Why Adults Learn Languages Faster Than Kids

We unpack why L1 and L2 learning differ, where adult learners can excel, and how to use child‑like methods without buying the myth of effortlessness. Along the way we revisit the critical period, language intuition, and practical tools like nursery rhymes for better input.

• L1 dominance, age of acquisition, and processing speed
• Near‑native performance vs intuition in lab tests
• Why the critical period applies to L1, not adult L2
• Transfer from L1 shaping L2 learning paths
• Kids’ advantages: fearlessness, repetition, support
• Adult strengths: strategy, focus, deliberate practice
• Using nursery rhymes and skits for prosody and chunks
• Cultural cues missing from beginner textbooks
• Building your own support system and routines

The best way to support the show is to recommend it to friends, rate us on whatever podcast listening app you are using, subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our Patreon for more.

References

Abrahamsson, Niclas & Hyltenstam, Kenneth. (2008). The robustness of aptitude effects in near-native second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 30. 481 - 509. 10.1017/S027226310808073X. 

Recommendations
From a future episode on the effectiveness of nursery rhymes on L2 acquisition

• Dokodemo Jamboree 
  • Colormixing 
• Synapusyu 
• Okaasan to Issho

Bonus: This was uploaded after I recorded this months episode but please also enjoy Jackie Chan’s City Pop Album 

• Jackie Chan – 無問題 (No Problem) Vinyl Rip 

Transcript

Setting The Topic And Theme

Tom 0:34

And welcome to Like My End. And this month on the podcast, we're going to look at learning a language like a baby. Or otherwise, what is the difference between L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition? So your first language, how do you learn a first language, and how do you learn a second language? It's kind of a trope at this point that oh, kids learn languages so easily. What if I learn my second language the way kids learn their first language? That'd be easy, it'd be perfect. But the trick is the ways that humans learn their first language and their second language are pretty different and are different in ways that learners don't always understand. And I kind of want to start the podcast off with a bit of a tangent though. Living in Japan Pro Tip this month is my daughter's fourth birthday. So we went to Tokyo Disney Sea, her Tokyo Disney Sea debut. But we didn't account for Lunar New Year. We forgot to check when Lunar New Year would be. So we went on a day where Disney Sea closed early because of some event. So they closed at 6 30, and we thought we'd be okay because who would go to Disney Sea when Disneyland is open till nine as usual. Of course it'd be empty, it'd be fine. It was the single busiest day I've ever been at either Disney Park, and it was because literally all of Asia besides well, all of East Asia besides Japan is celebrating Lunar New Year this week, and we didn't think to check because we celebrated New Year's months ago. Also, they had tons of just ride closures due to malfunctions and things. The new frozen ride was out of commission a couple of times. There's a new Peter Pan ride. This whole new area was full of people and having trouble keeping the rides going. So definitely, if you're coming to Japan in the middle of February, check when Lunar New Year is, because it might make things more crowded than they otherwise would be. But yeah, so this month we're talking about language acquisition. How do we acquire, how do we learn our first language, how do we learn our second language, and why how are they different, what those differences mean for learners, and why I think adult learners are actually much better than children when it comes to language learning. So yeah, let's get into it. So first let's talk about how do we learn our first language. There is a concept called the age of acquisition. And so that is the age that we were when we first were exposed to a word. And words learned earlier on are usually processed more quickly and accurately than compared to words later on. And so because of this concept, the language that we learn earliest in life usually is the strongest. And so RL1 is usually the language we are strongest in, or our native language, though linguists uh especially second language acquisition, ESL, that sort of stuff, trying to steer away from a native. That term kind of doesn't really mean a whole lot, and it it puts on other kind of nationalistic elements to certain languages. Learning a language, your L1 is basically the language you learn earliest in life. And it can sometimes it can be multiple languages at the same time, but for whatever reason within human brains, there is this kind of preference to one language. One language usually becomes dominant, even if you're at a proficient level in both languages, the when you go into a lab and test it, there is a dominant language that comes out. Even if in social settings there you couldn't tell a difference, it still comes out. And one study that we talked about in my second language acquisition course in university, it was by Brahamson and Hilton Stam, and I'll link in the show notes. It was a study where L1 Spanish speakers they moved to Sweden and had attained near native level of proficiency. That's the wording in the research paper. And so they were tested on both their language use and pronunciation by playing recordings of their speech for L1 or native Swedish speakers, and then were given a test on like fine-grained questions on grammaticality and well-formedness and intuition, language intuition based questions. And so, yeah, L1 speakers of Swedish listened to the recordings, and yeah, they were as far as they could tell, they were neat native, and it really didn't seem like these learners had learned Swedish later on in life, as they had done. They were basically indistinguishable from any other Swedish speaker that these L1 speakers could think of. But these participants in the study still struggled on tasks relating to language intuition that an L one speaker could answer easily, even if that L one speaker couldn't explain in words why they know something is or isn't grammatical. For example, to an L1 English speaker, the red big old dog probably feels a little weird to you, even if you can't explain why. But unless you've studied English grammar, you wouldn't know that there is actually a set order and rules to how adjectives can appear in a phrase, that the big red old dog is the order, is the correct and set order. But you couldn't necessarily explain it as an L1 speaker, even if you know it to be true, like in your gut. So with this study, that is a big difference between a first language and a second language. Even L2 speakers that are very, very proficient are indistinguishable from native speakers by native speakers. There is still this little element, your pronunciation, your grammar, your language use is, as far as anyone can tell, perfect. But in a lab, that's where issues come out. You don't have the intuition that an L1 speaker has, you don't have these ideas about the language that an L1 speaker has. And there's really no way to get that intuition later on. But so for a second language, what is a second language? An L2 or L3 or L4 is any language studied after acquiring your L1. And yeah, my daughter, we're raising her bilingually. So there is probably a stage right now. If you measured it, she'd probably be dominant in English. But there will be a stage where her Japanese will start to surpass, especially when she goes to more formal schooling from elementary school, her English will start to fade unless we do something about it at home. But back to a typical adult learner, the L1, so for my case, my L1 is English. So English grammar, English syntax, the way English works is used to make sense of all other languages that I try to learn. So I use English to understand Spanish or Japanese or whatever on third language acquisition and things like that. But that's a little more complicated than what we're going to talk about right now today. But there is evidence that shows that, say for me, if I studied Spanish now, in high school, my English was used to understand my Spanish learning. But now because I've reached a certain level of Japanese proficiency, now my Japanese would be used to understand Spanish and make sense out of Spanish. And that kind of sandwiching, like language lasagna, goes up through the range. But yeah, for today, for L1, L2, second language acquisition, it's just your L1, your first language, is used to make sense of the language you're learning right now. And one thing I want to talk about is the critical period hypothesis. This is the idea, the often misunderstood idea in like pop science general understanding is that you have to learn a language in childhood that you can't learn as an adult. You will never attain any sort of fluency or proficiency. And that's just not true. I mean, obviously, there's plenty of people that are very, very good at Japanese. I'm just thinking of YouTubers, there's Dogen and Matt vs. Japan and things, people that are very, very good in their pronunciation, especially. And so you can get to this near native level. And like we talked about in the study before, there are people that would be seen as L1 speakers by anyone around. But this critical period is more to do with L1 acquisition, your first language, not your second language. There isn't sort of a critical period for second language acquisition, as far as we know now. The critical period is the time at the beginning, the very beginning of a person's life, where they must be exposed to, and then can acquire an L1, any L1, but they must be exposed to language in the first few years so that they're capable of human language at all. But most of the case studies we talked about were of individuals that were somehow deprived of exposure, either through abuse and or neglect. So kids locked in attics or raised by wild dogs. These are the examples where, for whatever reason, usually through some sort of neglect, either malicious or otherwise, these children were never exposed to language in the first place. And that's really what we're talking about, this critical period of this first few years and really the first two or three years, if a baby is not exposed to any language of any kind, even incidental. Like there are some cultures that don't talk directly to babies until a certain age, but even just ambient language use in their community is still a huge part of acquisition. So whether it's directly to a baby or the ambient language, for whatever reason, there was none of it for this individual. And yeah, they can't produce language. They're basically at red car banana eat, and they they won't necessarily have a grammar structure, they won't be able to really get anything more than one noun and one verb, and they won't really be able to even comprehend a lot more than one noun and one verb. So yeah, this critical period is critical for your first language, but for your second language, third language, it's really hard to say. But yeah, a person that never acquired an L1 obviously can't acquire a second or third language. And yeah, the kind of common understanding, kind of common sense gut feeling is that the earlier you learn a language, the better. But there is no critical period for L2 language acquisition, as far as we can tell. So even if language learning felt difficult in high school or in college, that it might have felt difficult for different reasons than because you were getting older and your brain was less had less plasticity and things like that. It's going to take more work the older you are, because there's more interference and things. But generally speaking, any adult can reach fluency, so a basic conversational level in any language. The pairs make it more or less difficult. Because, yeah, with uh Japanese and English, that is not an equal pairing. It is very difficult for an English speaker to learn Japanese, but it is harder for a Japanese speaker to learn. So those affect your language acquisition far more than initial start date. Next, I want to look at what is it about language learning that children do better? And what is it about language learning that adults do better? Because there are things that actually adults do do better than children in terms of language acquisition. But first, let's look at the benefits of learning a language as a child. So, yeah, children are sponges. That's a common thing that's said a lot. And well, I mean, really, it's they have nothing to do but acquire their L1. My son is two months old and he can't move on his own. He can't even lift his neck on his own. So all he does all day long is eat poop and listen to everyone talk to him or talk to everyone else around. So he has no other choice but to learn English and Japanese because that's the environment he finds himself in. And as the study suggests, L1 intuition isn't really attainable for L2 learners, no matter how proficient eventually become, you're always going to really struggle with that just implicit understanding, that gut feeling of how the language is supposed to work. So your day-to-day, if you get very good with a L2, your day-to-day will be indistinguishable from an L1 speaker. But there will be times where your your self-doubt about the language you're trying to use, that stuff never really will go away because you never develop the same level of intuition. I do want to kind of preface that L2 learners do develop language intuition just like L1 learners. It's just not at the same level as an L1 learner. As you learn a language, you do start to develop a kind of implicit understanding of how the language works. A L2 speaker does start to develop an implicit understanding of the language, similar to the way an L1 speaker does, but L2's learners just never get to the same point in that sort of gut-feeling understanding. You do understand the language you learn and can predict what's supposed to happen and what sounds right, but just not to the same level as an L1 speaker. Another big thing that kids are kids are fearless. They're fearless of failure, they're fearless of embarrassment, they're fearless of even repetition. My daughter will scream a song out at the top of her lungs all day long, not even caring that most of the words are gibberish, and it's mostly just the rhythm that she's repeating. But yeah, there's just being an adult is a lifetime's worth of embarrassment and shame before you start learning a language that you're bringing into your language learn. And just the ability for a kid to just practice, be wrong, not care, and move on, all that sort of stuff is hugely beneficial in language learning. And then one one big thing that I've never seen talked about is just the support structure. I work in the schools. My daughter also is kind of uh I mean, I I have ADHD and dyslexia, some other learning disabilities, so there's definitely a chance that my daughter has some sort of learning difference uh from other kids in her class, and my gut feeling makes it feel like she probably has ADHD based on her behavior. We're working with the daycare, we're working with each other, my wife and I, we're working with the city, they got us in touch with a speech language pathologist, and we're gonna get her screened. So, yeah, ourselves, the daycare, the city, we're all stepping in to make sure that she, if she has some sort of learning difference, she either can get back on track developmentally or gets the assistance she needs to learn just like any of our other classmates. So, yeah, that kind of brings us to the end of this month's talk. But yeah, when people say they want to learn like a child, I think they either mean that they want dedicated time where all they do is study their target language. But I also feel that probably a lot of people mean effortlessly acquiring the language they're studying. But that second part, effortless acquisition, is it both discounts the amount of effort that kids are putting into their acquisition and downplays the importance of support. A large portion of the society is structured in such a way that children become fluent and literate in the dominant language of that region or country. L2 learners just don't have the support system for 18 years to acquire a language. And L1 speakers don't really know how to talk to L2 learners in a way that can help the conversation flow more smoothly. Kids get support and the benefit of the doubt, and adult learners get confused looks and exasperated sighs when you filled out the wrong form after expressly being told which form to fill in. Acquiring a language as an L1 or an L two is a bit like the story of the tortoise and the hare, except the tortoise has a rocket strapped to his back, and all the controls are written in the target language. The hare, the L1 learner, is assumed to win the race. But the tortoise, the L two learner, could be faster if they figure things out quickly, but they're also just as likely to blow up two feet from the starting line. But yeah, my whole point with this podcast is that L2 acquisition as an adult is possible. And I don't think I don't think adult learners are relegated to this like second class level of language knowledge and language ability. I think we can become very proficient if we dedicate the time. It's just going to take a lot of time. And the recommendations for this month, I'm reading a paper right now on how nursery rhymes are beneficial for L2 acquisitions. So, kind of in the spirit of learning like a child and making a future episode of this podcast, so our recommendations for this month aren't the usual manga or anime, but but YouTube channels that kind of specialize in nursery rhymes and songs for kids and toddler to preschool aged kids. You might have seen on Instagram or TikTok the two-color mix videos that's uh going around right now. These this is the channel that started that, the Dokodemo Jamboree. And so their nursery rhymes and things are really good for obviously kids, but even for second language learners, there's a lot of stuff that won't necessarily be found in, especially the beginner level textbooks. You get things like sound words, onomatopoeia, grammar, repetition, cultural knowledge that just can really enhance the other study materials you might be using. And the next one is shinapus uh how do I say this in English? Shnapshu. It's my daughter loves this show, and it's songs and skits and things and it's really geared toward toddlers and really young, like zero to four or five. And it's great for the same sort of reasons that Tonko devo jamboree is, and for the same sort of reasons that our my next recommendation will be, but just getting that cultural knowledge, the repetition, you can go onto YouTube, go onto their channel, and there'll be whole medley of the past week's episodes all edited together. And there's like recurring segments like Sesame Street and it's just a hugely beneficial thing that I sadly found way too late in my own journey after coming here and having kids. And the last one speaking of that is Oka Santo Iso. This one's a little hard to find. They don't really have any sort of YouTube presence directly. They don't have a channel and I don't know how you would go about watching this show outside of Japan. You might be able to look up NHK TV and find it that way. But a good thing is these songs are very very popular so kind of like Rafi or something like that. A lot of the other channels you will find like Dokodemo Jamboree on YouTube are singing Oka Santo Isho songs. When my daughter was real little I started to get a sense of which songs were Oka Santoisho and which songs were other writers or just generic folk songs or nursery rhymes. Generally I I like the Oka Santo Isho songs much more and they're really interesting and linguistically and culturally interesting. But yeah definitely if you are still interested in learning like how a kid acquires language, which I do think is useful and I will come back to later in a different podcast I want to touch on learning task-based learning using elementary school curriculum. I think that would be really interesting. But so I do think learning like a child in certain ways is useful to adult L2 learners but it's that kind of mindset of what it means to learn. And yeah definitely with these recommendations I think you will have a good shot at getting a taste for what an L1 Japanese child is experiencing here in Japan. And so yeah that is our episode for this month the best way to support the show is to recommend it to friends rate us on whatever podcast listening app you are using subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our Patreon for more our Patreon is a pay what you can model. We have a uh$5 a month but we also have three and ten dollars so whatever you can manage to give it supports the channel and keeps me making more episodes more content hopefully the future bonus content but yeah we are supported by viewers like you and we will be back next month with another episode see you then