How does it only take a year or so to speak/understand our first language but it’s so much harder to acquire another language?

Question

Like, we have a frame of reference (first language), so why is it so hard to learn another language after that?

In: Other

Answer 1

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.