ay well repeat again. But that is where they leave it…until the next time the word comes up.
Very young kids before they start talking will repeat sounds and combinations… like mu-mu-mu-mu. This, again, is not mimicry. This to me is the child working and exploring the various parts of their sound system. This is creation; not mimicry
Mimicry does not address the issue of how we create new sounds that we may not have in our first language. It does not address how we actually automate what we have created. On so many levels mimicry is a strategy that misleads us.
Focussing our awareness so we can notice more, our listening so we can hear more and our will so we can use our muscles differently and consistently, are all capacities we have access to and, indeed, express in our daily lives. Why not do so learning languages as well?
As an adult we would get much more value from our efforts if we focussed more of our efforts on listening, to ourselves, and to others. Then see what we have to alter in the way we use our mouth (etc) to bring closer what we say to what another says.
As they say, “You don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.” I am not suggesting that you forget everything that infants don’t do. I am, however, suggesting that you can learn faster and better by understanding that you have so many capacities that you don’t utilise. And we simply don’t utilise them because the ways that we learn do not call on them. The only way we develop muscles is by using them. It is not enough to talk about them. So THE hack of all hacks is, wherever possible, to let go of ways of learning that don’t call on the considerable powers we all have. Instead, as I have shown, embrace practices that engage “all” of you. Sometimes this might mean tweaking what you are already doing, other times it may mean wholesale changes.