If you want to learn a foreign language as quickly as possible, it's better to start not with the alphabet

Learning a new language as an adult often leaves us feeling frustrated and helpless. It would seem that our brains only improve their ability to analyze and remember as we age—but it is illiterate infants, not motivated adults, who acquire languages with incredible ease.

It all starts before birth. As soon as a baby's ears and brain are sufficiently developed, it begins to hear speech through the walls of the womb – picking up its rhythm and melody. A few months after birth, the baby begins to break down continuous speech into fragments and learns how words sound. When it begins to crawl, it understands that these fragments have meaning: they name the objects around it. But it takes more than a year of watching and listening before the baby utters its first words. Reading and writing come even later.

In adults, this process is usually reversed: we start with writing. We learn words from textbooks, try to pronounce them correctly, without yet feeling the general sound of the language. And we wonder why progress is so slow. The Conversation writes about studies that better explain the mechanisms of learning a foreign language, LIGA.Life tells the most interesting.