I'm going to take it forever.

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to the Effortless English podcast.

I am going to change this podcast a little bit.

From now on, I will have two parts to the podcast, usually.

First I'll read an article, or part of an article usually about language learning

English learning something like that and then I will give you my commentary I I will talk without a plan, without a script, just naturally,

conversationally, using casual everyday English, and I will tell you about my opinion about this article that I've just read.

So that's what I'm going to do from now on.

Hopefully this will give you a little bit of formal English in the article and also some casual conversational English from me. If I make a mistake in my

casual commentary I will not edit it, I will not correct it, I will not take it out. If I say um um a or other things like that, those also will be included.

I want you to hear totally natural English. Okay, here we go. First the article, this is an article by Dr. J. Marvin Brown and it's called

learning languages like children. Here we go, Dr. J. Marvin Brown. It is common knowledge that when people move to a new country,

the children will end up speaking the language natively and the adults won't.

The widely accepted explanation is that children have a special gift that they lose as they grow up.

Even with the coming of the age of science, this gift theory went unquestioned.

An early linguist thought that some special remedy was needed.

They proposed that for adults, language should be taught and studied instead of picked

up. And this idea slowly evolved into present-day language teaching.

But are we any better off with present-day language teaching?

Why, for example, do adults in Central Africa clearly do better when they move to a new

language community than our modern students do? Could it be that early linguists

and all the rest of us were mistaken?

...