As an adult, can you learn a language the same way that you did as a child?

Not entirely, because children’s acquisition of language is closely linked to the development of their brains. Some language courses try to imitate the child’s learning processes as closely as possible, but others recognise that as adults with knowledge of one language already we can’t go back to that language-free state we were in as infants.

Adults will always relate their second language to their first. Most adult courses recognise that, while we have lost the abilities we had as infants, we have acquired an understanding as adults which can be exploited to make language learning easier.