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Look up the "conditioned head turn procedure" as a means of testing phonetic perception in infants. It is pretty well established that infants have a much greater ability to distinguish phonemes compared to adults.

What you said is true the other way around too. Infants can't look something up in a dictionary, or ask a bilingual person to clarify the finer points of a word or phrase in a language they already know. Infants aren't just learning the language but also the concepts behind the language, which would seem to make what they're doing more exceptional than adult language learning.

> Infants aren't just learning the language but also the concepts behind the language

Some people say that children don't just learn grammar, but that they sometimes also create the grammar rules of emerging languages through a process called creolization.

I don't doubt those differences, but as someone with a music background and an awareness of sound (and having seen others pick up accents and phonemes much less readily than myself), I still see so much we can't control for.

Maybe nobody has succeeded at getting adults as close as they can get to the infant state. How do we know the difference between adults being incapable of hearing phonemes similarly to infants versus failure to express to the adults what state they need to be in to listen? Obviously, most adults are filled with thoughts and cultural interpretations of any psychological study context and don't have the same open mind as an infant.

The differences are stark in practice between adult and infant learning and behavior. But what are the underlying factors that create the distinctions? I think we have very little practical capacity to tease them apart.

I live in Japan and speak Japanese reasonably well (not native level by any stretch of the imagination, but I can have casual conversations in virtually any normal context). I know a lot of expats who live near me and just can't seem to learn Japanese. One of the biggest things I noticed they had in common was a desire to avoid being treated like a child. My level is like that of an 8 or 10 year old (though I lack fluency is some normal grammar which most children have no trouble with). I'm very comfortable acting like an 8 or 10 year old. When I go to the doctor for example, I don't expect to understand what he's saying. The "explain it to me like I'm five" thing is my ordinary lifestyle. But I find that some people just can't accept the step down. If they are 30 years old, they want to go out with native speakers and interact as a 30 year old. Then they get frustrated and humiliated when they can't understand what's going on. They want to watch the news on TV and get frustrated when they can't understand any of it. They refuse to watch things (like cartoons) that they can understand, because it is too childish. It's a bit of a blocker, I think.

Admittedly, though, it's frustrating that people always have to make an effort with you. If you go out with a group of native speakers to a bar for an evening, there's a good chance that the only conversation you understand is when someone makes a special effort to speak to you. There is nobody in your peer group that has the same communication level as you, so you can get really lonely. I always had the strategy of coming up with one-liner jokes. Just sit back and listen and listen and listen until you finally understand something and then think of a quick funny, but irrelevant thing to insert in the conversation. It's doubly funny because everybody thinks you have no idea what's going on. But that was my thing for years -- I never said anything meaningful in a conversation in a group. Just like a kid...

But all that aside, it's actually pretty easy to show that adults can learn languages as fast as children. Children acquire about 3 "word families" per day on average from the age of 1.5 up to 15 (and continue as long as they continue formal education). A "word family" is a bit like a piece of vocabulary, but includes all the inflections and combination words (so if you know "police" and "station", then you also know "police station" -- it's not counted as a new piece of vocabulary). This works out to about 1000 word families a year (although the rate is very variable between the ages of 1.5 and 5 -- the average child ending up with 5000 word families by the age of 5).

That kind of stuff is very well understood. You can learn faster than that as an adult. It's not even very hard. The trick is understanding that it's going to take up to 5 years to speak like a 5 year old. Most people forget what it's like to be 5 and how crappy your language skills are. They think, "Oh these 5 year olds can play easily together and jabber on constantly" -- but put them in an adult environment and the vast majority will clam up or be just as frustrated as we are.

This is an aside, and this sort of flattery is thankfully rare on HN, but you write very well. I say this as a fellow native English speaker. I’m sure your Japanese friends can sense that you are intelligent despite your language difficulties.

Your experience in Japan seems to support the findings of this study. Basically alcohol lowers inhibitions enough that people are less self conscious about speaking a foreign language and actually perform better.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026988111773568...

I noticed this was definitely true for me during my first several years here in Japan. In normal conversation, I would end up overthinking my sentences and making mistakes fairly often, but when drinking all of the nervousness and extraneous thought went away, and I could speak faster and more fluently than I thought I was capable of. Even with vocabulary recall, I would sometimes be surprised with myself for using words I probably would never have remembered while sober. Of course I still made mistakes, but the fear of it was no longer an obstacle.

Even now, I probably still speak more fluently when drinking, but I think the gap has almost disappeared.

I have a three year old daughter who is very verbal, but every now and then she wants to tell me something and she just can't figure out the words to say it. She will get really frustrated and say "I can't talk!" and gets upset.

I don't know if adults are used to that sort of frustration in their daily lives, where you just can't communicate the thoughts you have. I can't imagine how hard that must be.

It is, for what it's worth, one of the most common reasons I hear from Chinese friends of mine who move back to China after living in the USA. They like a lot of things about the USA but expressing their full intellectual range is a constant and often unsuccessful struggle even for the ones who speak English fairly well, and they feel like they're not able to live up to their potential as a result.

Having lived in China a bit to immerse myself for language learning, I can totally get that. It is very humbling to hear something in a conversation, have complex thoughts about it, and be completely unable to respond with any nuance or subtlety or precision.

I too have a 3 year old, and we've been in the habit since he was 1 of me just feeding him lots of possible sentences to say to express what he might be wanting to say. If I get it close, he repeats verbatim. If it's not what he wants, he rejects it or twists it to closer to what he wants.

And yeah, probably a decent portion of infant emotion is on not being able to communicate. Those who learn infant sign language have a better time. Being able to sign "I want the water, not more food" versus being unable to communicate is a massive difference.

Adults get used to this sort of feeling of incompetence if they embrace always learning new skills. They can even get skilled at accepting it without frustration. But tons of adults avoid these things and basically stop learning entirely new skills and don't understand the value of accepting child-like novice learning.

I, for one, get pretty antsy doing anything I'm good at already. I'm only ever interested in stuff where I feel there's some challenge to work on and something new to learn.

An 18-month old isn't just learning a language, they're acquiring language itself. At four-years-old, they aren't at "native speaker" level either.

A few years later, they acquire literacy, if taught. It's well-established that acquiring literacy at an older is more difficult. Young brains have higher plasticity.

Is it impossible to acquire literacy as an adult? Of course not. But it's far more difficult, to the point of being practically impossible for many people.

In context, the fact that 1000 out of several hundreds of thousands of samples managed to do something highly unlikely isn't that remarkable. It doesn't support the headline at all.

While I agree with you about plasticity there's a pretty good counterexample to your claim about literacy: in 1929 Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet, which never quite fit the Turkish language phonetically, to a Roman script variant that they still use today. This was largely credited to the massive increase in literacy over the next decade (random searches suggest it went from 5-10% to 80%).

Consider in comparison SE Asian languages (eg Mandarin) that are _incredibly_ difficult to learn to read let alone write.

I learned some German years ago and the one thing I appreciated was that it is phonetic. You can probably teach someone to pronounce German (badly) in a day or two. Likewise if you hear a word you can probably spell it with very minor variations.

> While I agree with you about plasticity there's a pretty good counterexample to your claim about literacy: in 1929 Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet, which never quite fit the Turkish language phonetically, to a Roman script variant that they still use today. This was largely credited to the massive increase in literacy over the next decade (random searches suggest it went from 5-10% to 80%).

Claims about the success of the Ataturk's reforms are probably about as credible as Soviet claims about worker productivity.

Other sources claim a literacy rate of 68% in 1975:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?end=2016...

Of course it can't be denied that school reforms had a massive impact on literacy, but it's not so clear how previously illiterate adults fared when learning to read and write for the first time.

> You can probably teach someone to pronounce German (badly) in a day or two. Likewise if you hear a word you can probably spell it with very minor variations.

If they're already familiar with the Latin alphabet, anyway (which admittedly is a good chunk of the world at this point; even if you're, say, Japanese or Korean, you know the Latin script because it's used pervasively). If not, then just learning the characters is gonna take a bit.

> If not, then just learning the characters is gonna take a bit.

It would still be easier than learning 1000+ characters in Mandarin.

At the same time though, the new Turkish state pushed universal literacy as a policy goal and invested enormously in it in a way that the Ottoman empire didn't at all. It's very difficult to extract from data of that period (which may also have been manipulated for political purposes) how much of that change as due to the script vs other factors.

While I don't think it's controversial that phonetically written languages are easier to learn at first, nor that the Turkish Ottoman alphabet based on Arabic was not ideal for writing Turkish, I don't think it was uniquely difficult.

I think it's about as difficult as writing English correctly using our alphabet, which is to say it is harder than Spanish but much easier than writing Chinese languages.

Note that literacy rates in Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman empire - most of it - where the script and the language matched was also low. You can make the argument that Arabic diglossia was responsible for some of that but still)