Why is the Native Language Learnt so Well

　　How does it happen that children learn their mother tongue so well? Let us compare them with adults learning a foreign language, for the comparison is both interesting and instructive. Here we have a little child, without knowledge or experience; there a grown-up person with fully developed mental powers. Here a haphazard（偶然) method of teaching; there the whole task laid out in a system. Here no professional（专业) teachers, but parents, brothers and sisters, nurses, and playmates; there teachers specially trained the art of language-teaching. Here only oral instruction; there not only that, but textbooks, dictionaries and visual aids.（视觉教具) And yet this is the result: here a complete mastery of the language, however stupid the children; there in most cases, even with people otherwise highly gifted,（天才的) a faulty and inexact command（掌握）, what accounts for（造成…原因) this difference?

　　Some people believe that a child's organs of speech are more flexible（灵) than an adult's. This explanation, however, does not really hold water（严密）. Children do not learn sounds correctly at once, but make countless mistakes. Their flexibility of the tongue and lips is acquired later, and with no small difficulty.

　　Others argue that a child's ear is especially sensitive. But then the ear also needs training, since at first it can hardly detect differences in sounds which grown-up people hear most clearly.

　　The real answer in opinion lies partly in the child himself, partly in the behaviour of the people around him. In the first place, the time of learning the mother tongue is the most favourable of all, namely, the first years of life. A child hears it spoken from morning till night and, what is more important, always in its genuine（真正的) form, with the right pronunciation, right intonation, right use of words and right structure. He drinks in all the words and expressions which come to him in a fresh, ever-bubbling spring（泉）. There is no resistance, there is perfect assimilation（消化）.

　　Then the child has, as it were, private lessons all the year round, while an adult language-student has each week a limited number of hours which he generally share with others. The child has another advantage: he hears the language in all possible situations, always accompanied by the right gestures and expressions. Here there is nothing unnatural, such as is often found in language lessons in schools, when one talks about ice and snow in June or scorching heat in January. And what a child hears is generally what immediately interests him. Again and again, when his attempts at speech are successful, his desires are understood and fulfilled.

　　Finally, thought a child's "teachers" may not have been trained in language teaching, their relations with him are always close and personal. They take great pains to make their lessons easy and interesting, always repeating the same phrases and at the same time doing the thing they are talking about. They are greatly pleased at every little advance the child makes. Every awkward attempt meets with sympathy and encouragement, and the most difficult step on the path of language becomes the merriest game. Unfortunately, this is a point often overlooked by teachers of language, who demand faultless accuracy from the beginning. By keeping their pupils working unnecessarily long at some little part of the subject, they often weaken their interest in learning the language. Perhaps one should not merely sprinkle（喷洒) the pupil, but plunge（使…投入)him right down into the sea of language and enable him to swim by himself as soon as possible. A great deal will arrange itself in the brain without the learning of too many special rules or the aid of elaborate（详细的）explanations.