this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Sadly, language is a bit iffy when it comes to internalizing.
Unless you learn a language when you're a child, and ideally starting before you're ten, you won't get instinctive enough to match a native speaker's. That's just how our brain development works.
There's a special linguistic plasticity which is the language learning instinct that's fully active until we're ten or so and gradually declines and pretty much stops when we're in our early twenties.
What you learn until then is used by the language centers of your brain and is more or less reflexive. You don't need to think about it to use it, like walking.
After that, we can only learn languages intellectuality, which means we do have to think about it and deliberately listen and speak (or read and write obviously) using our prefrontal cortex.
Maybe one day we'll invent a technology or some medical treatment to turn it back on in later life.
This is called the Critical Period hypothesis, and it's still a controversial area of active research, with many linguists and experiments on each side of the argument, so it's premature to talk about it in absolutes like this.