Q&A: Is it easier to learn a language as a child?

To celebrate the launch of my Eureka Languages project, I am tackling a series of questions regarding learning foreign languages, particularly as an adult. In this post, I shall deal with an age old myth: is it easier to learn a language as a child? This is something I have heard people say both in Singapore as well as in the UK - is there any truth to it? Most often, I have heard this as an excuse, "I can't speak (insert language) because I didn't learn it as a child." Is the adult mind any less capable than a child's mind when it comes to learning languages?

Allow me state my position on the issue: it is a silly, flimsy excuse that is used by people who are simply too lazy to embark on the challenge of learning a new language in their adulthood. I believe that the opposite is true: that it is in fact far easier to learn a language as an adult than as a child. It is a complete fallacy that our adult brains are not longer capable of learning once we reach a certain age. Many of us undertake the most complex, challenging and difficult academic challenges in our lives at university - apart from the special cases of child prodigies, the youngest age that one can gain admission to a university is 18. Some of us go to university later in our lives and it is not uncommon for adults in their 40s and 50s still pursuing post-graduate further education. Our brains are most productive in our adulthood, not in our childhood: we are remarkably unproductive in the early years of our childhood.

How do human brains learn and process new information?

Those of us working with technology these days are constantly learning how to use new programmes, new devices, new versions of existing/old technology and this isn't something we have much choice about - the world is constantly evolving and we have to keep learning new stuff everyday just to keep up with everyone else. And guess what? Most of us do this fairly well - so much so that when I noticed an older gentleman in a lift the other day using a painfully outdated mobile phone, I thought, "oh my, why are you refusing to get a more up to date modern phone? Come on. You don't look that old yet..." We have quite an open mind when it comes to figuring out new technology. There are plenty of things we only learn as adults such as driving. Yet we are not at all put off by the fact that we are starting from scratch as adults, we simply have a can-do attitude when it comes to passing our driving tests.

Aha, but I know what you're going to say. "The learning of languages uses a different part of the mind." Does it, really? This excuse has no scientific basis whatsoever, what makes you think we use a separate part of the brain to learn a language compared to say studying for a masters degree, learning a musical instrument, learning a new sport or learning how to drive? The functions of the brain are extremely complex and there are no neatly organized like compartments which deal with clearly defined functions - no, rather it is one big messy, gooey, grey mass in our skulls.

How we process information is far more complex than you think. 

Yes, parts of the brains do perform less effectively when we become old and this is associated with brain diseases such as dementia which do affect some older folks. However, this is a very specific medical condition which usually does not affect adults in their 20s and 30s with healthy brains. Quite simply, this theory which claims that there is a part of the brain that deals with learning languages only up till puberty is completely untrue. It has no medical basis whatsoever and it is cooked up by adults who are just too lazy to bother to try to learn a foreign language.

I also don't believe that children learn languages any more quickly. In fact the only factor holding adults back is the time factor: adults have many responsibilities. We have demanding jobs, we often work long hours, we have to do household chores, we have to go to the supermarket to get food or there will be no dinner tonight, we have to take care of our families - our to-do list is often endless and trying to find time to study a foreign language properly is often a challenge. Children however, do have the luxury of time to study: parents often make sure their children dedicate enough hours a day to study and revision so they can do well in their exams.  So whilst I recognize that the conditions are more conducive for a child to learn anything from musical instruments to ballet to foreign languages, this advantage is more a result of the social roles children are assigned, rather than anything neurological or physiological.

The social role of a student is conducive for learning.

It is easier for an adult to claim, "I am too old to learn a foreign language" than to admit the truth, "I am just too busy/lazy to learn a foreign language." Even if the latter is true through no fault of the adult in question, that then puts the ball back in his court. "If you really wanted to learn a foreign language, then you can make time - it is just a question of time management. No one is asking you to quit your job to become a student again, we're just asking you to find a few 30 minutes slots throughout your week to study this language." It then becomes a long term undertaking that requires quite a lot of discipline and motivation to see through, thus it is far easier just to give up without even trying by pretending that your brain is no longer capable of learning a new language.

To understand the process of learning, we have to understand the capacity of the human mind at different stages of our lives. Now all this should be fairly familiar to you. Let's take a subject like mathematics. If you were to pick up an exam paper set for a 7 year old child, a typical question would be fairly simple like: 30 - 19 = _______

Young children are only taught fairly simple concepts at school.

For an 11 to 12 year old, a more challenging problem-solving question could be expected, like:

Two candles of the same height are lit at the same time. The first candle takes 5 hours to burn completely. The second candle takes 4 hours to burn completely. If each candle burns at a constant rate, how long does it take, in hours, for the height of the first candle to be four times that of the second candle?

For a 14 to 15 year old, you could expect a more difficult question involving quadratic equations like:

Solve the equation: 2(x² - 2x) - 5 = 0

And by the time you get to 17 to 18 year olds, it gets even harder and would be more like:

"Knowing that combinational coefficient Cnr=n!(n−r)r!, find C51

The older you are, the more capable of handling complex maths you become.

I could dig out far more complicated questions for university level mathematics, but you get the idea, mathematics gets progressively more and more difficult as the child gets older because we expect the child to be able to handle far more challenging mathematics as the child gets older. We do not expect an 9 year old to be able to handle quadratic equations - that kind of algebra is considered too difficult for an 9 year old to understand. Here's the punchline: children don't have any kind of super powers to learn difficult, complicated stuff. They don't. Quite the opposite in fact - everything has got to be made easy and accessible for them. Why should it be any different when it comes to learning languages then? Gosh, I refer you to this post when I was simply aghast at just how ridiculously simple Chinese textbooks in the UK are - they would dispel any notion of children being able to learn languages easily.

Likewise, we can look at the way we learn English is taught to children. At the age of 6, they may be constructing simple sentences to describe the things they see, like "The vase is on the table, next to the window." At the age of 12, they start telling simple stories, such as recounting a visit to a museum or the seaside. By the time they get to 16 or 17, they are writing essays to argue more complex issues like whether university education should be free or if censorship is good for society. I am stating the obvious here: an 18 year old is going to have a far stronger command of the language than the 6 year old - the 6 year old has no special gifts to learn the language more quickly or efficiently.

Foreign languages are not easy for young children.

Rather, as adults, we have far greater mental capacity to tackle difficult academic and mental challenges. As a child, I had to memorize various terms in Italian for my piano theory exams: largo, allegro, staccato, adagio, crescendo, fortissimo, presto, trionfale, vivo - I found it hard to memorize them as I simply didn't have any useful knowledge it my head as a young child to make any meaningful connections with those Italian words. As an 8 year old child in Singapore, I have had virtually no contact with any Italian language or culture and thus I had no other means but to resort to rote memory to learn those Italian terms. And ooh boy, I found it difficult and confusing back then.

Looking at those terms again as an adult today who speaks French and Spanish, I instantly recognized and understood practically all of them despite not having looked at some of these terms in about 25 years. Why? Because as an adult, I have acquired far a lot more knowledge of Italian and of music (from opera, from my many trips to Italy, from Italian loanwords that have crept into English and French, from having watched Italian films etc) to help me make sense of these Italian words. Should this come as a surprise? Hardly. Italian is far easier for me today as a 38 year old adult than it was for me as an 8 year old kid because of all this extra knowledge I have today which helps me figure out Italian.

The more we learn, the easier it becomes to learn.

Of course, this isn't a fair fight to compare a 38 year old adult to a 8 year old child. The adult is going to have much more developed skills when it comes to language, reasoning and mathematics as well as having acquired far more knowledge about the world. This puts the 38 year old adult in a far better position to try to study anything compared to the 8 year old child. This advantage adults have is sustained all the way until the brain starts to deteriorate with old age, so I suppose you could claim, "I'm too old to learn new stuff" if you are in your 70s or 80s, at least that excuse would have some kind of scientific basis.

So there you go - I hope I have convinced you that your adult mind is actually far more powerful and capable of tackling the challenges of learning a foreign language. If you have any questions about learning foreign languages as an adult, please leave me a comment below and let's have a discussion. Thank you very much for reading.

Also, don't forget to check out my new website Eureka Languages and try the Eureka Languages Challenge.