How Children Learn A Second Language

HOW CHILDREN LEARN A SECOND LANGUAGE

How children learn a second language is something incredible. I really liked at the beginning of the text, when the Japanese little girl did not speak muchthe foreign language but after several months and once she went on a trip with a North American she just started doing it. There are many factors that intervene in the language acquisition process, butin this specific case there was a motivational agent that pushed this child to initiate it. That is why; I consider that the language acquisition is an amazing process in which human beings make useof their potential capabilities to learn a second language.

Every language is connected in certain way and this facilitates things especially when the person who is learning the second language isa kid because that individual is not thinking about the syntax, the grammar, or if it is correct or not; for infants those things are not important, they just want to communicate and to be understood.The brain does the rest; it is in charge of somehow connecting those elements from both languages (the native and the target) and also linking their similarities. In fact, children do not learn manyutterances by analyzing their internal grammatical characteristics, they learn them in a “prefabricated form”, their area of interest is communication. For instance, Uguisu using the expression: “I’mthe leader”.

On the contrary, this does not happen easily when you’re an adult; it is a fact that when people reach certain age they try to find the logic of things. The problem is that grow-upsdo not only think in an organized and structured way but they also link new knowledge with previous experiences, so if some new information is being studied and they do not consider it has a logicalorder or they cannot link it to any of those previous experiences mentioned before, then that new information will not be fully processed, and consequently, put it into practice.
“Transfer” is...