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It seems like magic.

The multilingual polyglots learn six, seven, or twenty languages.

While others can learn only one or two, they master them at an uncommonly high level of proficiency, with a native accent and local slang.

Babies, unable to do literally any useful work for themselves, turn from babbling babblers to creators of fluent sentences overnight.

Even retirees, old enough to be great-grandparents to the freshest generation of two-year-olds approaching fluency, are learning new languages at a later age and doing so successfully.

This begs the question: how do we geniuses, with our big brains and advanced society, learn a language?

 

 

The question is difficult to answer, but we can tell you one thing: you don't have to be extremely smart, or especially talented, or "good at languages" to learn a language.

The specifics of how exactly you are going to learn a foreign language are up to you, but basically we all learn a language through the same biological, cognitive and social processes that work the same way in different cultures and in different people.

Learning your first language as a child is a very different feat than learning a foreign language as an adult. However, to really understand what happens when we learn foreign languages as adults, we need to understand not only how we naturally acquire our native language, but also why language is uniquely human and ubiquitous in our society.

 

Learning Language: The Thing That Makes Us Human?

You could argue that when you’re learning a language, you’re at your most human.

Language is something we all share as humans, and alongside our fancy opposable thumbs it’s one of the core characteristics that make us just a bit cooler than all the other animals.

Today there are around seven thousand languages spoken around the world, including sounds and grammatical features that can seem distinctly alien to the languages many of us are familiar with, yet all languages are in nearly every way more similar than contrasting.

Starting with the most fundamental fact, any healthy human child exposed to any language anywhere in the world will always, always learn language. There’s never once been a kid who just never quite picked it up, and there never will be.

Things don't end there: did you know that kids learn a lot of linguistic structures in precisely the same way all over the world, regardless of the language they speak?

In human society, the proof that language is versatile and that we all learn it in the same way are two of the biggest pieces of evidence in favor of the theory of universal grammar, one of the concepts that brought linguist Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to fame. Universal grammar argues that people are born with an innate ability to learn languages and that the mechanisms that determine and interpret grammar are hardwired into the brain.

Although there are a variety of arguments (some more persuasive and exciting than others) in favor of different interpretations of human language, Chomsky's theory has been virtually the consensus among linguists since the 1970s.

 

Independent of differences of view as to where it came from, most modern linguistics agrees that human language is essentially a system of symbols used to communicate. We use words like apple, elma, and تفاحة as symbols to point our minds to a delicious red fruit that actually has no connection to the word we are saying. It's just an apple, or an elma, or something else, because that's what we say.

You might say that it is this capacity for symbolic thinking that makes us human, allowing us to use sounds, pictures, letters, and other abstract representations of things or ideas that are not directly in front of us.

As we move toward fluency in our first language or any language, we learn to use and understand these symbols to communicate with others and interact with the world around us. Moreover, this is important to how we think about how we learn language.

How do we learn a language?

 Children's Language Acquisition: How We All Learned Our Mother Tongue Without Skimming a Book

No one ever has to learn how to learn their native language. It happens whether we want it to or not.

One of the reasons children learn language so well is neurological: A child's brain has some special technological enhancements. Although we were all born with them, we lost them somewhere between diapers and high school Spanish.

Babies, like all humans, are experts at statistical learning: they observe the vast amount of linguistic information presented to them every day and make exceptionally accurate generalizations about the patterns they deduce. Every time you say "bottle" with a bottle in your hand, an infant's brain records some notes about the possible connection between the sounds they hear and their possible relationship to that object in mom's hand.

But they are also busy exploring when you use "in" rather than "on," why you sometimes call yourself "me" and sometimes "me," and what happens when a familiar verb gets an "-ing" at the end. Listening, analyzing, and collecting statistical patterns is only half of the story of a child's language acquisition.

We can think of the other half as the "use it or lose it" principle.

Combined with the mass of statistical data collected, children use social language learning strategies to truly master their native language. Therein lies the reason for another universal linguistic truth: No child will ever learn a language without human interaction.

It is through a combination of statistical and social data that children begin to master language and use it to communicate with others at around the age of one year old with breakneck speed. "want milk" makes Daddy bring the bottle, "again" makes Mommy come back for another round of peek-a-boo, and "what's this" becomes the key to unlocking all the world's mysteries.

 

Adult Language Learning: How We Learn Foreign Languages, Why We Can't Learn a Language, and How We Should Learn It

The two core elements of language acquisition in children -- statistical and social learning -- are the same as those in adult language learning. However, both the adult brain and, more importantly, adult social life have some key differences from children's.

Language learning by adults is essentially the same game, only with different rules.

Being an adult is hard: why we can't learn a language the way children do

Starting language learning as a child is a great strategy, as long as you remember that you're doing it as a child, given the differences between children's and adults' language learning.

Since both statistical "nuts and bolts" and social use of language are major components of language learning, it should not surprise you that they are reflected differently in the lives of three-year-olds and thirty-year-olds.

 

It is through understanding these distinctions that you can learn a language in the same way as your younger counterparts.

These are some of the key differences that adult language learners should be aware of when starting to learn a new language:

 

• - Grown-ups already are fluent in at least one language. Yes, you already have some language skills. But it can actually be a problem. One way to explain why children always beat us at learning languages is that we adults are so good at our native languages that it confuses our view of language in general. Your first language lays a hard foundation in your brain for language learning and has a huge impact on subsequent language learning.

• - Adults react to social sanctions, while children do not react in most cases. Children are not afraid to make mistakes. If it takes them two tries or twenty to understand a grammatical rule or pronunciation, they will go back until they get their way. Adults, on the other hand, are especially prone to shame and embarrassment. We are afraid of looking stupid in front of others, so we protect ourselves by using new language too cautiously (afraid to try new words and forms we think we can understand) or by not speaking at all.

• - Adults interact mostly as equals. The child's main interlocutors are his or her parents and other adults, who naturally adapt their speech to the less developed linguistic abilities of children. Adults, on the other hand, are used to communicating as equals. The vast majority of speech exchanges in a foreign language force you to communicate at the same level and speed as native speakers.

 

• - Other things require our attention. Children tend to have a very high unemployment rate, which means they can devote absolutely all their time to learning their native language. Adults, on the other hand, who are busy with work, assignments, connections, and the thousand other things we have to do every day to stay on track, finding time to learn a language can be difficult.

 

• Adults have to try. This is the biggest difference: a child only needs to do nothing for a couple of years, and his or her linguistically advanced brain will make sure that he or she learns. With adults, our brains are less malleable and more resistant to change, so we have to push it, and sometimes all those attempts only make things worse.

 

In fact, adults and children learn language the same way. We observe native speakers, identify patterns in language (statistical learning), and then test these patterns by interacting with other people, using their feedback to correct and refine the patterns we have derived (social learning).

What really changes between childhood and adulthood is our brains and our lives.

But the former doesn't change as much as you think, and we have enough control over the latter to keep it from destroying our multilingual aspirations.