How to learn? Early and often

(...)That modest attitude may have a scientific foundation. According to Fred Genesee, a professor of psycholinguistics at McGill University in Montreal, a child simply needs to be exposed to a different language for at least 30 percent of his or her waking time to acquire it. That means that up to three languages can be learned simultaneously, although the learning process will be more complex, in particular for the adults doing the teaching.(...)

(...)The most frequent language systems are "one parent-one language," in which each parent speaks only his native language with his child, or "minority language at home," in which the entire family speaks one language at home, and the community language with everyone else. Other systems, such as speaking an additional language with a nanny or in an immersion program, will also work, but only if used consistently, Genesee said.(...)

"For decades, people have worried that the brains of bilingual children are somehow negatively impacted by early experience with two languages," Laura-Ann Pettito, the study's senior scientific director, wrote in Medical News Today, an industry journal. "The present findings are significant because they show that the brains of bilinguals and monolinguals process their individual languages in fundamentally similar ways, except for the one fascinating exception that bilinguals appear to engage more of the neural landscape naturally available for language processing than monolinguals, which is a very good thing."

Education systems across the developed world have begun implementing foreign language classes as early as kindergarten, as opposed to junior high schools as was previously the case. But to achieve perfect fluency, a language should be taught even earlier: research shows that an infant's ability to detect different sounds and hear the nuances in foreign languages diminishes after the first six months of age.

However, for both children and adults, the key element in learning to speak a language is the need to communicate