Adults And Children Learn Foreign Languages Differently

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29. According to the article, Can Monolingualism be Cured? by Sprang, adults and children learn foreign languages differently. Children learn new languages faster than adults, to the children; it's an adventure. Even with the ease of absorbing different languages children still, take much time to learn their first language. The adults, however, don't have time to learn new languages but they use what they know, grammar, of the first language to learn a new one e.g. most sounds are similar in different languages and also foreign grammatical patterns are almost similar to English, this gives a adults advantage over the children. Moreover, adults learn foreign vocabularies faster as thy have enough exposure to the words in different contexts, they can recognize the words, and with proper training, they can easily learn the new language. Some language elements are best mastered through implicit learning e.g. watching TV and listening to Radio in the language you're learning.
Building knowledge of a new language depends on combining the explicit and implicit learning approaches, but this is not enough, practice is essential; in this aspect children outdo the adults as they have no fear of embarrassment during the practicing process. Language learning in schools has significantly improved with the introduction of cognitive science and applied linguistic, which combines both implicit and explicit knowledge.
30. Garrett, in her article, what does it take to learn a language well?, says that adults think learning a language requires academic smartness or a younger age but, learning a language doesn't need either; for example, a person without formal education can speak a new langua...