ABSTRACT
What does it mean to learn a language such as English? The task is such an ordinary one that it’s easy to forget it’s also quite a remarkable achievement. David Crystal (1995) outlines the knowledge that young language learners need to acquire in order to speak English:
• The 20 or so vowels and 24 or so consonants of a spoken dialect of the language, and over 300 ways of combining these sounds into sequences (such as /s+k+r/ into scream, and /m+p+s/ into jumps).
