[laurieg]

I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language.

The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.

[thaumasiotes]

> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.

It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.

But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.

[laurieg]

I appreciate the clarification, but does it provide any actionable insight on how to learn to discriminate those sounds as an adult?