I have heard the advice many times over the years: if you want to learn a language successfully, learn like a child.
There is an appealing simplicity to it. Children seem to absorb languages naturally, without worrying about grammar, vocabulary lists, pronunciation exercises or whether they are making mistakes. Adults, by comparison, often seem to make language learning unnecessarily complicated.
But after more than twenty years of teaching and learning languages, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with this comparison.
Adults are not children, and I don’t think they should be expected to learn as if they were.
An adult brings a whole person to language learning
By the time an adult decides to improve their English, they already have a history.
They have developed ways of thinking, communicating and solving problems. They have professional knowledge, interests, preferences and habits. They have opinions about themselves and about how other people see them. They know what they are good at, what they dislike, and what they are willing to struggle with.
They also have an existing relationship with language.
For many professionals I work with, English is not an abstract subject they have decided to study. It is connected to meetings, customers, presentations, colleagues, travel, responsibility and the kind of professional they want to be.
That makes language learning part of a much larger picture.
The language has a place in their existing life and, importantly, in their existing self-image.
Your goal is not independent of who you are
I think this is one of the things that gets overlooked when we talk about motivation.
We often talk about motivation as though it were something that can simply be increased by finding the right method, setting the right goals or discovering a more enjoyable way to learn.
But motivation does not exist in a vacuum.
An adult’s reasons for learning English are connected to what they want from their life and what they believe the language will allow them to do.
A manager who wants to participate more confidently in international meetings may have a very different relationship with English from someone who wants to live abroad, make friends, understand films without subtitles, or simply feel less dependent on other people when travelling.
Even when two people have exactly the same level of English, the language can occupy completely different places in their lives.
And that matters because the amount of effort someone is prepared to invest, the kind of progress they consider meaningful, and the things they are prepared to change are all connected to that relationship.
This is where some language-learning advice becomes misleading
The problem with “learn like a child” is not that everything children do is irrelevant to adults. There are useful things to learn from how children acquire language, including when children are learning an additional language.
The problem is confusing different learning situations.
A child acquiring their first language is developing language alongside their understanding of the world and themselves. A child learning an additional language is already bringing an existing language and developing conceptual world to that process. An adult learning an additional language brings something further: an already established history, identity, conceptual world, professional life and relationship with language.
These are not identical learning situations.
So the useful question is not whether adults can copy children. It is what makes sense for the particular person who is learning.
An adult cannot remove twenty, thirty, forty or sixty years of experience and approach a new language as though they were starting to become a person for the first time.
And there is no reason to.
An adult’s existing knowledge is not an obstacle that needs to be discarded. It is part of the learner.
The question is what we do with it.
There is no method that can learn for you
This is also why I am sceptical of the search for the perfect language-learning method.
Over the years, I have seen many different approaches presented as though the right method could finally make language learning easy, natural or effortless.
But no method can decide what English should mean in your life.
No method can decide what you actually want to be able to do with it.
No method can determine what you are willing to change, how much time you are willing to give it, or what kind of English user you want to become.
A method can provide structure. A teacher can provide guidance. Practice can create opportunities.
But the person doing the learning remains responsible for the learning.
I think this is an important distinction for adults in particular.
Adults don’t need to become children
The more I have taught adults, the more I have come to think that the goal should not be to make them behave like children learning their first language.
It should be to understand the adult who is actually sitting in front of you.
What does English need to do for this person?
Where does it fit into their professional and personal life?
What do they want to be able to express?
What are they prepared to work on?
What kind of relationship do they want to have with the language?
Those questions are not distractions from language learning. They are part of understanding the learning situation itself.
Adults already have a self, a history and a world.
They don’t need to become less adult in order to learn another language.
Perhaps they need to make better use of the advantages that being an adult gives them, while accepting the responsibilities that come with them.
Do you need help communicating clearly in English?
I help senior professionals who want to communicate with greater clarity and confidence in English.