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I always wondered why kids could learn a handful of languages and adults struggle to learn anything past one. Language is an interesting one. Maybe it’s my per

• colordrops 6y ago
  Hmm, I'm 45 and it doesn't seem hard. I think adults have a lot less time and more stress rather than some hobbled brain.
  • dalbasal 6y ago
    Very few people can achieve fluency in 2 or 3 years. Children do it naturally, given a right environment, and simultaneously for two or three languages. That doesn't mean it's impossible. "Hard" is relative. But, children's brains quite clearly have abilities that are lost later on.
    • ggrrhh_ta 6y ago
      The fluency achieved in even four years is very very limited: very correct from the point of view of how well the grammar used by adults work (better than adults over that period), but the range of the things they can express is much smaller than adults learning the language over those four years (several hours per day).
      • michaelscott 6y ago
        To add to this, the vocabulary and the types of sentences that children will construct are much simpler. They may talk about animals, what they've done at school and what to play next. An adult reading a foreign newspaper, by contrast, has to be able to understand language around current affairs, politics and socio-economic events and structures. A very different side to any language.
        • ggrrhh_ta 6y ago
          Absolutely. I have lived in places where the main language is not in the family of those you speak and I have experienced two situations: a) you have to work every day and there is little to zero chance of being exposed to the language at work, plus, little over the weekends, no possibility of finding courses outside working hours, etc. and b) spending the first months six hours a day exclusively learning the language. Well, in my unscientific experience, with b), in months you get the fluency that adults typically get in about two years.
          • michaelscott 6y ago
            I can absolutely believe that. I'm a relatively recent transplant to a new country and though I fall into your category A and am nowhere near fluent, I could conduct basic daily affairs (ordering at restaurants, pay bills at a post office, make basic appointments) in about 2 months or so of being here. I think adults don't give themselves enough credit in language learning.
    • freddie_mercury 6y ago
      Children are nowhere close to fluent after 2-3 years. It takes children 10+ years to reach fluency. Just Google "myth of children language learning" for dozens of peer reviewed references. Here's just one example: "Research comparing children to adults has consistently demonstrated that adolescents and adults perform better than young children under controlled conditions (e.g., Snow & Hoefnagel-Hoehle, 1978)."
      • DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
        Thanks for citing this, and clarifying my ignorance! Your point is so obvious to me now.
      • galactus 6y ago
        I wonder about those "controlled conditions"... I know its anecdotical evidence, but this really contradicts everything I have ever seen after years ans years of interacting with immigrant families (and being a immigrant myself). Kids are usually perfectly fluent after a couple of years of school while parents are still struggling, even if they are also totally immersed. It really surprises me this is considered a "myth".
• autokad 6y ago
  also, people annoy me at how bad they are at teaching language. 'you slightly mispronounced that word in the sentence, we are not moving on until its perfect'. kids are able to move on mistakes and focus on big picture things, filling in the gaps later.
  • richthegeek 6y ago
    To be fair, native speakers often act like "you slightly mispronounced that word in the sentence, so I have literally zero idea what any of it meant and am doubting your intelligience" It's very frustrating in Polish, for example, when I forget to roll my R's (difficult with my lisp!) and somehow I'm talking alien nonsense.
  • bluejay2 6y ago
    Agreed. The focus on error-free communication at the early stages is what I think turns off a lot of would-be language learners. I like the idea of only correcting learners when really needed (i.e. when their message can not be understood) but letting the other stuff go (used the wrong preposition? don't worry about it. he/she will pick it up as they progress)
• hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Kids have infinite time and dedicated one on one live-in tutors (parents). As an adult you don't have either. Though dating someone is your only real approximation of the latter. There are some cherries on top of that, like how a babbling kid doesn't care to make mistakes. But I would think all of them pale in comparison to the two big advantages above.
• Enginerrrd 6y ago
  I tried to learn spanish as a kid in around middle school. It was an extracurricular class and it was the first thing I'd really ever failed at. Now at 30ish, I find I can learn languages MUCH easier. I speak fluent french and am reasonably conversant in Spanish. (I can read it pretty well though.)
  • zensavona 6y ago
    Any tips on language learning? I have struggled with and ultimately failed at learning two languages (German and Thai).
    • dalbasal 6y ago
      Emphasise speaking. We tend to focus on reading, oral understanding & writing. Those fit easily into "sit down and study for 45m" format. Speaking doesn't, and can feel uncomfortable or contrived in classroom settings. One of the big reasons "immersion" often leads to fast breakthroughs is because it comes with a lot of natural speaking. That's often the bottleneck. You don't stop and think of the correct grammar, words or whatnot when speaking. You just try to make yourself understood as best as you can, with whatever language skills you have. Even 200 words is something. Engaging that intuitive improvisation can be really helpful.
      • bluejay2 6y ago
        I have a different take. I would say don't worry about speaking at all, at least not in the first several months. It will come when you are ready. Focus on understanding messages from comprehensible input (be it from books, movies, whatever). Speaking is hard, and the anxiety caused by forced speaking (for example, the type you find in a lot of high-school language classes) can be a barrier towards language acquisition. In a nutshell, I subscribe to the Input Hypothesis that Stephen Krashen writes a lot about on his site sdkrashen.com. (Under that hypothesis, the gains from immersion, when they arise, are because of the higher amount of interesting, comprehensible input that is directed at the learner, rather than an increase in the learner's output) Yes, at some point you'll need to work on pronunciation but that is something different than the type of extemporaneous speaking we are discussing here. But this probably only goes to show what another commenter pointed out, which is that there is a lot of conflicting advice out there.
• dalbasal 6y ago
  I think you you put your finger onto the right place: language. Kids can learn one or multiple languages extremely fast, and they can do it without formal, strict or even intentional instruction... at a very young age. There's obviously something different, and for this purpose superior, about a child's brain. There are probably a lot of more subtle examples, language is something that's easily comparable. Naturally, that's interesting to study. There may be ways of replicating some of the child brain's abilities in adults. But for immediate and practical purposes, it makes sense to just take advantage of this window while it exists. Multilingual childcare seems like an awesome choice, for example. We should also identify other aspects of learning that are like this, and create the environment for them to engage. I've heard that navigation skills are similar... very easy to develop at a young age... even down to a constant awareness of cardinal directions.
  • dorkwood 6y ago
    > Kids can learn one or multiple languages extremely fast Can they really, though? I have a three-year old nephew who can speak, but not particularly well. I feel like if you dropped me into another country where I didn't speak the language, and had someone to look after me and respond to me whenever I tried to communicate my frustrations or desires, and I had no other responsibilities other than to exist, I could get to the vocabulary of a three-year old in less than a year.
    • zeepzeep 6y ago
      3-year olds don't only learn language. They learn literally everything.
      • dorkwood 6y ago
        Yes, this is true. My argument is that I think I could learn faster than a child at a given task if you stripped me of any adult responsibilities. The fact that children are having to learn to navigate the world at the same time they're learning to speak is precisely what would allow me to beat them.
    • 6y ago
• mvn9 6y ago
  Kids take years to learn a language. They do it almost all day long. Emerge yourself in an environment with the language you want to learn. Boost some important words with spaced repetition. You will learn faster than any child. Accents, on the other hand, that's a different story.
• throwaway5778 6y ago
  Seeing how the vast majority of adults does in fact speak two languages and a huge chunk of them even more (e.g. most of Africa) I'd say your initial premise (adults struggle to learn anything past one) is misguided.
  • ferros 6y ago
    I’m not so sure. Again speaking only from my observations. Some people i know have migrated to another country in their early twenties, taken on their new host language as their core. E.g partner and kids with this new language. Yet still after 40 years they are not as comfortable as with their original language.
  • anonytrary 6y ago
    I think he is referring to brain plasticity differences between adults and children. Also, your rebuttal does not consider the fraction of those adults who learned those languages when they were young. I would guess that adults who already know more than one language can learn another more quickly than adults who only know one language.
    • throwaway5778 6y ago
      Yeah people love to go on about brain plasticity but few people actually know much about it (for instance how you can re-induce said plasticity in adults), let alone how it relates to language learning as an adult. >Also, your rebuttal does not consider the fraction of those adults who learned those languages when they were young. That still includes: -Pretty much all immigrants -All populations using a regional lingua franca (Modern Standard Arabic, Swahili, Indonesian, French, English, Russian, Portuguese) -Everyone who learned English as a requirement for their job (that's everyone in business, research, the tourism industry, the software industry and probably a few others I'm missing) -Everyone who learned another language as part of their higher education (usually English, but can also include languages like French, German or Russian) Of course the language acquisition is usually far from perfect. You probably won't get rid of your accent as an adult, and your writing may be rife with mistakes. But as a communication tool, most adults manage just fine, because communication is part of being human and humans are naturally good at communicating.
• raverbashing 6y ago
  Time Kids can watch cartoons all day, they talk with other native speakers all day without worrying they'll make a mistake and just talking about stuff, etc (Also they're usually at school) Adults are judged more and have less time to learn, even passive learning (listening intently, etc). They also are understandably more focused on work. I've learned other languages when adult and it was more a matter of time than "not being able to". Sure, it is harder and I'm not going to deny brain plasticity, but I learned more when I was less able to depend on English.
• melvinroest 6y ago
  > I always wondered why kids could learn a handful of languages and adults struggle to learn anything past one. > Maybe it’s my personal bias but it seems a lot easier to learn other things than language as an adult. I started to speak properly when I was 4, I was a bit late. But imagine the following: You'd go to a country that you don't know the language of for the next 5 years. You can assume that you don't need to worry about your survival as food, water and shelter are provided for you among some luxuries like internet. Basically, you achieved financial independence. The challenge becomes: in this new land you have to learn the local language within 5 years. There is, however, one caveat. You are only allowed to interact with the local population in their (spoken and body) language. You're not allowed to use any other educational resource. In other words, you have to learn a new language exactly like a baby does. Could you do it in 5 years? I bet if you set your mind to it, you really could.
  • throwaway5778 6y ago
    Your 2 years estimate is way too conservative, I've seen people do it in a year, sometimes a few months if the languages are close enough (French-Italian-Spanish-Portuguese etc.) Then there are all the really intensive courses/immersion programs where failure is basically forbidden (FSI, DLI, French Foreign Legion) and people reach B2-C1 very quickly, even for 'hard' languages (like Japanese or Arabic for a native English speaker, or French for a native Chinese speaker).
    • melvinroest 6y ago
      Well, the constraint is that you're not allowed to follow a course right? Moreover, my argument is to convince naysayers. I wonder what Japanese course you're talking about.
  • saeranv 6y ago
    There's one more factor/advantage that should be accounted for: children and their parents/grandparents engage in a natural feedback loop. Parents try and teach the children words, once the child starts repeating the words the parents get excited and repeat it back, and so on and so forth. It's like having extremely dedicated, enthusiastic tutors for those five years.
• karmakaze 6y ago
  I see it the other way, that these other things have 'a language' of their own. There's vocabulary and higher structures and usages that emerge from it. I've seen this time and again. Branches of math or science, music, and even complex games (Go, Starcraft2, etc) have many layers. I can't clearly differentiate what's needed to learn one kind and not the other. A game of Go has even been called a conversation between two people. Edit: I'm (re)learning to play Starcraft2 at a higher level and loving those 'elevated plateaus' feeling of learning which does get rare.