Why can’t we learn languages just like babies learn their native languages, by listening and imitating the language without the help of other people
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We can. It’s just babies don’t have much else to do and you do. Plus you’re already used to figuring out shortcuts that can be used in lieu of true understanding, so you’ll get functional *enough* pretty quickly and then dramatically slow down because you don’t have much need for it.
Babies brains are special during the developing years which makes them better at learning like that. We can also do it, but very few try and it takes longer.
> Why can’t we learn languages just like babies learn their native languages, by listening and imitating the language without the help of other people.
Babies ABSOLUTELY have the help of other people. Sure, they don’t have a “language educator” drilling them with grammar exercises and whatnot, but they absolutely do have parents and grandparents interacting with them for years.
Grown-ups don’t have that luxury because few people have the time and money to drop everything and hire some native speakers to act like doting parents for months on end.
It takes a baby at least a couple of years of full immersion to become decently communicative. Adults actually can learn better than that with the right motivation. If you were thrown into a situation where no one spoke your language, you’d probably be decently fluent in their language after only a couple of months.
You can, it’s called an immersion method. It requires a lot of sacrifice though, you need to be communicating in the new language only. So doing anything requiring proper understanding is not possible for a longer while, and won’t work for many people who have to otherwise function and work.
Adding to the answers here: a huge part of learning is “discrimination”. That is, learning what rules of the world are *not* true.
As we grow older, we learn that painting a car red doesn’t make it drive any faster. If scientists discover a special red paint that makes cars actually drive faster, we have to spend extra time unlearning the rules we previously had.
With language, our brains quickly learn which sounds are considered normal and which are not. When learning a new language at an older age we have to overcome the “rules” from our native language which say only certain sounds are valid.
We not only have to learn the new language we have to overcome our native language rules.
Linguists disagree about the specifics of what kind of language faculty we are innately born with vs. what we learn via exposure to language as children; but for the sake of an ELI5 explanation, pretend that all humans are born with hundreds of language “muscles,” just like we’re born with physical muscles in the body. You might have an English muscle, a Spanish muscle, a Korean muscle, a Swahili muscle, etc. (There are other language acquisition models where the metaphor is more like, “you aren’t born with any muscles at all, but you’re born knowing how to *make* the muscles you need,” but that distinction doesn’t matter much here.)
Thinking about physical muscles, it might *seem* optimal for all of your muscles to be super strong all the time, but in reality your body has a limited amount of resources it can dedicate to growing your muscles, so it has to choose how to allocate those resources based on the kinds of activities you actually do. If you spend your entire life training as a marathon runner, your body will develop in a way that is optimal for running marathons. That doesn’t mean that you can’t later decide to also take up weightlifting; but if your body has been honed for distance running, you’re never going to be built the same way as somebody whose body has developed based on a lifetime of powerlifting.
The language acquisition faculty in your brain operates on the same general principle. Even though *we* might think it would be more convenient to be able to become fluent in any language at any time, a baby’s brain has a limited amount of resources it can dedicate to acquiring language, and it makes the choice to dedicate all of its resources to the language(s) it hears the most. If you spend your first year of life *only* ever hearing Arabic and French being spoken, your brain goes, “great, Arabic and French are the languages I need to be able to interact with the world,” and throws everything it has into being good at those languages. By the time you reach adulthood, you can still learn a new language to varying degrees of proficiency; but your brain has spent literally your entire life training to be an Olympic-caliber Arabic-and-French speaker, and it only has so many resources left over to become proficient in a new language as well.
Babies take literal years of doing *nothing but learning language* to learn one language. Adults can learn a new language in a couple of years while spending most of their time doing other things.
[There’s a Simpson Episode about this](https://youtu.be/CfsAH9HmQSA?si=-I7NTWrfbAIySCCZ). Bart goes to France and hears nothing but french for 2 months.
If you’d be thrown into foreign country and nobody spoke your language, I’d assume you pick the basics up really quick.
With success of the internet comes media in all languages, translators, etc. pretty much eliminating your desperate need to speak the language.
Fun fact. Adults (well most since there are plenty of stubborn dumbasses out there) are way better at learning than children. Most adults don’t put in the same time. If you made a child and an adult spend the same amount of time learning, adult would always be ahead.
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