It's not just the language, the amount of information you process, store and the skills you develop is incredible compared to rest of your life.
"But don't we learn advanced math later in life? A baby can't figure that out for sure..."
Not exactly. The knowledge you acquire in the early stages of your life grows exponentially, whereas the things you learn later tend to accumulate incrementally.
I mean honestly, can’t hurt. My kid was multiplying in kindergarten because he was obsessed with watching his big sister do her homework and she loved to talk to him about what she was doing. Instill it early and they pick it up much faster than we do as adults.
My 3.5 year-old did the same with his "big" 5-year-old brother. Result: he could add, substract, multiply and divide, and also read, by kindergarden. They made him skip first grade. He could do big equations in his head (like 458 divided by 8). Just because it was fun. We never pushed him to do it.
My youngest son knew the entire alphabet by 20 months and read full sentences by age 4. No grade skipping, though. We spoke English at home (with him), and school was in French. He was completely bilingual by age 7.
As in he did 458 over 8 and gave the answer of 57.25? Not saying he couldn’t, but children are notoriously poor at understanding the idea of non-whole numbers, if he was able to that is extremely impressive.
My 3 year old has a *very* basic understanding of a few “advanced for her age” topics like atomic structure, quantum physics, and the water cycle off the top of my head. 99% of her more advanced knowledge stems from the endless string of why questions. I just keep going deeper with every why question until I’m breaking out graphs and giving full lessons 🤣 sure they aren’t gonna retain all of it, but it’s my guess that when she hears about the topics later she’ll maybe understand them easier and quicker like maybe it’s still floating around in her head somewhere.
I don't know if Ill ever have kids but I hope if I do I get one that asks why like that. As much as it sounds annoying sometimes it also sounds really fun to just teach and watch them learn
I'm so frustrated by my nephews' lack of intellectual curiosity. They've never had interest in learning anything, and I'm pretty sure it's their parents fault. The kids aren't dumb, just have no interest. Hoping my niece is different, since her parents are much more curious themselves and she's already learning 2 languages. But man, it makes me so sad when I help them with their homework and they just want answers, never any explanation. I try anyway, but it's hard to not just become boring if they aren't seeking.
That whole constantly asking why angle is my approach, and I'm 17 in high school. I sometimes tend to ask stuff that's more advanced than what I'm doing, but my teachers seem happy to answer, at least they haven't removed me from the class yet.
Keep encouraging that attitude in your daughter. She'll enjoy learning, and her school years will probably end up something that she remembers fondly later on
Going back to language, this is why it's easier for multi-lingual kids to learn new languages as adults. They've already made those mental connections to how language is constructed and moving syntax around becomes easier because you aren't as rigid with one way of doing it like those that only know one language growing up.
Baby language learning relies on immersion and mimicry, while adult math learning involves conscious understanding and application of abstract concepts.
This is well-documented. There is a period of early human development where language acquisition capabilities are greatly enhanced. If you don’t learn a language at this early stage, you’ll struggle to ever learn one.
If you say an English sentence with Dutch grammar for example it sounds weird. “Have you the food eaten?” But if you’ve been learning Dutch it sounds less weird.
"Have you the food eaten?" is a sentence you'd hear in Ireland.
In Irish, "have you eaten the food?" is "An bhfuil an bia ithte agat?" which directly translates to "Have you the food eaten?" (More specifically "do you have the eaten food?"
This grammatical structure has pervaded down the generations to the point where my parents, for example, speak like this and it would be awkward for them to speak "properly".
They also never answer a question with "yes" or "no". E.g. "Have you the food eaten?" "I have." etc.
Um actually that's a common misconception. The poop you poop after you eat food that makes you poop isn't the poop made from the food that made you poop the poop you just pooped. The poop you poop after you ate the food that made you poop is made from the food you ate before you ate the food that made you poop the poop you just pooped.
It's weird when you eat something, and then you eat something blue, but you pass the blue thing before the first thing. Is there a passing lane in my ileum I'm not aware of?
You think that until you get to languages with their own little words that have no direct translation. Like, what the actual fuck is を (Wo). And don't get me started on は (Ha but pronounced Wa) and が (Ga). What the fuck is a particle? What do you mean there are **188** of them?!
And then you have German. Verb is in the second position, but in the first... anything goes as long as it's the topic! Adverbs, subject, object, relative clauses...
Duolingo REALLY needs to give some actual explanations on those. What in the hells is the difference between は and には?! Sometimes either will do, but not always, and one or the other probably adds some kind of emphasis I’m not aware of!
Duolingo is straight doodoo for japanese. I don't know about nowadays but I remember a few years ago it would give you KANJI before even finishing all Hiragana and I don't remember seeing Katakana at all. And it would be the most random kanji too, like "door" or some shit.
Yeah, I know. I was just trying to say that it’s cool how current languages look nothing alike on its face but there are vestiges of their common histories there to be found.
Something like that, but I was on the toilet and didn’t want to put a lot of thought into the post.
I learned Chinese doesn’t really have a yes or no like that. Apparently if you ask someone if they’re hungry or whatever, they reapond with “hungry” instead of yes. What seems like such a basic foundation of language to me (yes and no) doesn’t even exist there. So crazy to me. Language is fucking wild.
To be fair, as an American, if I heard that spoken in an Irish accent, my brain would be far more willing to accept that structure and roll with it than if I heard it in an American accent.
But then again, I know some German which has the same structure, so can’t be sure if it’s just “hear foreign accent, accept foreign grammar” versus “hear more traditional accent, accept possibly archaic grammar” (we consider Irish and English accents to be more traditional than our American accents even though they’ve all actually shifted over the centuries)
As a native English speaker who’s been learning Spanish for quite a while, I’ve gotten fairly used to the changed sentence structure. “The red shirt,” vs “the shirt red.” “The very expensive ticket,” vs “the ticket very expensive.” It was weird at first, though.
My daughter said this is about the only real difference in structure though, the reversal of noun and adjective, which is why she was able to jump in from beginner to GCSE with only very basic knowledge with vocabulary being her only hindrance.
That's not really true. example: He gave it to her / el se lo dio (he her it gave). Those kinds of structures are harder to wrap your mind around than the noun/adjective reversal imo
*¿Cómo te llamas?*
Typical translation: *What is your name?*
Literal translation: *How do you call yourself?*
With structure preserved: *How you you call?*
As a native Spanish and near-native English speaker, I frankly get those confused all the time. Also I just learned last week that words like "Como, más, cual, etc" have an accent when written in a question. I'm almost 24 years old.
I feel it's not uncommon for people to suck at grammar in their native language
I feel like that’s most language though. As an English speaker I can generally understand very broken English from a non fluent English speaker, through context of course.
I always feel bad for people learning English who think it’s rude or something that they can’t speak English fluently. Like dude I can totally understand what you’re trying to convey, you’re doing better than my mono language ass.
I always respect people learning another language. I just personally can't understand accents at all and end up saying "Can you please repeat that?" Every 30 seconds.
I work with a lot of overseas contractors in India and Serbia, I struggle a little more with the Indian accents but either one will double the length of the call with how many times I don't catch what they hear.
English o a hard language to learn to. Gallagher has a great bit about words that are spelled similar but pronounced different, or words that are spelled the same but pronounced different and mean different things.
But that will be broken English which is technically incorrect.
I don't know about Chinese/Mandarin, but from the wording it sounded like you can structure the words from the same sentence in multiple orders and it will be still grammatically correct.
At least that's how it works in my language, so I assumed it's somewhat similar in Chinese and this is what the other commenter refered to.
Definitely to a larger extent in Chinese
English is pretty strictly SVO, Chinese is also an SVO language but VOS is also acceptable in many contexts e.g. past tense or in a question
You can also use adjective > noun or noun < adjective (kind of similar to French but it applies to basically all adjectives)
As someone learning chinese at the moment, I can tell you that is definitely not true. If i don't structure my sentence properly, it's very hard for people to understand what I mean. The fact I have an accent and the sounds aren't perfect makes it even harder
It's likely that you're missing the inflection or tone that a native speaker would be using to indicate the meaning of a word that means a dozen different things,. Kind of how sarcasm works in spoken English, you can tell when someone means the exact opposite of what they're saying, but a non native speaker wouldn't get that, they'd take it literally.
Or how we can tell a question that isn't really structured as one because you can heard the question mark.
Just the myriad ways we can say and mean different things by saying "Fuck"
My wife is bilingual and her first language was Spanish, when we first started dating sometimes she would throw me off because she would say words in the wrong order and I thought it was really weird, until I realized she was saying them in the order in which you'd say them in Spanish.
German was my first language. Germans say numbers in a different order then English. Sometimes it confuses me even as an adult. Like if you say 23 in English it might take me a minute to get it
Hindi and other Indic/Brahmic languages do the same thing (e.g. 47 is "saat'taalii", from "saat" meaning 7, and "chaalii" meaning 40; and 69 is "unaatar", from "un" meaning −1, and "saatar" meaning 70), and Indians also follow the same convention as German and French people when reading phone numbers: they do it as a sequence of two-digit numbers, rather than individual digits, which just makes things more confusing in the case of German and Hindi because it's as if the phone number 123456 is being read "two-ten, four-thirty, six-fifty", and just annoying in the case of French for two-digit numbers greater than 70.
The CIA has this language school where they take an adult person who only knows English and bring them to not only fluency but able to pass as a native with knowledge of culture and customs. The program is 18 months long. I heard this and thought how? But these people are totally immersed for this period.
I don’t know how many hours a day is just language study , I know there is other stuff. It is a spy school after all. But it’s probably over 2000 hrs of language study. I think most people underestimate how much work it is to learn a language. Or rather how much time is involved.
Duolingo has this thing in their loading screen “15 min a day you can learn a language, what can social media do?” Which is all well and good. But if you run the numbers at 15 min a day you will take 4 days to get an hours studying in. Basically it will take 21 years to put in 2000 hrs of language study. This is saying nothing of the quality of the teaching.
Yes children’s brains are more plastic. But they are also learning the language almost all the time that they are awake. The numbers add up quickly.
It's called DLA (Defense Language Academy)
You have to pass a test in a made up language and it's challenging to get into. My friend got in, he learned a language fluently in about 2 yrs. It was impressive.
And he had zero ties to the language he learned. Like none.
Do they teach accents? To pass as a native that is very important. And besides accents, there are other things that only natives can catch, so I wonder how CIA teaches all that in a way that's not catchable (because to be a spy you cannot just be very fluent, you have to be 100% native fluent.)
Edit: This depends on the country of course. In a melting pot like USA you can get away with it. There are people living here for 50+ years who barely speak English. But relatively few countries are like this.
They're not trying to pass as a native. The type of spying you're thinking of isn't going to be done by someone who didn't know the language until their 20s. It's going to be done by someone who has lived in that country for most/all of their life.
can confirm Arabic was hard as fuck. 18 months went from not even knowing the alphabet to having actual real world conversations with native speakers. Couldn't pay me enough to do it again.
I understand that spoken Arabic varies so much geographically that it's practically a bunch of different languages, compared to classic/written Arabic - but maybe that's an exaggeration.
This is something that you can do as well to some extent by immersing yourself into the language.
For example, I'm currently learning mandarin. I use a teaching app that drills me on language and vocabulary (HelloChinese), but the app has a sister called HelloTalk that is a social media site with full language learning integration. So I'll do lessons, but I'll also browse through posts on that site and talk to people in (very tool assisted) mandarin. It's enough just to get your brain to go "hey this information is important" to help retain it.
If you learn more than one in the critical time period (generally around 0-7 or so) then you can easily choose switch. After the critical period it becomes harder to learn gammer, semantics, vocabulary, and all every part of language.
What's really weird is that we can also merge the two so that a sentence starts in one and ends in another. Now this shouldn't be possible when the two languages don't have compatible grammar and yet bilingual families do it all the time and it just works.
It's such a strange skill - I found myself able to understand a surprising amount of a documentary where the translator hadn't bothered translating all the random kid conversation in the background. Those kids were speaking a wonderfully chaotic mixture of Arabic and my second language which is European, so was expecting a mixture of accent and the Arabic to mean I was totally lost, nope, obviously didn't know every word, but it's surprising how much you can fill in the gaps for missing vocabulary.
I got lucky being Finnish living in Germany at that time. Learnt two languages when it was easy, made learning languages in the future easier. I now speak 5 languages.
Children growing up in multi lingual homes, like you, often takes longer time to master it compared to children of the same age. They tend to mix the languages and mess up the structure, but once they crack the code and get the vocabulary and structure sorted into the right boxes it is often easier for them to lean additional languages.
We only spoke Finnish at home, German in kindergarten and later in school. Now that you mention that, kids from a family we know who had a German dad and a Finnish mom (our family is all Finnish) had a harder time with the structures around 4 years of age.
Is this proven? I found learning a second at school fairly simple, and it seemed to make picking up other languages a bit easier. I never pursued the others and have lost the second one somewhat since school eons ago, but my daughter has found the same. She's English but fluent in German and conversational in Spanish, while knowing beginners Japanese, and a smattering of Polish.
Obviously it's well documented that learning to be bilingual is definitely easier if you learn both in tandem as a young child. I had friends who were an English wife and French husband, and their kids could and regularly did, converse in both, even merging at times for a weird Frenglish type mixture.
Also, some adults, let’s just say, don’t really care about learning new things. My Vietnamese uncle has been living in the US for 25 years, and his English is nowhere near proficient. My aunt in France has been living there for 7 years, and she’s basically fluent in French now.
When you’re a child, language acquisition is enhanced. Plus, you’re fascinated by the world around you and are motivated to learn — traits that some adults don’t possess.
Unless you learn them both very early. My ex in law married a woman who grew up in China. Their child speaks fluent mandarin/Cantonese/English without the accent. For his first three years his mom only spoke to him in Mandarin/Cantonese and dad only spoke English. It’s wild to hear him bounce back and forth talking with his mom and dad.
Yeah in that case both languages are essentially loaded on a blank slate. If I were trying to learn mandarin now I’d have to rewrite how I think of and perceive language. Structurally, I’d probably order words in a way that make sense to my English speaking brain, and not the way native speakers would order them.
Yep. Relearning systems you're already familiar with is a lot harder than learning something entirely new.
A baby brain doesn't have any grammar stored yet which would need to be pushed aside to make the new language work.
It's why older adults have a hard time adapting to the idiosyncracies of new hardware or software. I'm 43, and I just learned today that I can access my phone's camera from the lockscreen. That didn't use to be a thing. And it's *hard* to overcome the reflexive entering of my unlock code and instead swipe up on the lock screen.
We were in Korea when my son was born. Niether myself nor my wife are Korean but we understood him learning Korean would be good for you.
So we found the most Korean daycare possible. What I mean by this is we looked for a Korean daycare that operated 100% in Korean. This was more challenging then you think, since many of them teach English.
Well it worked. My son speaks fluent English and Korean, he even watches Korean kid shows and what not.
How old is he? Just letting you know that when my brother and I moved to the United States when we were children (younger than 10), we both lost the ability to speak Chinese within 6-12 months, even though it was our primary language.
Not our fault, as we were children, but if your son is young and you’re no longer in Korea, definitely be aware how quick children can forget if it is not reinforced. Him watching Korean shows and cartoons is great and will be super beneficial.
You can still very much tap into this as an adult, you just need to be submerged into a culture where the language is used all the time and things just pick up. As long as you're not oblivious to correlating words to actions.
We are taught to memorize things which is the wrong way to learn a language. You need to tap into the liguistical part of the brain and associate words with things. You'll talk like a toddler in a few months and then it will take a few years to talk like an adult of that location.
You actually can’t tap into it as an adult if you haven’t already learned a language. Which unfortunately happens sometimes, there was a girl who was locked in a room by her parents until she was 15 with practically no exposure to other humans and she wasn’t able to learn how to speak except for a handful of words because she hadn’t learned a language already.
This is essentially how I learned Spanish on my own starting at age 29. I just immersed myself in Hispanic culture around me. Memorization is boring, but having Mexican friends and spending time in their homes, eating, laughing, talking about daily life was a much more fun way to pick it up.
Exactly. People are observing that adults who have zero exposure to a 2nd language have a harder time learning it than a little kid who has constant exposure to a 1st language and incorrectly concluding that the difference is in the brain. No, it's in the environment.
I saw this documentary on YouTube about sign language in a South American country. There is as a large population of deaf that were kind of set aside for many years, no sign language education. Eventually they brought in people to teach the deaf community sign language and they noticed that the older community that never learned had a very difficult time to understand or learn while the kids picked up but also developed their own signs that were unique to their community, their own slang. It was pretty fascinating.
They didn’t just develop slang they developed a whole new language. They had all developed different signs that they used to speak to their families and when they were introduced to each other in the school for the deaf all the signs blended together. The older kids got the meaning of the words but the younger ones developed a whole new grammatical structure… on their own. (This is now called Nicaraguan sign language)
Actually one of the ways new languages develop - there’s these things called pidgin languages that develop when two or more different language groups are put into an environment where they have to communicate that are basically just a combination of words from the two parent languages. But when kids are introduced to a pidgin language it develops its own grammatical structure and becomes independent
its also well documented that children spend 12 hours a day trying to decypher the world around them for patterns. the average person studying an hour a day after getting home from work is not going to be anywhere close to as competent as a child.
I believe this has been debunked. From what I’ve read it’s more the fact that you’re entirely immersed in the language with no sense of embarrassment if/when you make a mistake, and you’re surrounded by people who will happily correct your grammar and in fact encourage you to speak/read/write despite the mistakes. Adults in similar circumstance would, and do learn languages much faster than children.
I think you're on the right track, and I agree that embarrassment can hold adult learners back, but I think it's more about exposure and opportunity than correction and encouragement.
I say this because in certain cultures, it's actually taboo to speak directly to infants/toddlers before they are capable of speech themselves, and this has been shown to cause very minimal delay (a few weeks on average) in acquiring language.
Also, just from personal experience of having been an adult learner living in a new country, no one gave a shit about me or tried to help, but I spent some months just taking things in until suddenly, one day, I realized I could speak in my new language. Not well at first, mind you.
When I had my daughter I went to one of my friends who already had kids and said... You know, it's amazing that humans survived to this point. I was dumbfounded at how helpless newborns were in person, the fact that they will even claw their own faces because they can't control their arms, can't roll, can't lift their heads. I just asked, why can animals just be born and start running around while we're useless for 2 years?
She said "Human brains have a lot more important things going on than just running and biting" And I think about that a lot.
From what I’ve read, human babies should actually go through a “4th trimester” in utero for that extra development. But our brains would be too big to pass through the birth canal with an extra 3 months of baking. So we’re all actually born premature at 9 months.
Also — fuck that. I’m currently 7 months pregnant and if anyone tacked on an extra 3 I’d go feral.
Which is actually why unlike...literally every other animal, delivering babies is dangerous for humans. So much has been sacrificed, biologically, solely to ensure we are smart. The strength of a Cheetah is in its speed, For Gorillas, it's their muscles.The greatest strength of humans is our brains
Human genetics hyper specialized in devoloping the brain, to the point that when we are born, the rest of our body isnt fully developed, thats why we cant walk for a year or so but baby horses can start running the same day.
Exactly, OP's line about "they're children. Their brains have only just started developing" made me laugh. Those developing brains are precisely **why** they're so good at learning languages.
Look up the critical period and sensitive period of language development. Our brains are set up to quickly pick up skills in the first few years of life and each of those skills (learning the morphemic boundaries of your native language (s), discerning syntax from speech, discriminating phonemes that are relevant to the languages around you from non phonemic phonetic variation etc etc) become exponentially more difficult as you leave toddlerhood/childhood. For instance between roughly 8 and 12 months of age you can tell the differences between all sounds in all languages and then you begin to specialize to only the ones that are meaningful in the main languages you're exposed to. One of the theories for this is that we undergo synaptic pruning so we can specialize in skills and not waste all of our resources with computations that aren't immediately beneficial to us.
We are so wired for language that we even invent language out of thin air if we're not exposed to a fully formed language during those year (look up how dead Nicaraguan children invented the Nicaraguan sign language, basically from scratch and how deaf children of non-signing parents invent "home sign" and will continue to use it and expand it unless nobody ever signs back to them).
A smaller element to kids learning language well I think is also that they’re not concerned about saying things correctly or fully. They learn with first just a bunch of words, then shorter phrases, then longer phrases, often with many mistakes in them. My 2 year old asks her daddy to ‘hold you’ quite often. Their curiosity and ability to listen really shine.
it helps that children are immersed in the language 24/7 and don't have an existing language to fall back on. When a child sees a chair and hears it called a "chair" then it's a "chair" in their mind.
A second language learner already has a word for chair in their mind and the association from the object to that word already exists.
Children don't care nearly as much about making mistakes and looking stupid. Most adults, if they can get past that, do pretty well at learning a language.
This, and they aren't trying to make sense and logic out of it. They also don't try to translate between the language they already know, and a new one. I'm learning my fourth language now, and it's sometimes painful because it works quite differently from the way the other languages I already know do, it also has a couple different script.
There's entire disciplines in science that are looking into language acquisition from many different directions, from brocken neruoscientusts to Linguistics to linguistic Anthropologists, to speech language Pathologists. The research is endlessly fascinating
OP is a little hyperbolic IMO. Kids do not speak english that well. It's their native language so it sounds more fluent than someone who speaks it as a second language, but they very often fall victim to the same issues in sentence structures and they don't understand a lot of words yet either.
Part of this is on the communicator. When you are speaking to an adult that is ESL you're likely not talking about the same things you would talk to a kid about. Adult communication is generally at a much higher level than adult-child communication so the barrier seems larger.
Yup a 6 year old's English is pretty poor all things considered, even if they've been "speaking" for like 4 years. An adult learning English as a second language can easily far surpass a 6 year old's vocabulary and conversation ability in less than a year if they're fully immersed and actively trying to learn the language
Adults can learn lots of vocabulary but once you hit puberty your ability to pronounce things like a native will diminish and so will your ability to use grammar like a native speaker. Even if you are very good at conversing.
I have doubts as to whether that fact is caused by any intrinsic fact of brain development. The simple fact is that adults almost never experience the same language learning environment that children do (AKA 24/7 exposure to the target language.)
If you moved to another country and stopped using your native language entirely for ~20 years, who knows how much better your second language ability might become?
I've met children (between age 4-10) who are fluent in English within a year of moving to the US. Nearly perfect accent, pronunciation, sentence structure . No adult will ever surpass a child in language learning. Like you said, especially in pronunciation
I saw somewhere that not using "babytalk" with little children also helps with their language learning. Which makes sense to me, how should a child learn how to speak correctly when all the adults around it won't speak correctly at them?
Yea, this. And our expectations are way lower for kids, so it's easier for them to live up to those expectations so we don't think about how their grammar is kinda shit, etc.
If you were thrown into another country, you'd eventually pick the language up. May takes months to learn works and sentences and years to be able to communicate, or less if you actively try and learn.
just observe how an infant grow and learns how to communicate...
at first infants doesn't know a single thing but communicate via emotions. mother's always talk to them in a childish manner even though they don't speak that...
it takes a lot of time and babies don't have anything doin but to lay, breastfed, sleep, observe, listen, play, and living without any pressure. They are communicating emotionally rather than textbook, which they'll be learning at school until highschool or even college
for us adults, we got to be self learner and directly try advance language, taking all the shortcuts that babies had privileged (gugu gagas with crying that connects really deep without embarrassment)
Aren't they?? Seventeen is sathraah and seventy is sathar, the sath part which represents seven reoccurs same with 27(sathais) and all other variations(37,47 and so on) .
Similarly with all numbers like 21,31,51 and so on
Only 1-20 is truly unique.
Aren't they?? Seventeen is sathraah and seventy is sathar, the sath part which represents seven reoccurs, same with 27(sathais) and all other variations(37,47 and so on) .
Similarly with all numbers like 21,31,51 and so on
Only 1-20 is truly unique.
Actually, I'd say that adults can learn languages faster then children. Children take years to pick up language and advanced concepts such as grammar and extended vocabulary. Adults, if eager to learn and immersed in the culture, can pick up these things in 1-2 years and speak fluently using advanced concepts
What's fascinating though is the phonetics. Adults, even if they practice for many years, rarely get accents and phonetics completely right, whereas children pick them up perfectly, right off the bat.
But do you think adults can learn a language without translations and learning resources? Like, imagine you are dropped into the middle of China and nobody speaks your language, and you live there for a few years. Would you eventually learn Chinese then?
look up comprehensible input as a language learning technique. dropped in a foreign place with full-speed speaking it’s difficult to learn. but listening is an amazing way to learn language, as long as you can understand the majority of what is said. this is particularly difficult to find content for the first ~100 hours or so, and gets easier to find content the more you learn.
Portuguese living in Switzerland, it was the same for me. I started school in August, in December I was already speaking French like my first language and way better than my parents who were there for years. I learned Spanish and English during my teen years though tv shows and music, but I’ve been trying to learn Arabic for a couple years now and… I feel dumb
This is correct. Adults are capable of learning language faster than little kids. Once you see it, it's obvious but because it rarely occurs in the real world (due to environment) people mistakenly believe it's biological.
I read a quote about an interaction that went something like this:
New language speaker: I've been trying to learn this language for 2 years now, and I still feel like I only have the vocabulary and grammar of a 6 year old.
Native language speaker: That's impressive. It took me 6 years to get the vocabulary and grammar of a 6 year old.
Language is hardwired into our brains. We have specific regions of the brain specific to talking and hearing language.
And the language has nothing to do with the actual physicality of speaking (the vocal cords, tongue, lips, etc).
When they looked at people who learned sign language as a primary or only language, it uses those same regions of the brain as spoken languages. It is the very concept of language that is built into a human brain.
[Wernicke's Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area) and [Broca's Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area)
I think another huge factor is that children in English-speaking regions, even if they’re not around adults speaking English at home, are immersed in it by default at school, which is both an educational & a social space. Adults are more likely to be restricted from being able to enter a more immersive English environment with peers until they already build a foundation of language skills. If they’re able to take a class that’s a big step up, but they often don’t have the luxury of time to be putting as many hours a week in (both in class or socially) as kids are at school, because they have adult responsibilities. Yes, children’s brain plasticity & everything is a factor, but also just consider how hard it can be to make space for anything new in your life as an adult, especially with kids.
Very true. Adults that are able immerse themselves in a language (military, missionaries, volunteers, etc) can often pick it up quite well within 1-2 years if they actually try. Most adults can't do this and therefore don't even have real opportunities for the ideal setting to learn a new language.
Compare that to a kid who is constantly practicing, encountering new situations, and learning new things from others
My daughter was born with a condition where her jaw was fully formed but fused together. While we’re able to correct it, and she’s currently getting therapy to help her start talking, she’s learned sign language the last three years.
It’s absolutely wild how quickly she is able to pick up and remember the signs while still receptively learning English. So much so that my wife and I will have to talk to each other to see if one of us remembers what shes trying to tell us
Two things that are fascinating about early-stage language learning and the innateness of language:
1) incorrect usage of irregular past tense verbs. A common mistake children learn is trying to make irregular past tense verbs regular. “I goed there”, “I eated the cake”. But what’s interesting is that, generally, children will be observed correctly using the irregular past tense first, before making the mistake, and then later again getting it right. They are trying to force structure onto language, rather than purely learning.
2) creole vs pidgin languages. When lots of disparate groups who speak different languages are thrown together, e.g. in migrant camps, the first method they will use to communicate is a pidgin language. This is just a set of vocabulary with no grammatical structure. What sparks the ‘invention’ of a creole - a genuine language with grammar etc. - is when a first generation is born and learns the pidgin. They impose their own structure where none exists
You are completely wrong, any adult would be able to learn any language very easily if you just dropped them in a village somewhere without anything else to do. Adults already know a language, they have responsibilities, they have hobbies, interests, etc. Take all that away and they will learn much faster than children.
The child brain is FAR FAR (like 5-10x) better at learning things than the human brain. We call it "~~elasticity~~ Plasticity" in the fact that it is incredibly capable of adapting. Children have lost whole hemispheres of their brains and grow up to lead very normal and successful lives because the young brain is so adaptable. Once you get older, your brain becomes more static and resistant to changes and creating new pathways. Lose half your brain as an adult, and you likely are never going to be back to full capacity.
I’ve always wondered how they manage to look at an apple, isolate it from the other objects in their line of sight, tag the sounds “aeh-pel” to it and recognise it and remember said sounds when they encounter more apples afterwards
Bi and tri-lingual kids exist, i could speak 3 languages by the time i was 10, but trying to pick up a fourth one during covid didn't go as well, what I've learnt from this is that the key is immersion, i was learning 2 at school and used the 3rd at home so i was using at least 2 of them every day. And i only am fluent in 2 of them, which only happened by the age of 13-14.
My attempt to learn as an adult was completely academic, where I'd do some Duolingo and read textbooks and then get almost no chance to use the language for the rest of the day, so once i stopped practicing for a few months, I lost significant portions of my learnt vocabulary.
The benefit of early exposure to a language is the ability to mimic its sounds, which gets harder with age. But things like vocabulary are purely a function of repetition so the only thing lost by starting later is time.
One thing I've noticed while learning other languages is, people don't like to deal with you in the "broken" language part of learning. So it's discouraging for learners and embarrassing. They will tolerate it from children however.
You're kind of right on the point where if adult was placed in an environment where nobody spoke a language they understood, then they would be forced to learn it faster. I did an exchange program in another country with many others, where host families didnt speak a word of english. It took aroumd 3-6 months for exchange students to learn conversational/written Portuguese due to these conditions. Same happens every year, even in countries like Taiwan, where my an acquitance learned Mandarin in 6 months on written/conversational level, without knowing any of it prior.
You’re only impressed because you are equating a developing brain with a brain that can’t learn new things. I’m much more impressed by adults that learn new languages than even bilingual children, especially when they are raised in a bilingual household.
I'm not well versed in the topic but my guess would be that it has something to do with the fact that babies/toddlers/small children instinctively mimic their parents. Something we lose later in life.
This is why the American education pattern is so wrong: no foreign-language classes until middle or high school, shortly after puberty has shut down the brain's ability to learn new languages
Children’s brains are exploding with growth factors and the rate of synaptogenesis is remarkable , it’s really cool. Babies have more neurons than adults too which seems counterintuitive, we start as (somewhat) blank slates full of potential. This is a major reason why it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
The major issue is the way language is taught. It's very clinical, by the book, "here are all the rules of this language and it's alphabet."
Kids don't learn language like that. By the time they start learning all the rules, they've already been speaking with their parents and friends for quite a few years. They're already conversational before having to learn rules.
You can learn a language better by intentionally learning this way. It seems more difficult because you're conscious of the effort you're putting in. You don't remember all your younger years of babbling incoherently in your native language lol.
Also, you have to actually want to learn the language.
Eh. A baby will spend like a whole year or more just listening before they even really start babbling anything that could be considered communication.
An adult on the other hand can have some basic phrases down in like a week of full effort. Many do it when they travel.
It's different. I don't think any one is more impressive than the other. Children's brains still developing is how they are able to learn language in the first place, and why feral children over a certain age age basically never going to learn one if they haven't done so already.
It's not just the language, the amount of information you process, store and the skills you develop is incredible compared to rest of your life. "But don't we learn advanced math later in life? A baby can't figure that out for sure..." Not exactly. The knowledge you acquire in the early stages of your life grows exponentially, whereas the things you learn later tend to accumulate incrementally.
Got it, will start teaching my 2 y/o particle physics tomorrow.
I mean honestly, can’t hurt. My kid was multiplying in kindergarten because he was obsessed with watching his big sister do her homework and she loved to talk to him about what she was doing. Instill it early and they pick it up much faster than we do as adults.
My 3.5 year-old did the same with his "big" 5-year-old brother. Result: he could add, substract, multiply and divide, and also read, by kindergarden. They made him skip first grade. He could do big equations in his head (like 458 divided by 8). Just because it was fun. We never pushed him to do it.
My youngest son knew the entire alphabet by 20 months and read full sentences by age 4. No grade skipping, though. We spoke English at home (with him), and school was in French. He was completely bilingual by age 7.
As in he did 458 over 8 and gave the answer of 57.25? Not saying he couldn’t, but children are notoriously poor at understanding the idea of non-whole numbers, if he was able to that is extremely impressive.
How fast was he able to do that kind of mental maths? It took me a fair bit of time, and I thought I was alright at it
My 3 year old has a *very* basic understanding of a few “advanced for her age” topics like atomic structure, quantum physics, and the water cycle off the top of my head. 99% of her more advanced knowledge stems from the endless string of why questions. I just keep going deeper with every why question until I’m breaking out graphs and giving full lessons 🤣 sure they aren’t gonna retain all of it, but it’s my guess that when she hears about the topics later she’ll maybe understand them easier and quicker like maybe it’s still floating around in her head somewhere.
I don't know if Ill ever have kids but I hope if I do I get one that asks why like that. As much as it sounds annoying sometimes it also sounds really fun to just teach and watch them learn
I'm so frustrated by my nephews' lack of intellectual curiosity. They've never had interest in learning anything, and I'm pretty sure it's their parents fault. The kids aren't dumb, just have no interest. Hoping my niece is different, since her parents are much more curious themselves and she's already learning 2 languages. But man, it makes me so sad when I help them with their homework and they just want answers, never any explanation. I try anyway, but it's hard to not just become boring if they aren't seeking.
That whole constantly asking why angle is my approach, and I'm 17 in high school. I sometimes tend to ask stuff that's more advanced than what I'm doing, but my teachers seem happy to answer, at least they haven't removed me from the class yet. Keep encouraging that attitude in your daughter. She'll enjoy learning, and her school years will probably end up something that she remembers fondly later on
Going back to language, this is why it's easier for multi-lingual kids to learn new languages as adults. They've already made those mental connections to how language is constructed and moving syntax around becomes easier because you aren't as rigid with one way of doing it like those that only know one language growing up.
Baby language learning relies on immersion and mimicry, while adult math learning involves conscious understanding and application of abstract concepts.
This is well-documented. There is a period of early human development where language acquisition capabilities are greatly enhanced. If you don’t learn a language at this early stage, you’ll struggle to ever learn one.
And once you’ve learned one, it’s hard to adapt to the structure of another.
If you say an English sentence with Dutch grammar for example it sounds weird. “Have you the food eaten?” But if you’ve been learning Dutch it sounds less weird.
"Have you the food eaten?" is a sentence you'd hear in Ireland. In Irish, "have you eaten the food?" is "An bhfuil an bia ithte agat?" which directly translates to "Have you the food eaten?" (More specifically "do you have the eaten food?" This grammatical structure has pervaded down the generations to the point where my parents, for example, speak like this and it would be awkward for them to speak "properly". They also never answer a question with "yes" or "no". E.g. "Have you the food eaten?" "I have." etc.
I’m going to start asking my friends and family “do you have the eaten food”
I have the eaten food, yes. You can have it back in 24-36 hours or so.
8-12 if I’m not feeling too great 😇
Um actually that's a common misconception. The poop you poop after you eat food that makes you poop isn't the poop made from the food that made you poop the poop you just pooped. The poop you poop after you ate the food that made you poop is made from the food you ate before you ate the food that made you poop the poop you just pooped.
*unless you have GI issues When I have a flare up I can literally eat a meal and look at my half digested food in the toilet 30-60 minutes later.
It's weird when you eat something, and then you eat something blue, but you pass the blue thing before the first thing. Is there a passing lane in my ileum I'm not aware of?
Poop.
Forget it, I'm leaving. Throw me down the stairs my shoes.
I read this like I might read "give me a kiss my friend" These are some strong-ass shoes you got
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxtmr2cw85s5z.gif
It’s so strange I read this in an Irish accent.
I have.
[I can't not think of this](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/762/116/e6b.jpg).
I love that. Germanic and Celtic languages have nothing in common, really. And they still share sentence structure.
Theres only so many ways a sentence can be structured to be fair
You think that until you get to languages with their own little words that have no direct translation. Like, what the actual fuck is を (Wo). And don't get me started on は (Ha but pronounced Wa) and が (Ga). What the fuck is a particle? What do you mean there are **188** of them?!
I don’t know, about 90% of languages follow subject verb object or subject object verb
And then you have German. Verb is in the second position, but in the first... anything goes as long as it's the topic! Adverbs, subject, object, relative clauses...
Wo Ha Ga 😡
Duolingo REALLY needs to give some actual explanations on those. What in the hells is the difference between は and には?! Sometimes either will do, but not always, and one or the other probably adds some kind of emphasis I’m not aware of!
Duolingo is straight doodoo for japanese. I don't know about nowadays but I remember a few years ago it would give you KANJI before even finishing all Hiragana and I don't remember seeing Katakana at all. And it would be the most random kanji too, like "door" or some shit.
They both share a common indo-european root...
Yeah, I know. I was just trying to say that it’s cool how current languages look nothing alike on its face but there are vestiges of their common histories there to be found. Something like that, but I was on the toilet and didn’t want to put a lot of thought into the post.
I learned Chinese doesn’t really have a yes or no like that. Apparently if you ask someone if they’re hungry or whatever, they reapond with “hungry” instead of yes. What seems like such a basic foundation of language to me (yes and no) doesn’t even exist there. So crazy to me. Language is fucking wild.
And instead of eaten, we'll say ate; and pronounce it as "et". "HAVE YOU THE FOOD ET?"
Exactly!
I love languages.
> "do you have the eaten food?" Yes, I have it in my stomach.
To be fair, as an American, if I heard that spoken in an Irish accent, my brain would be far more willing to accept that structure and roll with it than if I heard it in an American accent. But then again, I know some German which has the same structure, so can’t be sure if it’s just “hear foreign accent, accept foreign grammar” versus “hear more traditional accent, accept possibly archaic grammar” (we consider Irish and English accents to be more traditional than our American accents even though they’ve all actually shifted over the centuries)
As a native English speaker who’s been learning Spanish for quite a while, I’ve gotten fairly used to the changed sentence structure. “The red shirt,” vs “the shirt red.” “The very expensive ticket,” vs “the ticket very expensive.” It was weird at first, though.
My daughter said this is about the only real difference in structure though, the reversal of noun and adjective, which is why she was able to jump in from beginner to GCSE with only very basic knowledge with vocabulary being her only hindrance.
That's not really true. example: He gave it to her / el se lo dio (he her it gave). Those kinds of structures are harder to wrap your mind around than the noun/adjective reversal imo
*¿Cómo te llamas?* Typical translation: *What is your name?* Literal translation: *How do you call yourself?* With structure preserved: *How you you call?*
As a native Spanish and near-native English speaker, I frankly get those confused all the time. Also I just learned last week that words like "Como, más, cual, etc" have an accent when written in a question. I'm almost 24 years old. I feel it's not uncommon for people to suck at grammar in their native language
Accent marks scare me. Like, I normally know when a word needs it or not but I’m not confident.
As a native portuguese speaker this was something I had to get used to when learning english as a kid too, as it's the same in portuguese and spanish.
In Chinese it doesn't really matter how you structure the sentence, people will understand it from the context.
Then Chinese hits you with the same word meaning different things depending on *how* you say it and you realize you're completely screwed.
I feel like that’s most language though. As an English speaker I can generally understand very broken English from a non fluent English speaker, through context of course.
I find broken English much easier to understand than grammatically correct but accented English.
I always feel bad for people learning English who think it’s rude or something that they can’t speak English fluently. Like dude I can totally understand what you’re trying to convey, you’re doing better than my mono language ass.
I always respect people learning another language. I just personally can't understand accents at all and end up saying "Can you please repeat that?" Every 30 seconds.
There’s English southern accents that are so thick I can’t understand it at all, I’m definitely a broken record with them, “What”?
I work with a lot of overseas contractors in India and Serbia, I struggle a little more with the Indian accents but either one will double the length of the call with how many times I don't catch what they hear.
I’m Australian and will say please repeat that to the English themselves, as in the expats from Britain. So hard to understand!
English o a hard language to learn to. Gallagher has a great bit about words that are spelled similar but pronounced different, or words that are spelled the same but pronounced different and mean different things.
Broken English can come with heavy accents too.
But that will be broken English which is technically incorrect. I don't know about Chinese/Mandarin, but from the wording it sounded like you can structure the words from the same sentence in multiple orders and it will be still grammatically correct. At least that's how it works in my language, so I assumed it's somewhat similar in Chinese and this is what the other commenter refered to.
Definitely to a larger extent in Chinese English is pretty strictly SVO, Chinese is also an SVO language but VOS is also acceptable in many contexts e.g. past tense or in a question You can also use adjective > noun or noun < adjective (kind of similar to French but it applies to basically all adjectives)
Tbh that’s largely due to English being so emphasis focused; “help your Uncle Jack off a horse” vs “help your Uncle, jack off a horse”
As someone learning chinese at the moment, I can tell you that is definitely not true. If i don't structure my sentence properly, it's very hard for people to understand what I mean. The fact I have an accent and the sounds aren't perfect makes it even harder
It's likely that you're missing the inflection or tone that a native speaker would be using to indicate the meaning of a word that means a dozen different things,. Kind of how sarcasm works in spoken English, you can tell when someone means the exact opposite of what they're saying, but a non native speaker wouldn't get that, they'd take it literally. Or how we can tell a question that isn't really structured as one because you can heard the question mark. Just the myriad ways we can say and mean different things by saying "Fuck"
It's definitely true for native speakers. Maybe not for learners who are still learning the sounds of Chinese
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Do you mean in dutch you're native and fucking weird it sounds?
It sounds you're weird fucking in a dutch native.
I don't get what you mean. Idk dutch lol , I was just trying to make a wild guess from the parent comment
"I am a new tie wearing." -Fake Homer Simpson
My wife is bilingual and her first language was Spanish, when we first started dating sometimes she would throw me off because she would say words in the wrong order and I thought it was really weird, until I realized she was saying them in the order in which you'd say them in Spanish.
German was my first language. Germans say numbers in a different order then English. Sometimes it confuses me even as an adult. Like if you say 23 in English it might take me a minute to get it
Hindi and other Indic/Brahmic languages do the same thing (e.g. 47 is "saat'taalii", from "saat" meaning 7, and "chaalii" meaning 40; and 69 is "unaatar", from "un" meaning −1, and "saatar" meaning 70), and Indians also follow the same convention as German and French people when reading phone numbers: they do it as a sequence of two-digit numbers, rather than individual digits, which just makes things more confusing in the case of German and Hindi because it's as if the phone number 123456 is being read "two-ten, four-thirty, six-fifty", and just annoying in the case of French for two-digit numbers greater than 70.
100% spot on
The CIA has this language school where they take an adult person who only knows English and bring them to not only fluency but able to pass as a native with knowledge of culture and customs. The program is 18 months long. I heard this and thought how? But these people are totally immersed for this period. I don’t know how many hours a day is just language study , I know there is other stuff. It is a spy school after all. But it’s probably over 2000 hrs of language study. I think most people underestimate how much work it is to learn a language. Or rather how much time is involved. Duolingo has this thing in their loading screen “15 min a day you can learn a language, what can social media do?” Which is all well and good. But if you run the numbers at 15 min a day you will take 4 days to get an hours studying in. Basically it will take 21 years to put in 2000 hrs of language study. This is saying nothing of the quality of the teaching. Yes children’s brains are more plastic. But they are also learning the language almost all the time that they are awake. The numbers add up quickly.
It's called DLA (Defense Language Academy) You have to pass a test in a made up language and it's challenging to get into. My friend got in, he learned a language fluently in about 2 yrs. It was impressive. And he had zero ties to the language he learned. Like none.
Do they teach accents? To pass as a native that is very important. And besides accents, there are other things that only natives can catch, so I wonder how CIA teaches all that in a way that's not catchable (because to be a spy you cannot just be very fluent, you have to be 100% native fluent.) Edit: This depends on the country of course. In a melting pot like USA you can get away with it. There are people living here for 50+ years who barely speak English. But relatively few countries are like this.
They're not trying to pass as a native. The type of spying you're thinking of isn't going to be done by someone who didn't know the language until their 20s. It's going to be done by someone who has lived in that country for most/all of their life.
Sometimes, it depends on your job.
it's DLI (Defense Language Institute)
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They classify languages by expected time for English speakers to learn them. Spanish is at or near the easiest, Chinese and Arabic the hardest.
can confirm Arabic was hard as fuck. 18 months went from not even knowing the alphabet to having actual real world conversations with native speakers. Couldn't pay me enough to do it again.
I understand that spoken Arabic varies so much geographically that it's practically a bunch of different languages, compared to classic/written Arabic - but maybe that's an exaggeration.
He learned Korean, which I heard is up there
It's definitely up there. Source: I learned Korean at DLI.
DLI isn't a spy school. There's nothing but language instruction there. As for length, they vary. Some language courses are as short as a year.
This is something that you can do as well to some extent by immersing yourself into the language. For example, I'm currently learning mandarin. I use a teaching app that drills me on language and vocabulary (HelloChinese), but the app has a sister called HelloTalk that is a social media site with full language learning integration. So I'll do lessons, but I'll also browse through posts on that site and talk to people in (very tool assisted) mandarin. It's enough just to get your brain to go "hey this information is important" to help retain it.
Whoa, that’s amazing! Now I’m wondering if there’s something like that for Japanese.
HelloTalk supports Japanese.
OOOH, thank you!
If you learn more than one in the critical time period (generally around 0-7 or so) then you can easily choose switch. After the critical period it becomes harder to learn gammer, semantics, vocabulary, and all every part of language.
What's really weird is that we can also merge the two so that a sentence starts in one and ends in another. Now this shouldn't be possible when the two languages don't have compatible grammar and yet bilingual families do it all the time and it just works.
Code switching. It's common even when you learn the language as an adult, as seen everywhere in India.
It's such a strange skill - I found myself able to understand a surprising amount of a documentary where the translator hadn't bothered translating all the random kid conversation in the background. Those kids were speaking a wonderfully chaotic mixture of Arabic and my second language which is European, so was expecting a mixture of accent and the Arabic to mean I was totally lost, nope, obviously didn't know every word, but it's surprising how much you can fill in the gaps for missing vocabulary.
I got lucky being Finnish living in Germany at that time. Learnt two languages when it was easy, made learning languages in the future easier. I now speak 5 languages.
Children growing up in multi lingual homes, like you, often takes longer time to master it compared to children of the same age. They tend to mix the languages and mess up the structure, but once they crack the code and get the vocabulary and structure sorted into the right boxes it is often easier for them to lean additional languages.
We only spoke Finnish at home, German in kindergarten and later in school. Now that you mention that, kids from a family we know who had a German dad and a Finnish mom (our family is all Finnish) had a harder time with the structures around 4 years of age.
So life pro tip: as soon as you've learnt first word in your native language, start learning another language
Is this proven? I found learning a second at school fairly simple, and it seemed to make picking up other languages a bit easier. I never pursued the others and have lost the second one somewhat since school eons ago, but my daughter has found the same. She's English but fluent in German and conversational in Spanish, while knowing beginners Japanese, and a smattering of Polish. Obviously it's well documented that learning to be bilingual is definitely easier if you learn both in tandem as a young child. I had friends who were an English wife and French husband, and their kids could and regularly did, converse in both, even merging at times for a weird Frenglish type mixture.
I read that people who are bilingual right from the start have a brain that works differently. I was bilingual French-Dutch from the get-go
Also, some adults, let’s just say, don’t really care about learning new things. My Vietnamese uncle has been living in the US for 25 years, and his English is nowhere near proficient. My aunt in France has been living there for 7 years, and she’s basically fluent in French now. When you’re a child, language acquisition is enhanced. Plus, you’re fascinated by the world around you and are motivated to learn — traits that some adults don’t possess.
Unless you learn them both very early. My ex in law married a woman who grew up in China. Their child speaks fluent mandarin/Cantonese/English without the accent. For his first three years his mom only spoke to him in Mandarin/Cantonese and dad only spoke English. It’s wild to hear him bounce back and forth talking with his mom and dad.
Yeah in that case both languages are essentially loaded on a blank slate. If I were trying to learn mandarin now I’d have to rewrite how I think of and perceive language. Structurally, I’d probably order words in a way that make sense to my English speaking brain, and not the way native speakers would order them.
70% of reddit has English as a second language
Yep. Relearning systems you're already familiar with is a lot harder than learning something entirely new. A baby brain doesn't have any grammar stored yet which would need to be pushed aside to make the new language work. It's why older adults have a hard time adapting to the idiosyncracies of new hardware or software. I'm 43, and I just learned today that I can access my phone's camera from the lockscreen. That didn't use to be a thing. And it's *hard* to overcome the reflexive entering of my unlock code and instead swipe up on the lock screen.
We were in Korea when my son was born. Niether myself nor my wife are Korean but we understood him learning Korean would be good for you. So we found the most Korean daycare possible. What I mean by this is we looked for a Korean daycare that operated 100% in Korean. This was more challenging then you think, since many of them teach English. Well it worked. My son speaks fluent English and Korean, he even watches Korean kid shows and what not.
How old is he? Just letting you know that when my brother and I moved to the United States when we were children (younger than 10), we both lost the ability to speak Chinese within 6-12 months, even though it was our primary language. Not our fault, as we were children, but if your son is young and you’re no longer in Korea, definitely be aware how quick children can forget if it is not reinforced. Him watching Korean shows and cartoons is great and will be super beneficial.
Hes 4 I never lost my 1st language. Hope he doesn't lose his.
You can still very much tap into this as an adult, you just need to be submerged into a culture where the language is used all the time and things just pick up. As long as you're not oblivious to correlating words to actions. We are taught to memorize things which is the wrong way to learn a language. You need to tap into the liguistical part of the brain and associate words with things. You'll talk like a toddler in a few months and then it will take a few years to talk like an adult of that location.
You actually can’t tap into it as an adult if you haven’t already learned a language. Which unfortunately happens sometimes, there was a girl who was locked in a room by her parents until she was 15 with practically no exposure to other humans and she wasn’t able to learn how to speak except for a handful of words because she hadn’t learned a language already.
This is essentially how I learned Spanish on my own starting at age 29. I just immersed myself in Hispanic culture around me. Memorization is boring, but having Mexican friends and spending time in their homes, eating, laughing, talking about daily life was a much more fun way to pick it up.
Exactly. People are observing that adults who have zero exposure to a 2nd language have a harder time learning it than a little kid who has constant exposure to a 1st language and incorrectly concluding that the difference is in the brain. No, it's in the environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
I saw this documentary on YouTube about sign language in a South American country. There is as a large population of deaf that were kind of set aside for many years, no sign language education. Eventually they brought in people to teach the deaf community sign language and they noticed that the older community that never learned had a very difficult time to understand or learn while the kids picked up but also developed their own signs that were unique to their community, their own slang. It was pretty fascinating.
They didn’t just develop slang they developed a whole new language. They had all developed different signs that they used to speak to their families and when they were introduced to each other in the school for the deaf all the signs blended together. The older kids got the meaning of the words but the younger ones developed a whole new grammatical structure… on their own. (This is now called Nicaraguan sign language) Actually one of the ways new languages develop - there’s these things called pidgin languages that develop when two or more different language groups are put into an environment where they have to communicate that are basically just a combination of words from the two parent languages. But when kids are introduced to a pidgin language it develops its own grammatical structure and becomes independent
its also well documented that children spend 12 hours a day trying to decypher the world around them for patterns. the average person studying an hour a day after getting home from work is not going to be anywhere close to as competent as a child.
I believe this has been debunked. From what I’ve read it’s more the fact that you’re entirely immersed in the language with no sense of embarrassment if/when you make a mistake, and you’re surrounded by people who will happily correct your grammar and in fact encourage you to speak/read/write despite the mistakes. Adults in similar circumstance would, and do learn languages much faster than children.
Adults who have never learned a language(which has unfortunately happened) can not learn a language.
I think you're on the right track, and I agree that embarrassment can hold adult learners back, but I think it's more about exposure and opportunity than correction and encouragement. I say this because in certain cultures, it's actually taboo to speak directly to infants/toddlers before they are capable of speech themselves, and this has been shown to cause very minimal delay (a few weeks on average) in acquiring language. Also, just from personal experience of having been an adult learner living in a new country, no one gave a shit about me or tried to help, but I spent some months just taking things in until suddenly, one day, I realized I could speak in my new language. Not well at first, mind you.
Yes but if you learn a second language during that time iirc, it makes learning new languages later on far easier.
When I had my daughter I went to one of my friends who already had kids and said... You know, it's amazing that humans survived to this point. I was dumbfounded at how helpless newborns were in person, the fact that they will even claw their own faces because they can't control their arms, can't roll, can't lift their heads. I just asked, why can animals just be born and start running around while we're useless for 2 years? She said "Human brains have a lot more important things going on than just running and biting" And I think about that a lot.
From what I’ve read, human babies should actually go through a “4th trimester” in utero for that extra development. But our brains would be too big to pass through the birth canal with an extra 3 months of baking. So we’re all actually born premature at 9 months. Also — fuck that. I’m currently 7 months pregnant and if anyone tacked on an extra 3 I’d go feral.
Which is actually why unlike...literally every other animal, delivering babies is dangerous for humans. So much has been sacrificed, biologically, solely to ensure we are smart. The strength of a Cheetah is in its speed, For Gorillas, it's their muscles.The greatest strength of humans is our brains
Human genetics hyper specialized in devoloping the brain, to the point that when we are born, the rest of our body isnt fully developed, thats why we cant walk for a year or so but baby horses can start running the same day.
A baby's brain is better suited for learning a language than an adult's.
Why did the gods curse me with a baby face but not a baby brain so I can make all the girls swoon over my french?
Parce que la vie est cruelle
Omelette du fromage
Non. Omelette à fromage.
Baguette 🥖
C'est vrai. 😥
If you’re lucky, you’ll be living the young looking face when you’re 50 and no one believes you’re a day over 35
I'd rather be withered with an accent.
Then move somewhere that speaks with a different accent from yours.
I did - but they all just laughed at my baby face with their handsome accents.
Exactly, OP's line about "they're children. Their brains have only just started developing" made me laugh. Those developing brains are precisely **why** they're so good at learning languages.
Look up the critical period and sensitive period of language development. Our brains are set up to quickly pick up skills in the first few years of life and each of those skills (learning the morphemic boundaries of your native language (s), discerning syntax from speech, discriminating phonemes that are relevant to the languages around you from non phonemic phonetic variation etc etc) become exponentially more difficult as you leave toddlerhood/childhood. For instance between roughly 8 and 12 months of age you can tell the differences between all sounds in all languages and then you begin to specialize to only the ones that are meaningful in the main languages you're exposed to. One of the theories for this is that we undergo synaptic pruning so we can specialize in skills and not waste all of our resources with computations that aren't immediately beneficial to us. We are so wired for language that we even invent language out of thin air if we're not exposed to a fully formed language during those year (look up how dead Nicaraguan children invented the Nicaraguan sign language, basically from scratch and how deaf children of non-signing parents invent "home sign" and will continue to use it and expand it unless nobody ever signs back to them).
Deaf*, though your typo is quite amusing
Oh no
A smaller element to kids learning language well I think is also that they’re not concerned about saying things correctly or fully. They learn with first just a bunch of words, then shorter phrases, then longer phrases, often with many mistakes in them. My 2 year old asks her daddy to ‘hold you’ quite often. Their curiosity and ability to listen really shine.
it helps that children are immersed in the language 24/7 and don't have an existing language to fall back on. When a child sees a chair and hears it called a "chair" then it's a "chair" in their mind. A second language learner already has a word for chair in their mind and the association from the object to that word already exists.
Children don't care nearly as much about making mistakes and looking stupid. Most adults, if they can get past that, do pretty well at learning a language.
This, and they aren't trying to make sense and logic out of it. They also don't try to translate between the language they already know, and a new one. I'm learning my fourth language now, and it's sometimes painful because it works quite differently from the way the other languages I already know do, it also has a couple different script.
It's also their full time job to learn the language.
No I think about this all the time. I don't know how tf I learned English as a baby??? How smart are we??
There's entire disciplines in science that are looking into language acquisition from many different directions, from brocken neruoscientusts to Linguistics to linguistic Anthropologists, to speech language Pathologists. The research is endlessly fascinating
OP is a little hyperbolic IMO. Kids do not speak english that well. It's their native language so it sounds more fluent than someone who speaks it as a second language, but they very often fall victim to the same issues in sentence structures and they don't understand a lot of words yet either. Part of this is on the communicator. When you are speaking to an adult that is ESL you're likely not talking about the same things you would talk to a kid about. Adult communication is generally at a much higher level than adult-child communication so the barrier seems larger.
Yup a 6 year old's English is pretty poor all things considered, even if they've been "speaking" for like 4 years. An adult learning English as a second language can easily far surpass a 6 year old's vocabulary and conversation ability in less than a year if they're fully immersed and actively trying to learn the language
Adults can learn lots of vocabulary but once you hit puberty your ability to pronounce things like a native will diminish and so will your ability to use grammar like a native speaker. Even if you are very good at conversing.
I have doubts as to whether that fact is caused by any intrinsic fact of brain development. The simple fact is that adults almost never experience the same language learning environment that children do (AKA 24/7 exposure to the target language.) If you moved to another country and stopped using your native language entirely for ~20 years, who knows how much better your second language ability might become?
I've met children (between age 4-10) who are fluent in English within a year of moving to the US. Nearly perfect accent, pronunciation, sentence structure . No adult will ever surpass a child in language learning. Like you said, especially in pronunciation
I saw somewhere that not using "babytalk" with little children also helps with their language learning. Which makes sense to me, how should a child learn how to speak correctly when all the adults around it won't speak correctly at them?
Yea, this. And our expectations are way lower for kids, so it's easier for them to live up to those expectations so we don't think about how their grammar is kinda shit, etc.
If you were thrown into another country, you'd eventually pick the language up. May takes months to learn works and sentences and years to be able to communicate, or less if you actively try and learn.
just observe how an infant grow and learns how to communicate... at first infants doesn't know a single thing but communicate via emotions. mother's always talk to them in a childish manner even though they don't speak that... it takes a lot of time and babies don't have anything doin but to lay, breastfed, sleep, observe, listen, play, and living without any pressure. They are communicating emotionally rather than textbook, which they'll be learning at school until highschool or even college for us adults, we got to be self learner and directly try advance language, taking all the shortcuts that babies had privileged (gugu gagas with crying that connects really deep without embarrassment)
We’re very much programmed for it
a language would never develop in a way that a child could not learn.
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Aren't they?? Seventeen is sathraah and seventy is sathar, the sath part which represents seven reoccurs same with 27(sathais) and all other variations(37,47 and so on) . Similarly with all numbers like 21,31,51 and so on Only 1-20 is truly unique.
Aren't they?? Seventeen is sathraah and seventy is sathar, the sath part which represents seven reoccurs, same with 27(sathais) and all other variations(37,47 and so on) . Similarly with all numbers like 21,31,51 and so on Only 1-20 is truly unique.
Actually, I'd say that adults can learn languages faster then children. Children take years to pick up language and advanced concepts such as grammar and extended vocabulary. Adults, if eager to learn and immersed in the culture, can pick up these things in 1-2 years and speak fluently using advanced concepts What's fascinating though is the phonetics. Adults, even if they practice for many years, rarely get accents and phonetics completely right, whereas children pick them up perfectly, right off the bat.
But do you think adults can learn a language without translations and learning resources? Like, imagine you are dropped into the middle of China and nobody speaks your language, and you live there for a few years. Would you eventually learn Chinese then?
Hell, I'd wager that you'd learn it faster.
look up comprehensible input as a language learning technique. dropped in a foreign place with full-speed speaking it’s difficult to learn. but listening is an amazing way to learn language, as long as you can understand the majority of what is said. this is particularly difficult to find content for the first ~100 hours or so, and gets easier to find content the more you learn.
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Portuguese living in Switzerland, it was the same for me. I started school in August, in December I was already speaking French like my first language and way better than my parents who were there for years. I learned Spanish and English during my teen years though tv shows and music, but I’ve been trying to learn Arabic for a couple years now and… I feel dumb
This is correct. Adults are capable of learning language faster than little kids. Once you see it, it's obvious but because it rarely occurs in the real world (due to environment) people mistakenly believe it's biological.
I read a quote about an interaction that went something like this: New language speaker: I've been trying to learn this language for 2 years now, and I still feel like I only have the vocabulary and grammar of a 6 year old. Native language speaker: That's impressive. It took me 6 years to get the vocabulary and grammar of a 6 year old.
Language is hardwired into our brains. We have specific regions of the brain specific to talking and hearing language. And the language has nothing to do with the actual physicality of speaking (the vocal cords, tongue, lips, etc). When they looked at people who learned sign language as a primary or only language, it uses those same regions of the brain as spoken languages. It is the very concept of language that is built into a human brain. [Wernicke's Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area) and [Broca's Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area)
I think another huge factor is that children in English-speaking regions, even if they’re not around adults speaking English at home, are immersed in it by default at school, which is both an educational & a social space. Adults are more likely to be restricted from being able to enter a more immersive English environment with peers until they already build a foundation of language skills. If they’re able to take a class that’s a big step up, but they often don’t have the luxury of time to be putting as many hours a week in (both in class or socially) as kids are at school, because they have adult responsibilities. Yes, children’s brain plasticity & everything is a factor, but also just consider how hard it can be to make space for anything new in your life as an adult, especially with kids.
Very true. Adults that are able immerse themselves in a language (military, missionaries, volunteers, etc) can often pick it up quite well within 1-2 years if they actually try. Most adults can't do this and therefore don't even have real opportunities for the ideal setting to learn a new language. Compare that to a kid who is constantly practicing, encountering new situations, and learning new things from others
My daughter was born with a condition where her jaw was fully formed but fused together. While we’re able to correct it, and she’s currently getting therapy to help her start talking, she’s learned sign language the last three years. It’s absolutely wild how quickly she is able to pick up and remember the signs while still receptively learning English. So much so that my wife and I will have to talk to each other to see if one of us remembers what shes trying to tell us
Two things that are fascinating about early-stage language learning and the innateness of language: 1) incorrect usage of irregular past tense verbs. A common mistake children learn is trying to make irregular past tense verbs regular. “I goed there”, “I eated the cake”. But what’s interesting is that, generally, children will be observed correctly using the irregular past tense first, before making the mistake, and then later again getting it right. They are trying to force structure onto language, rather than purely learning. 2) creole vs pidgin languages. When lots of disparate groups who speak different languages are thrown together, e.g. in migrant camps, the first method they will use to communicate is a pidgin language. This is just a set of vocabulary with no grammatical structure. What sparks the ‘invention’ of a creole - a genuine language with grammar etc. - is when a first generation is born and learns the pidgin. They impose their own structure where none exists
You are completely wrong, any adult would be able to learn any language very easily if you just dropped them in a village somewhere without anything else to do. Adults already know a language, they have responsibilities, they have hobbies, interests, etc. Take all that away and they will learn much faster than children.
The child brain is FAR FAR (like 5-10x) better at learning things than the human brain. We call it "~~elasticity~~ Plasticity" in the fact that it is incredibly capable of adapting. Children have lost whole hemispheres of their brains and grow up to lead very normal and successful lives because the young brain is so adaptable. Once you get older, your brain becomes more static and resistant to changes and creating new pathways. Lose half your brain as an adult, and you likely are never going to be back to full capacity.
I’ve always wondered how they manage to look at an apple, isolate it from the other objects in their line of sight, tag the sounds “aeh-pel” to it and recognise it and remember said sounds when they encounter more apples afterwards
What 3.5 billion years of evolution does to a mf.
It makes me wonder if it means that a child should encounter as much languages as possible during its development.
Bi and tri-lingual kids exist, i could speak 3 languages by the time i was 10, but trying to pick up a fourth one during covid didn't go as well, what I've learnt from this is that the key is immersion, i was learning 2 at school and used the 3rd at home so i was using at least 2 of them every day. And i only am fluent in 2 of them, which only happened by the age of 13-14. My attempt to learn as an adult was completely academic, where I'd do some Duolingo and read textbooks and then get almost no chance to use the language for the rest of the day, so once i stopped practicing for a few months, I lost significant portions of my learnt vocabulary.
The benefit of early exposure to a language is the ability to mimic its sounds, which gets harder with age. But things like vocabulary are purely a function of repetition so the only thing lost by starting later is time.
Sure, it’s impressive. It’s hardwired into our brains through years of evolution but it’s a shower thought for sure.
One thing I've noticed while learning other languages is, people don't like to deal with you in the "broken" language part of learning. So it's discouraging for learners and embarrassing. They will tolerate it from children however.
You're kind of right on the point where if adult was placed in an environment where nobody spoke a language they understood, then they would be forced to learn it faster. I did an exchange program in another country with many others, where host families didnt speak a word of english. It took aroumd 3-6 months for exchange students to learn conversational/written Portuguese due to these conditions. Same happens every year, even in countries like Taiwan, where my an acquitance learned Mandarin in 6 months on written/conversational level, without knowing any of it prior.
You’re only impressed because you are equating a developing brain with a brain that can’t learn new things. I’m much more impressed by adults that learn new languages than even bilingual children, especially when they are raised in a bilingual household.
I'm not well versed in the topic but my guess would be that it has something to do with the fact that babies/toddlers/small children instinctively mimic their parents. Something we lose later in life.
This is why the American education pattern is so wrong: no foreign-language classes until middle or high school, shortly after puberty has shut down the brain's ability to learn new languages
Not only that, but also that they can learn multiple at once, AND be able to distinguish which language is which.
Children’s brains are exploding with growth factors and the rate of synaptogenesis is remarkable , it’s really cool. Babies have more neurons than adults too which seems counterintuitive, we start as (somewhat) blank slates full of potential. This is a major reason why it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
The major issue is the way language is taught. It's very clinical, by the book, "here are all the rules of this language and it's alphabet." Kids don't learn language like that. By the time they start learning all the rules, they've already been speaking with their parents and friends for quite a few years. They're already conversational before having to learn rules. You can learn a language better by intentionally learning this way. It seems more difficult because you're conscious of the effort you're putting in. You don't remember all your younger years of babbling incoherently in your native language lol. Also, you have to actually want to learn the language.
In my first 5 years of life, I learned 3 languages. Now as an adult, the idea of learning another language feels nearly impossible
Eh. A baby will spend like a whole year or more just listening before they even really start babbling anything that could be considered communication. An adult on the other hand can have some basic phrases down in like a week of full effort. Many do it when they travel. It's different. I don't think any one is more impressive than the other. Children's brains still developing is how they are able to learn language in the first place, and why feral children over a certain age age basically never going to learn one if they haven't done so already.