3 Language-Learning Strategies From My 1-Year-Old

What a toddler with thirty words can teach adult language learners about communication, vocabulary, and trusting the process.

Hannah Pitner, PhD

4/2/20264 min read

boy in brown sweater and blue denim jeans walking on green grass during daytime

I'm a mom and a linguist, which means watching my child acquire language for the first time has been both emotional and deeply nerdy.

This stage has been a genuine reminder that we all have innate language-learning strategies, and that by the time most adults try to learn a new language, they have become completely disconnected from them. Not because they lost the ability. Because they stopped trusting it.

My son is sixteen months old. He has maybe thirty words. What sticks out to me the most is not how many words he knows, but how creatively he uses them. Here are three strategies you can apply to your own language learning:

Circumlocution: Use What You Have

My son's word "bye-bye" is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now.

Depending on context, gesture, and timing, it can mean: I want to leave this activity. I am done with that. Stop doing that to me. Get that away from me. When we wiped his nose the other day, he turned his face away and said a long, dramatic "byeeee."

He also combines words with actions in ways that are surprisingly precise. He will stand by the door holding my keys and say "go go." He will point the remote at the TV and say "dadel" (his word for Ms. Rachel). He is working with a small inventory and making it stretch.

This is circumlocution: using the words you already have to talk around what you want to say. It is a known strategy in applied linguistics, and it is one of the most important things adult learners can develop.

What adult learners often do instead is the opposite. They try to memorize the exact right phrase for every situation. They write things down in notebooks. And then in the moment, in an actual conversation, they freeze, because the exact phrase is not there. My son does not freeze. He grabs "bye-bye" and makes it work.

The principle is simple: reuse builds fluency. It creates a solid foundation and forces you into real communication, even when your vocabulary is incomplete.

Non-Linguistic Resources

Babies rely heavily on gesture, pointing, facial expression, movement, and shared context. It is a huge part of how they communicate before language catches up.

What is interesting is that adults actually have more of these resources than babies do: more physical coordination, more social awareness, more ability to read a room. And yet adult learners often feel embarrassed using them. They stand still. They stay quiet. They wait until they can say it correctly.

My son does not wait. He points. He moves. He looks at me and then looks at the thing he wants. He uses his whole body to communicate, and it works. Not perfectly, but well enough to keep the conversation going.

Non-linguistic resources do not replace language, but they make communication possible long before your vocabulary feels complete. They are part of how fluent speakers actually talk. Letting yourself use them is not a workaround. It is good language practice.

Motivation

My son's entire language system is organized around his interests. Right now, that means snacks, balls, Ms. Rachel, and going outside. Those are his words because those are his world.

He does not know the word for "notebook." He does not need it. Every word he has is connected to something he actually wants or does or sees every day. Because of that, his vocabulary, small as it is, is highly functional.

Adult learners often have the opposite problem. Many people who took Spanish in high school already know several hundred words, sometimes over a thousand when you account for cognates and word families. But those words are often words like cuaderno and lápiz, learned in a classroom context that had nothing to do with their real lives.

Research on vocabulary acquisition suggests that around 2,000 high-frequency words can account for roughly 80% of everyday language use, but that figure depends entirely on which words, and whether they match the contexts you are actually communicating in (Nation, 2006). A nurse who needs Spanish for patient care needs a very different 2,000 words than someone learning for travel or for a new job in a bilingual workplace.

My toddler has it figured out intuitively. He learns the language of his world. That is the part adult learners most often skip, and the part that makes the biggest difference.

What Ties It Together

There are a few other things I have noticed that do not fit neatly into categories but feel important.

He understands phrases long before he can produce them. He has been hearing "do you want a snack?" for months, and his comprehension came way before his ability to ask for one himself. This is normal in language acquisition. Receptive language almost always precedes productive language, and it is a good reminder that understanding more than you can say is not failure. It is how it works.

He also gets consistent, low-stakes feedback. When he says "nana," I say back, "Oh, you want a snack?" This is a recast: I model the correct form without making the correction feel like a correction. He does not get embarrassed. He moves on. He tries again later.

And he repeats. Not just words, but words paired with actions, in context, over and over. He watches first. Then he tries. Then he keeps going.

None of this is something adults lose. It is something we forget, usually because somewhere along the way, we started believing that learning a language means getting it right before we open our mouths.

Citation

Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? The Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82. https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.63.1.59