Learning Languages Isn't Hard

There's a widespread misconception that children have this "magical plasticity" to their brain that makes them uniquely good at learning languages, since they can learn languages "fast" whilst adults can't, or suffer a lot while attempting to. Despite the existence of "scientific data" to prove this, I still think it's a misrepresented myth; it's not nearly as true as people pretend it is, and adults are just about as capable of learning languages as children (if not more, since children often take several years to function in a language, which is much longer than an adult that knows what he's doing, and is making actual effort).

The issue here isn't with being an adult or a child, but rather a discrepancy in motivation between them. A language-less child has lots of reasons to invest most of his mental life in attention to language, since they have a desperate personal need to understand each passing sentence they hear, whilst apathetic adults don't (and are really busy with their lives themselves, unlike children), and since pre-fluent children are surrounded in an environment predominated by fluent speech for almost every minute of every day, learning a language and participating in conversations becomes a much easier task when compared to the amount of time spent for adults. Regardless of this fact; do adults often take more than a decade of active study to reach fluency? No.

Similarly, most adults trying to learn languages are not spending most of their study time talking with natives, unlike children. Most Japanese learners including me, for example, spend a lot of it reading manga, watching anime, or perhaps talking with other learners, but none of these are as efficient a way to learn as talking with natives (mind you, there's nothing more laughable to a Japanese person than a gaijin trying hard to speak their language).

Still, I believe that adults can actually learn languages much faster than children if they learn them in a comparable environment, and I say this as someone who reached a pretty okay level of fluency in three languages as a child (Arabic, English, and French), and currently studying Spanish and Japanese as an adult. The idea that it's harder as an adult (and all the "scientific data" behind it) is purely a result of a fallacious comparison that doesn't isolate the factor it compares.

Then, what makes studying languages hard? The hyperfixation on vocabulary, for instance. Most monolingual people hold the vague belief that languages are just different word lists that people use, hence, many 101 students will manually look up every word in the dictionary to translate from English to the language they want to learn. This actually increases the mental load of learning a language; these people would have to think of something in English, then translate the sentence word by word, then say that. This is not only totally wrong from a grammatical sense, but also exhausting.

I would say that, if you understand the grammar and morphology of a language, it's actually possible to fluently speak a language while knowing only about a few dozens of words. Verb endings and tenses and such are the most important part of a sentence; if you don't have a productive and reflexive use of verbs, you will just going to be reciting nouns you know. So really, when you learn a new language, you can't look at it as new words, but new patterns of speech that interconnect in a logical way.

Besides, vocabulary is very simple to grasp once you get a hang of the essential grammar rules, especially by studying your favorite media works in other languages and diving in their environments (i.e., "mining"), or daily studying Anki flashcards for instance. I learned English primarily from interesting video games and translated manga, and the amount of words I picked up like this in a week is millions of times the amount of words I would've learned through boring or uninteractive mediums (e.g., textbooks, school, Duolingo) in millions of years.