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It's common knowledge that the best age at which to learn a second language is while you're young, however the reason isn't very clear. Contrary to what might be popular belief, it has very little to do with cultural appreciation, self-expression or the capacity for a large vocabulary. It has more to do with learning to make the right sounds.

To learn to make sounds we need to listen and mimic and repeat the process until the sounds are similar enough that we're satisfied. This isn't just a phenomenon specific to human beings. This is how birds learn songs as well.

It's also important at this point to acknowledge that when we learn we tend to retain knowledge 80% better if we get a repetition within 24 hours of our first exposure. Otherwise the information we would have gained fades into the background of our memories.

When we're very young we don't know what sounds to listen for in words so we don't use auditory selection. We develop an ability to discriminate between phonemes as we get develop our capacity for language.

When we're young, we listen and we hear everything. As we grow older, we impose the criteria we learned when we were younger to discriminate between different sounds. This is why people from England are more likely to be able to pick out accents of other British people giving away the town from which a person is from but an American might not be able to hear the difference. The Dutch are also known for having more variability in the sounds vowels make and are probably better discriminators because of it.

It isn't necessary to pick up an entire language while you're young to be able to speak it well. You just need to learn to make all the sounds and to be able to listen for them. It's better to learn a few words in many languages while you're young than to learn many words in one language.

It's difficult to expose children to words spoken in another language with an accurate accent. Most likely the best way to do this, though difficult, is to travel with your child when they're in a development window for language learning, usually between ages 0.5 and 3.

Parents would be doing their children a terrific favor if they taught them how to say a few words using different sounds in many different languages when they're young and let the child choose which other languages to learn when they're old enough to decide. Chances are, with a diversified cultural background they'll probably choose to learn more than one.

Learn more about this author, Sarah Parrish.
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