We Don't Remember Learning to Talk
Pierre Teo · Published · Language learning
All of us mastered a first language. Yet as adults, many of us struggle to do it again. How can we be so good at something once and find it so hard the second time?
Part of it, I think, is that we don't remember any of it. Psychologists call this childhood amnesia: the first few years of life leave almost no memories at all — it's why none of us remembers being two, or learning to walk. Our first language falls entirely inside that blank stretch. Almost everything else we know how to do — reading, cycling, driving — we learned as people who could watch ourselves learn.
It's invisible because of where it lives, too. Fluency sits in procedural memory, next to riding a bike: we can do it, but we can't say how — it just feels right or wrong. It never passes through conscious thought, which is exactly what makes it fast enough for conversation.
So we're left with one vivid memory of "learning our language," and it's the misleading one: school. Grammar lessons, spelling tests, comprehension worksheets — all of it years after we were already fluent. But that was learning about the language, not learning the language — literacy, taught to a child who could already talk. But it's the only part we remember, so it's easy to mistake it for the whole of language learning — and it's the part most advice preaches anyway.
That's probably why so many of us, as adults, when we try to learn a second language, reach for the only model we remember and rebuild the classroom — textbook, grammar drills, vocabulary lists — the part of the process that never taught us to talk in the first place.