How to Learn Language Like a Kid

When you try the exercise above, do you notice yourself getting better and better with practice?

What you’re experiencing is implicit learning.

Implicit learning, or “learning by doing,” is done unconsciously through repetition or exposure. We learn just about any motor skill this way—think shooting a basketball or riding a bike.

Explicit learning, on the other hand, is “learning by studying.” This is a process in which you actively try to master the structure of information. Learning by studying is used for things like mathematical formulas or memorizing the capitals of countries of the world.

As kids, we learn by doing all the time—how to use scissors, how to jump rope, how to swim backstroke, etc.

These are not difficult things, they just need a lot of repetition to train our muscle memory.

As adults, we are often learning new concepts (learning by studying), but rarely learning new skills (learning by doing), except people who learn new sports, dances, or musical instruments as adults.

So we often forget what it’s like to learn by doing.

This is no surprise, because our education system focuses almost exclusively on learning by studying. We move from learning through playing and moving our bodies outside as children to sitting in classroom, memorizing facts, formulas, and lists of information.

This type of learning works well for complex processes and memorization, but not for activities that need to be learned through practice—by doing.

Imagine trying to learn to ride a bike by reading a book on the theory of it.

You could be a PHD on the physics of bike riding, but it’s not until you get on a bike, try to pedal, and fall on your ass several times before you really learn how to ride it.

It’s the same for language learning. Language is a skill that you need to learn by doing.

Most people are required to study languages formally in school, so we mistakenly think of them as a subject—something that can be learned by studying.

But learning a language is much more similar to learning to play a musical instrument than to memorizing a mathematical formula. It requires active practice, not rote memorization.

Think about it.

How many times have you heard someone who speaks a language really well say “It’s all thanks to the countless hours I put into Duolingo and Rosetta Stone!”?

Everyone who has learned to speak a language well has one thing in common—they’ve spent a lot of time practicing speaking with real people.

I’m not good at English because I learned the structure in grade school and now I’m running grammar algorithms in my head. I’m good at English because I spoke it over and over again and eventually it became second nature.

No native speaker or any other fluent speaker of a language is ever actively thinking about memorized conjugations and grammar rules when they speak; they’ve internalized the patterns of the language that they hear around them, and spent a ton of time mimicking how others talk.

This is because in order to really learn something by doing, and be effective, you must cross what I call the “feedback barrier”.

This is the moment when you take whatever you’re learning from the theoretical to the practical—you put it out in the real world and get feedback on it.

When you hop on a bike for the first time, the feedback is wobbling or falling off. And you need that feedback so you can eventually learn to ride smoothly.

With language, crossing the feedback barrier means going out into the real world and talking with real people.

You can memorize all the grammar rules you want, but you won’t improve in conversation until you put yourself out there, get feedback, and try again.

Despite this obvious truth, most people still try to learn foreign languages through studying.

You might like “learn by studying” programs like Duolingo and Rosetta Stone because they come to you easily.  It’s not hard to memorize a couple of vocab words and grammar rules and forget it all a couple of days later.

But in The Mimic Method courses, we help you learn the core elements of your target language in order to teach you how to:

• Hear and understand people when they speak fast
• Pronounce the sounds naturally, so you can speak like a native

So you can get out there, get speaking, and get feedback as quickly as possible.

I know our programs are challenging. It takes a lot of mental energy to wrap your mouth and ears around the sounds. But once you get it—just like riding a bike—it will be impossible to forget. And you’ll learn everything much quicker because you have a solid sound foundation.

Once you’ve mastered the sounds (the first thing everyone does when learning their first language) your ability to learn will increase exponentially because you can perfectly hear, pronounce, and mimic everything you hear, so you can learn and retain the information much better.

That’s a key difference between things that are learned implicitly and explicitly. Things you learn by studying, you often forget quickly.  Whereas things you learn by doing are ingrained into you—you learn them forever.

We tend to forget this, but it took you years of practice to learn all the sounds of your native language. That’s why babies start out saying names like “Baba” instead of “brother”–they can’t yet pronounce all the difficult sounds in the word. But after enough mimicking, they get it.

Just like the video above, making new sounds in a foreign language takes physical coordination.

It can be really awkward and difficult at first, but it becomes easier through repetition.

If you practice consistently, one day you’ll wake up and the sound that’s been tripping you up all this time will become second nature.

Sign up for one of our language courses or get our FREE guide to the elemental sounds of your target language.