Is it too late to learn another language translation?

Language is an important part of what makes us human. It helps us to convey our thoughts and emotions to others and it is key to building relationships. Needless to say, it is important for us to acquire language as infants and, apparently, it is not even that difficult.

According to Rowland & Noble (2010), children as young as 12 months benefit from an innate sensitivity to the grammar that we need to understand causative sentences. Researchers are yet to discover exactly how the mechanism works that enables children to distinguish syllables and words from the sounds they hear and to acquire grammar to understand and produce language themselves.

In general, children learn and develop very quickly thanks to increased brain plasticity. This explains why they are able to pick up languages more easily than teenagers and adults. Children are literally built to take in language information and this happens unconsciously; it is in their brain chemistry. The brain gathers information much more easily in an unconscious state of mind than in a conscious one.

The combination of this mysterious language mechanism and the ability to learn unconsciously explains why children (vs. adults) can learn additional languages relatively easily when they are exposed to them. Once they have learnt the grammatical structures in one language, they can integrate them in any other languages that they unconsciously learn.

Even though it becomes more difficult to learn languages later on in life, it is of course still possible.

Personally, as a native Belgian Dutch speaker, I have always found it important to not only speak English, but also French. As a child, I didn’t like any of the television programmes I could watch on Flemish television channels, so my mum tried turning on the BBC. Not only did it entertain me, but I was learning English in the meantime. Learning French was a little harder. In Belgium, learning French starts at school when you are 11 years old and continues until you are 18. I only had the feeling that I could really speak French when I did an exchange with someone from Wallonia and spent a few days with her and her family. Being surrounded with French and having no choice but to speak French just worked for me and I liked it.

Over 95% of the team at Sharpline Graphics comes from a linguistic background, each bringing with them their own unique language-learning experiences.