It’s so HARD for people to learn another language after they grew up.
Just like hitting an invisible wall.
But, there are always a few people can break the wall in their adulthood, they even learnt a lot of distant languages in a row.
Why? And how exactly do children learn language so fast, just like riding on a rocket.
The Tower of Babel is an early explanation to it. So, what reason(s) can we have nowadays?
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, the brain will automatically shut down the cognitive window for language learning after the body becomes mature, and shift the main interest into social skills, as survival and reproduction are the 2 core tasks of our genes to keep us working at them.
Form the perspective of cognitive science, people will hardly keep their focus on the basics of a skill when they have obtained it. For language, the basics are a set of oral movement patterns to producing sounds (phonetics).
In addition, the public education system makes the problem even worse: language learning is severely severed from language use. The process is set up to study a lot of explicit and abstract linguistic knowledge, and usually they have little connection with their interest, so they’re easy to make the learners feel boring, tedious, dull. And it’s so painful for thoes who really want to get in the world of target language.
Moreover, there is still no a powerful yet simple tool – an integration of phonetic learning & semantic learning – out there. Are there no good product designers or engineers in the sector? No. Not at all. It’s not about application, product, software, AI, EdTech, business. It’s about that there has got to be someone who cares to beat the fucking problem first and foremost.
Now, dada! is here to make the access to another mother tongue.