Can You Learn A Language As An Adult?

The short answer is yes, you can definitely learn a language as an adult. It will be a long, slow challenge, but it is totally possible.

Stop and think about how many other things you have learned as an adult …Taxes, How to drive, How to get a job, how to do DIY …all quite complicated things.

If you can learn these, you can clearly learn a language; the only thing stopping you is yourself. If you put the effort in, it will happen.  

Learning A Language After Childhood Is Possible

It is often wrongly believed that once you leave childhood, you cannot learn a language, or if you do, you will never be good as someone who learned as child.

While children are exceptionally gifted at learning languages, you do not lose this ability as you age.

This myth is total lies and has probably stopped so many people from even attempting to learn a language. You can still learn anything you want, all the way through your adult life.

The only difference is that you may learn in a slightly different way compared to child as your brain is more developed, however, it is still completely possible to make it happen.

Learning A Language As An Adult Is Not The Same As Learning As A Child

Some things that you will learn in life will only make sense when you are an adult, you need to be able to understand and comprehend the information in a rational way that children cannot grasp.

Languages are not one of these things; we actually learn them on a very deep subconscious level and this is usually why there is such a difference between how children and adults learn languages.

The ability to pick up and decode a language is somehow in our DNA. We are designed to recognise language patterns and start using them to communicate, it is something we can all do and we will do it naturally, which is exactly the reason that babies can start to learn to speak without really having any comprehension of the world around them.

When you bombard a small child with a language its little brain will be able to automatically start to process the sounds it is hearing. After about a year of this immersion it will start to understand and they will start try speak themselves.

To watch a child learn to speak really is one of the true wonders of the world. They are like little sponges that suck everything in and spit it all back out a few months later.       

As we get older and become adults this instinctual ability to learn languages does fade. Well, it more gets blocked by our more conscious mind.

We can still learn, it is just that we do it in a more deliberate and reasoned way and tend to analyse things logically and compare them to what we already know. This can both help us and hinder us, but if we do things properly we can use it to our advantage and actually learn the language we want.

Children Actually Learn Very Slowly

If you are a parent you will have probably looked into what your baby should be able to do at certain ages and one of those things is their ability to talk.

You will actually be surprised to find that a 12 month old child can usually only say about 5 words and this then jumps to 300 words after 24 months, which isn’t exactly a lot. They probably will understand a lot more, but speaking wise this isn’t a lot.

I think if you went away now and started looking at a new language you could learn 5 words in the next hour and you would have certainly mastered a lot more than 300 words over the next two years.

your adult brain does give you the advantage when it comes to starting a language. A child will certainly pick up the pace after a few years, but I really believe that you can match them, if not beat them at being able to learn more.

The Adult Brain Can Still Learn Languages

As I’ve already said, your brain is still capable of learning new things throughout your entire life.  

When you reach a certain age, your bones and other body parts will stop growing, but your brain is different, the brain can keep developing until the day you die. Sadly some of us will suffer from degenerate brain diseases, like dementia, which can obviously affect your ability to learn, but up until this point you can learn anything you want.

There is no limit to what the brain can learn. This means you can study a language or anything else, at any age and you will be able to master it.

Potentially the older you get, the slower you might be at learning, but the fundamental ability for the brain to learn is still there.      

Why We Struggle To Learn Language As Adults

Three of the biggest issues for adult language learners is Time, Fear and Over thinking. These simple mistakes can really affect our ability to make progress in a new language and are often why think it is impossible.

We Don’t Have Time To Spend Learning Languages

One of the biggest problems we have when learning a language is that we do not realise how long it will take. It can be a very long and slow process.

This is made worse by the fact that we have lives. We have jobs, responsibilities, relationships, just life!

It can be hard to fit language learning into a busy schedule and when things get busy it will often get pushed to the side and forgotten about. If you are trying to immerse in a language you really need to do multiple hours, day after day to see any progress and the average adult just can’t do that.

Many people start learning and just can’t commit to the long term effort that is needed, so they give up long before they have any success.   

We Have Fears About Learning languages

For those who can commit the time, they usually suffer from a different problem, fear.

As adults we don’t like to make mistakes, we don’t like to appear stupid and we don’t like being vulnerable and unable to express ourselves.

When we learn a language, we will face all of these problems which can be a huge stumbling block for our progress.

You are going to be listening to hours and hours of the language and a lot of it will not really make any sense. You are going to forget things and you are going to make mistakes if you try and speak. On paper the whole experience sounds horrible and there are points where it really will be.

The problem is that we are designed to avoid anything difficult which means we will not battle though the pain of learning so that we can make the progress.

Too many of us are scared to push ourselves out of our comfort zone, so we get no where.    

We Don’t Let Our Brain Acquire The Language

Probably one of the biggest issues is that we get in the way of ourselves. A lot of language learning is done at a subconscious level. If we expose our brains to enough of the language we will make the connection and join the dots as such, exactly like how small children do it.

The problem is that we have conscious brains that really like to know what is going on and try and analyse things and sometimes this gets in the way of learning a language. It’s fine to consciously try and work out what is going on every now and again and look into grammar for example, but at the same time we need to be able to turn this off and just accept that the material is a little fuzzy.

I often find if I just let the language wash over me, I sort of get what is going on, but the second my conscious tries to like confirm this and I sort of try to explain what is going on, it all gets lost.

This is a very strange phenomenon, but basically my subconscious is doing its thing and the longer I can let that happen, the more progress I will make. Too many people are not aware or this, or they don’t quite like the feeling, which means they basically block their own progress and don’t allow themselves to acquire the language.

Honestly, if you can unlock this mindset while immersing you will make so much progress.    

Why It Can Be Better To Learn As An Adult

Learning a language as an adult can actually be better, as you can be more efficient with your time and make progress a lot quicker than a child.

We have the advantage of already knowing a language and we already have a sophisticated and complex vocabulary and we also have the ability to comprehend so much more than a child.

When we learn a new language as an adult we can directly translate advanced words and understand and use them immediately. A child is never going to be able to do this. They will only ever be able to speak to the level of child, no matter what language they are able to learn.  

It will take a child until adolescence to build up a strong vocabulary and understating of things, where as we can do rather fast. This is helped by the fact that we do not need to spend a lot of time on the basics.

If you think of things such as colours or numbers, we can quickly learn these as we already have an advanced understanding of these compared to a child. If I tell you the word for 1 “million”, you will instantly know what the concept of this word means and how to use it, where as a child may be encountering this for the first time and it may take a few months, or even years to really grasp what the word “million” really means.  

(You can read more about – Am I Too Old To Learn A Language)

Conclusion

It’s important to know that you can learn a language as an adult. It will still be a lot of work and take a lot of time, but it is totally possible, don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

You just need to a take a different approach than what a child would, but this is easily done and due to the fact you have a developed brain means you can actually develop your skills faster and to a higher level than a child, given the same amount of time.

If you are thinking about learning a language, you should give it a go. It can be a very rewarding project and you can see for yourself that as an adult that you can learn a language. 

 (You can read more about – Is There A Limit To How Many Languages You Can Learn?)