They say that unless a child starts learning a language before the age of 6, they will be unable to speak proficiently and fluently enough that they sound native. This is technically incorrect. The way the brain picks up language is actually very similar to how we interpret music. For music, the brain will make “presets” that determine what “music is”. Our brain will then listen to other pieces of music, and compare it with the preset that we have as to what music is defined as. If the preset does not match to what we are listening to, then the brain will decide “oh we do not like this”. The same goes for language, but in a slightly different sense. The brain will create presets based on the sounds that are created in an alphabet of a language. For example, our brain distinctly knows the difference in sound between a “ruh” sound for “r”, and a “luh” sounds for “l”, and is able to formulate the differences in these two sounds. Languages like Japanese or Korean, do not have a distinctive “r” or “l” sound, so when native Japanese or Korean people hear the words “law” and “raw”, they hear the same thing because they never developed the preset to differentiate the two sounds. For them, the two words sound the same. So instead, the child simply has to be exposed to (at the very least) the alphabet of a language in order to still be able to speak proficiently and fluently if they would like to study the language in the future.
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