Your brain can crack a new language's patterns in three days. Fluency takes 64 weeks.

A journalist with no Portuguese spent 30 minutes a day matching spoken words to animated scenes on a screen. By day three, she was scoring above 90 percent. Lancaster University linguist Patrick Rebuschat says the brain does this through cross-situational learning — a statistical trick it's been running since infancy, tracking which sounds keep appearing alongside which objects, BBC Future reports. — Read the rest

The post Your brain can crack a new language's patterns in three days. Fluency takes 64 weeks.