People often assume children learn languages much more easily than adults. I doubt that’s true.
A few days ago I argued about this with a friend. His point was that a child’s brain makes new connections faster than an adult’s. I don’t think that matters much. An adult’s experience with learning, and everything they already know, lets them learn a language faster.
Starting with no reference at all
When you come into the world you have to learn an enormous amount, and the brain keeps up. Still, compared to most animals, it takes a human forever to look after itself. I’m glad the days when eating was a challenge are over (though I still don’t wear white to dinner).
Everything is new, and without a reference it’s hard to learn a new movement or a new language. Jumping isn’t hard once you can stand and walk, but standing for the first time? From down there, jumping must look like a superpower.
Having a reference helps a lot
It’s the same with languages. If you know Latin, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian should come fairly easily, while Japanese might still feel hard because you have nothing to compare it to.
But a language is more than its vocabulary. You already know a grammatical system, and you can hold the new one up against it. The verb goes at the end of the sentence? Different, but fine. The surprises still come. How many ways are there to say “I” in Japanese? Something like nine common ones?
You can also move your mouth and tongue more precisely than a child. I do think it’s harder for adults to sound like a native speaker, but mostly because they’re too embarrassed to try. For some reason, sounding like a native isn’t always appreciated. At school you get teased for sounding too French in French class, and people make jokes about newsreaders who pronounce foreign names the way they’re meant to be said. Actors do it for roles, and so can you. It’s fine if your voice changes a bit when you switch languages. I use my mouth differently in English than in German, and that’s something you can learn.
Use your experience
Adults can also learn systematically. You may already know what works for you. Do you learn by seeing? Do you need to hear things a lot? Or do you want to lose yourself in something you enjoy and pick up the language along the way? If you think about it, you can find the method that lets you learn naturally. A child can’t do that yet, because it takes time and experience to figure out how you learn best.
So I’d say adults come out on top: they learn faster and better. There’s a reason we don’t train children to be doctors or pilots, and there aren’t many great child novelists either. Using a language well takes an adult’s skills and experience. Even if you only speak your native language, you start ahead of a child learning its first.
So why do children seem to learn faster?
Their brains aren’t better. They just don’t have a choice. A child gets tossed into a world where everyone around them already speaks the language perfectly, and the only way to get anything (food, attention, a turn on the swing) is to talk. Nobody sits them down in a classroom with other kids who can’t speak either and teaches them slowly. They’re immersed, and they learn to get by.
I still see the same thing with adults. People who move to a small town in rural Japan speak very good Japanese after a short time, and I’ve watched it happen with people who moved to small towns in Germany too. In Berlin, on the other hand, you can live for decades without learning German, because there’s always someone happy to switch to English.
So the method still works for adults. It just doesn’t happen on its own anymore: you have to put yourself somewhere the language is the only way to join in.