Kids seem to succeed at language learning where adults fail, but that’s only because they get much more input than we do. In a kid’s first six years of life, they’re exposed to tens of thousands of hours of language. In our few years of language classes in school, we’re lucky to hear more than a few hundred hours, and many of those hours are spent talking about a language rather than talking in a language. It’s no wonder our language machines don’t seem to work; they’re starving for input.
