We Don't Remember Learning to Talk
Pierre Teo · Updated · Language learning
Every single one of us mastered a native language. Yet when we try to learn a second language as adults, most of us hit a wall.
How can we be 100% successful at a complex skill once, and struggle so intensely the second time?
A major reason is that we have zero memory of how we actually pulled it off.
Because of childhood amnesia, the first three to four years of our lives leave almost no autobiographical memories. We don't remember being eighteen months old, we don't remember learning to walk, and we don't remember the thousands of hours we spent absorbing the rhythms of our mother tongue. We became fluent during a cognitive blank stretch.
By the time our conscious memory comes online, speech has already been moved entirely into procedural memory. Like balancing on a bicycle, we just do it automatically without knowing how we do it.
We do, however, have very clear memories of "language class" in school.
We remember sitting at desks, filling out grammar worksheets, memorizing spelling lists, and learning parts of speech. But that wasn't learning how to speak a language. That was literacy training, taught to children who had already been conversing fluently for years. It was teaching us about a language we already owned.
Because school is our only conscious reference point for language instruction, it becomes our default template. When we decide to learn Japanese, Spanish, or Thai as adults, we immediately rebuild the elementary school classroom: we buy a textbook, memorize conjugation tables, and drill vocabulary lists.
We try to acquire a spoken language by copying the exact classroom exercises that had nothing to do with how we learned to talk in the first place.