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If learning a language is so easy for young
children, why is it so difficult when you’re

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older?

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We have entire industries devoted to helping
adults learn languages “the easy way”.

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I mean, never mind there isn’t an “easy”
way for adults to learn language, and never

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mind that different people learn in very different
ways, there are a hundred companies that’ll

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happily take your money. I’ve tried a couple.
They didn’t work all that well, and my French

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is just as stumbling as it was when I tried
to learn it in school -- probably worse, given

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that I’ve forgotten half of what I had to
learn then.

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But young children just learn languages automatically,
don’t they? Surround them with language

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speakers, and they’ll just pick it up easily.

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Well, first of all: easily? I mean, a baby
spends about a whole year with nothing but

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input before it even starts producing any
sort of coherent sound, while an adult can

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concentrate for an hour or so and get a few
basic sentences memorised. And that baby’s

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learning constantly, almost every minute it’s
awake. Adults have a heck of a lot of other

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things to do, including communicating and
thinking in the languages we already know.

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There is something called the “critical
period hypothesis”. The idea is that for

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the first couple of years of life, the brain
is particularly good at picking up languages.

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Noam Chomsky proposed a “language acquisition
device” in the brain that switched off as

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you got older. Now, that hypothesis is well-known
enough to be taken as fact by the public at

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large, but linguists are still debating it.
Chomsky moved away from his language acquisition

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device, towards the idea that we steadily
narrow down the parameters of the language

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we’re taught from a long, long list of possibilities.
And that theory is still getting a lot of

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criticism.

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In fact, if you ask the big question: “how
do children acquire language”, then the

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answer is: nobody really knows, but some linguists
have really strong opinions on it.

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We know that language must be partly based
on genetics, and partly based on surroundings.

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No matter how much you talk to a gorilla,
it’s never going to be able to understand

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more than a few words -- and there are serious
questions about whether any of the great apes

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have actually managed that. Even the smartest
animal, with the best tutor, will never be

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a conversation partner. So there must be something
fundamentally human about language.

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But at the same time: there’s nothing genetic
about which language you can speak. If I’d

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been adopted at birth by French-speaking parents,
I would be speaking and thinking in French:

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there’s no gene for the English language.

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There is one thing that’s clear, though.
We’re born with the potential to speak any

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human language. But after a while, surrounded
by just a few languages, or maybe just one,

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we work out what we need to listen for -- and
we stop listening for anything else.

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Many languages on the Indian subcontinent
have a distinction between p and p(h). So,

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pa would be different from p(h)a. Hear the
difference? The second one is aspirated, there’s

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a bit more air coming out my mouth. Pa versus
P(h)a. If you don’t speak one of those languages:

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do you reckon you could hear a subtle difference
like, when there’s someone speaking at full

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speed? Do you reckon you could produce that
difference, reliably, without thinking about

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it? Millions of people, billions of people,
can and do, and they learned it automatically:

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but try and pick that up as an adult, and
it’s going to take you a long, long time.

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It’s called categorical perception: our
brain takes this strange input, these electrical

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signals based on changes in air pressure,
and we look for particular categories within

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them. And once we’ve filed something into
a category, the other details don’t matter.

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But it’s not all over if your brain is too
set in its ways, like mine is. Adults are

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really quite good at learning vocabulary,
the same way we’re good at memorising anything

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else. Most of the language courses aimed at
adults emphasise that: they use flashcards

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and translation exercises, and don’t worry
too much about getting production perfect.

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You may never sound, or even think, like a
native speaker, but that doesn’t mean you

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can’t at least make yourself understood.

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