’ve learned for a year, I will put my fluency against any one-year-old native speaker.
They might understand considerably more words than me, but I can tell jokes, form thoughts, make small-talk and say what noises animals make better than any fucking baby you throw at me.
The brain starts growing mylin, the native speaker kid is going to win every time over all but the most dedicated adult polyglots, but your title is phrased in a way that made me imagine doing a rap battle against a French baby.
I believe it is understood that in our early years we are developing very quickly, and during these years, we absorb new information a lot easier.
You can look up the tragic case of Genie, a little girl who was isolated by her parents when she was a child and eventually rescued when she was I believe 13 years old? Because of this isolation, Genie never developed even her first language very well as she had missed that crucial developmental window. And even with extensive care, her language understanding never truly caught up to what was expected of someone at her age (even at around the age of 30).
The details are vague, as I read about this case a long time ago, so please feel free to correct me on anything I got wrong.
That’s not necessarily true if you live in a multilingual environment. You can definitely pick up more than one language easily if you are regularly exposed to and compelled to regularly speak those languages from an early age. For example people in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Africa and parts of Europe like the Netherlands and Nordics tend to speak at least two languages because their societies places a premium on speaking more than one language.
I picked up English at 14, when my brain was still squishy and capable of learning.
It took me about 4 months before I felt comfortable having a full casual/social conversation and I was able to read a book and really understand what was being said. After 1 year, I started getting told that I had lost my accent altogether.
How? I spoke only english at home, only english at school, only english with my friends and I mostly played games with Americans on Ventrilo and TeamSpeak so I was forced to constantly think in english and put words into sentences.
Complete and total immersion.
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