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What If We’ve Been Teaching Languages Wrong?
Why you still can’t speak Spanish or French
Most people think it’s easier for a young child to learn a language, compared to an adult.
That’s certainly what the conventional wisdom says. We also have the anecdotal evidence that many people fail to learn a second language, but no one fails to learn their native language.
But doesn’t that seem a little odd? After all, adults do basically everything else better than children, including learning. Why are languages different?
The most popular theory is that there is something special about brain plasticity during infancy that is perfect for learning languages. The usual metaphor is that an infant’s brain soaks up language like a sponge soaks up water.
It’s a satisfying enough explanation that most people stop asking questions and just accept it as fact. But it isn’t the only explanation available to us. In fact, it might not even be the most obvious.
The biggest difference between an infant learning a language and an adult learning a language is that we employ opposite teaching techniques for the two…
