But babies babble and practice speaking right from the beginning!

Babbling hasn’t been shown to have any clear relation with learning to speak. The fact is that babies spend many months hearing their mother tongue before they say their first word. They start understanding much earlier than that, though, and by the time they say their first word they can already understand a lot. Another example that shows this point very clearly are young children that move to another country. Children that move around the age of 9 or younger consistently become indistinguishable from native speakers. However, these children never babble their second language. They do, though, have a long silent period in which they observe and pay attention to what the people around them are saying before they start speaking. If only we didn’t forget the things that we already knew intuitively as children…