Why can’t adults learn languages like children?
In: Biology
Children are actually trash at learning languages. It took me like 3 years to say my first word and like 6 to start talking to other kids in a coherent way. Babies spend all their time just listening and absorbing their target language. Listening to the patterns and understanding what sounds are noise and what is language etc. Adults can do the same but it takes a huge commitment but there are people that have done it.
Now since you don’t have the free time of a baby you can use things like an SRS (Spaced repetition system), reading, writing, etc to help you learn faster. But many times if I tell someone everything to do to master a language in 2 years they think it’s too extreme when it’s exactly how children learn.
There are studies that suggest the human brain is wired at birth to be really good at learning languages, but as we grow older, that functionality goes away, even to the extent that we lose the ability to even perceive certain sounds if we don’t hear them spoken. I recall reading a study years ago that said the area of the brain tailored for language acquisition suffers a massive die-off of cells at around age two and another around age seven. However, more recent studies show the brain is able to easily learn languages until age 17 or so.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180501083830.htm
Personally, I am a native English speaker who learned Spanish and German quite easily as a teenager. Now that I am nearly 60, trying to learn Italian and Mandarin have proved far more difficult. I can really tell a difference in my aptitude. It’s still possible to learn languages at any age, but it’s usually a lot harder once your brain loses its youthful “plasticity.”
It might be very strange to take a minute or two to discover that ‘kids’ could learn faster than adults. Most sports have teams for kids and also teams for adults as well. It is very interesting to discover that in some cases, children learn very fast compared to adults who might also be learning the same thing. This [article](http://sportscoachuk.org/blog/how-do-kids-learn-faster-adults) gives a brief overview of how kids are able to learn faster in some cases than adults. Kids learn faster than adults because the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where working memory is stored, is more developed more in adults than children.
Due to the development of the prefrontal cortex, adults experience functional fixedness and that makes adults see everything exactly as it is. For instance, an adult will see a tennis racket exactly as it is. In contrast, a child will see a broomstick as a javelin stick. The creativity of children is caused by their prefrontal cortex, which gives them the ability to be flexible and inventive. Kids have minds that are designed to learn and adults have minds designed to perform.
It is very fascinating to discover that kids actually have the ability to be very creative and learn new things. This might be a great way to help kids develop their talents while they are still young. It might be the best option for a parent to make a child try different activities because it will help the child develop their abilities through creativity.
In addition to what other people are saying, adults are very rarely fully immersed in any 2nd language the way kids are.
Adults can choose where they live, who they marry, where they work, and which ways they socialize in their free time and very rarely do they choose to do more than 1 or 2 of those things in a 2nd language.
An adult who fully immerses themselves in a language for 5 years can come out of that speaking much better than a 5 year old kid would, they just rarely choose to do that.
If you learn something new, this must be stored in your brain (obviously). These memories are actually stored within the connections between your neurons: generally, a whole group of neurons become connected more strongly and this strengthened connectivity is your new memory.
Kids brains are much more plastic than those of adults, which means that the formation of new connected neuronal networks goes much faster and probably also includes more neurons as it would for adults. Thus, their brains just learn better and faster.
For languages specifically it also seems to be stored differently. If you learn multiple languages as a kid, each language is encoded within its own population of neurons, with only limited overlap. If you learn a new language as adult though, you cannot ‘claim’ a new population of neurons, so instead the language is encoded within the areas that also code for your already known languages.
Therefor, the kids can later keep the languages apart much better as people who learned it later can (I know this for a fact as I have to switch between dutch, german and english on a daily basis and fail miserably to keep the languages apart)
It’s because the brain is still developing throughout your childhood, when you’re an adult your brain is ‘finished’ and learning becomes harder. Imagine you’re building a castle or a mansion, while the framework is just being put up, if you want to add a new room you just put it in the plans and build it. But if you complete your castle, then adding a new room includes knocking out walls, adding supports and all the other things you gotta do to slap on an extra chunk of building
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