It's no secret that children learn things faster than adults, but what is the best age to learn a new language? A new study has managed to pinpoint the time when it gets more challenging.
Learning a new language takes time, skill, and determination, and may be easier for some than others. It's a known fact that kids learn a new language faster than adults, and they can achieve native-speaker levels with more ease.
Best Age To Learn A New Language
A new study conducted by the MIT In the United States indicates that there is indeed a critical period after which learning a new skill becomes harder, like learning a second language.
According to the study, the best time to learn a new language with native-speaker proficiency is by the age of 10. Children under 10 can more easily absorb information and excel in the new language.
Young people under the age of 18 can still show great skill at mastering the grammar of a new language, but things start to get more challenging beyond this point.
Study Details
For the study, researchers assessed 670,000 people of different nationalities and ages to determine their grammatical skills in a second language. The scientists gave the participants a grammar quiz and before asking them to note whether a sentence was grammatically correct, they asked the participants to state their age, the amount of time they've been learning English, and the setting in which they learned the language.
Roughly 246,000 of the 670,000 study participants stated that they grew up in a household where they only spoke English. The rest, meanwhile, were bilingual or multilingual. Russian, German, Turkish, Finnish, and Hungarian were the most common native tongues among the participants. English natives were excluded.
The youngest ones who participated in the study were 10 years old, the majority were in their 20s or 30s while the oldest ones were in their late 70s. The data collected led the researchers to determine that childhood is the best time for learning the grammar of a new language, but the ability stays relatively strong during teenage years as well.
Learn A New Language Before Age 18
After the age of 18, however, people may no longer reach the level of proficiency that native speakers have, although they might still be able to learn quickly.
Josh Tenenbaum, a co-author of the study and MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences, tells BBC that it's tough to determine whether it is a biological matter or a cultural/social one.
"There's roughly a period of being a minor that goes up to about age 17 or 18 in many societies. After that, you leave your home, maybe you work full time, or you become a specialised university student. All of those might impact your learning rate for any language," Tenenbaum explains.
That's said, it's still possible to learn a new language as an adult, but it gets trickier.
