Did you know that when babies babble they use all of the possible phonemes of all world languages? If you’ve ever enjoyed babies babbling to themselves, trying to say something remotely resembling the sounds of words they are surrounded by in their own lingual climate you might have just been amused and overwhelmed with cuteness, but that baby is the most well adapt polyglot there is surpassing your language potential by orders of magnitude.

A baby’s pending lingual competences are unmatched by anything you can do as an adult. Yes, an adult you can learn languages through hard work, structured learning of the syntaxes, grammatical rules, vocabulary and proper pronunciation of strange phonemes, but to a baby this is child’s play (pun completely intended). Their neural network is set up to learn and adapt and they will soak up that which surrounds them and subsequently, as they grow, begin to lose the ability to pronounce or even hear certain phonemes. This is why you learn all languages so much more easily while you’re very young than when you’re an adult. The languages you grew up filling up your sonic landscapes in time embed themselves in the neural network and as you get better at specializing in your own language you start to lose sight of the global bounty of sounds and the finesse between them – it’s a sort of being born into the society as a person while simultaneously necessarily dying into the language. There is the notion that we lose something primal and essentially human, the deep connection to our subconsciousness and desires the moment we’re indoctrinated into language and this is very true. Let them develop at their own pace and expose them to other languages while they are learning. It will supercharge their brain and allow them to keep certain phonemic flexibility in their adult life.

As you get clearer on something it is always for a price, specialization necessarily means that some competences will have primate over others and their paramount function (in this example for a child to be able to articulate their thoughts and function in their own social surroundings) will shrink the world of possibilities. This has to happen in order to not be overwhelmed – the operative knowledge for everyday life needs to substitute the non-operative land of endless possibility. You wouldn’t want your cardiologist to actually be a carpenter who dabbles in heart surgery now would you? It might seem sad but the specialization in all areas is just a wise use of your time and resources because while you cannot be world class in everything you can get damn good at something and that is not too shabby at all. Choice is good but too much choice can result in never really making a decision and leaving you paralyzed to act, be and live. So don’t see your specializations as a loss, but an opportunity to polish your skill. Even Renaissance men can’t know it all and we’re a society of specialized men and women, with their own gifts and shortcomings, doing wonderful things – together.