Learning a Language

Steven Pinker on learning a language:

You learn a language by exposure. First during the critical stages of growing up, a process surprisingly fast and effective, but only pertaining to the basic aspect of language, namely its oral one. Similarly to learn to write you need to read a lot, and this is a far less natural process and takes much longer time. To acquire a sense of style you need a lot of exposure, and this is what eventually provides you with an ear going beyond that of the oral aspect.

This also makes sense if read in the context of programming languages.