Why is language learning unique? Isn’t it just like any other kind of learning?

The easiest way to put this is that every kind of ability that you can learn is slightly different, but language learning has a couple of differences that make it stand out. Any ability is basically a combination of the following areas:\n\nConscious memorized knowledge.\nReasoning ability.\nHand-eye (or more generally sensory-motor) coordination, including muscle memory.\nAn arbitrary mental image that represents the end goal of the activity that you are performing. In the case of tennis, it would be the mental image of the ball hitting the ground close to the court line. In the case of racing a car, it's the car getting as close as possible to the inside of the next curve at the ideal speed.\n\nLanguage learning stands out in 2 important ways:\n\nSome other activities require building an arbitrary mental image, like music and dance. But the mental image you need to build to be able to speak a language is HUGE. No other kind of activity requires this huge arbitrary mental image.\nSince it’s arbitrary and non-visual, just practicing the activity doesn't allow you to get the precise feedback you need to make the small micro-adjustments you need to improve your pronunciation. So in that sense it’s very different from tennis.\nYou are expressing thought. While some arts allow you to convey abstract feelings to a certain degree, no other activity has you trying to convey all the details and nuances of your thought and trying to convert it into something that can precisely recreate that thought in somebody else’s brain.