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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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.
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