June 10, 2025

I'm sure you heard that the older you get the less likely you are to use a second language as a native speaker. The common reasons mentioned are aging, memory decline, brain maturation. While we can certainly see that babies and pre-school children learn a second language effortlessly, without spending hours practicing the grammar and memorizing vocabulary, it is a misconception that for post-puberty learners learning a new language is a huge and often tedious effort.  

Through my academic and teaching experience, I actually noticed that what creates difficulties for adults is more about their personality and their approach to English rather than something biologically related to brain aging. There are also numerous cases of foreigners who became native-like in a second language (the Russian- born novelist Nabokov being one of them), but cases are much rarer than with the pre-puberty learners. 

So what's the problem then? As humans, we have a unique capacity to learn a human language with ease. It's something we are born with and remains a part of our brain forever. However, as humans we are complex social, emotional and psychological beings who get shaped by our environment. In other words, we adopt and develop ideas that shape our personalities. These psychological frames can prevent us to interact with the new language in a way that boosts our inborn ability to learn any human language effortlessly. Pre-school children, on the other hand, do not yet have a rigid sense of "self-identity" and thus, they do not have boundaries or fears experimenting and interacting with a new language in a way that taps into our language learning capacity.​ 

Next time you think: "Oh, I can't make a progress in English past a certain point no matter how hard I try", it's worth asking yourself instead: "What is preventing me to go a step beyond my current level? Fear of failure? Fear of getting ridiculed by native speakers? Shame of making a clown of myself? Discomfort of pretending to be somebody else? "​Remember that learning a second language is a journey. It is a process of gaining a new skill that can be applied in your business, but it is also a process of discovering your limits and overcoming them.​ 

Enjoy the process!​​​ 

​​