Learning a Language

I was discussing with a friend of mine about how fast a child can learn a language and how it become progressively difficult to learn a new language as we become older. He had an interesting perspective in that. He said, a child does take a lot of time to learn a new language, if u think about it a little more carefully. A child has nothing else to do in the first 3 years of life other than to learn the language. Everything else is taken care of by the parents. And the parents simply keep training the child to learn the language, when ever the child is awake. This means its a 12 hour training class a day for the first 3 years of life, with everything else take care of. Also, the child does not know anything else, so he has no option other than to follow the parents and learn the language. As we grow up, we have lot more stuff to do in life like job, TV, family etc and hence it takes us a lot longer to learn a new langauge.

I found this observation interesting.