How children learn a language and how LLM's like ChatGPT do it

👶 How children learn language: naturally, through the body and the world

Learning to speak is an everyday miracle. A child hears thousands of words a day, watches gestures, reads faces, points at things, babbles, gets it wrong, tries again. No pressure. No grammar rules. No fear.

They learn through context, repetition, and the need to communicate. Speaking isn’t the goal, it’s the result of being alive and needing to express something. The brain does the rest.

Children learn by:

• Getting context-rich, repeated input

• Engaging in real human interaction

• Learning without theory

• Using time, emotion and curiosity

🤖 And what about ChatGPT? It learns similarly… but without a body

Models like ChatGPT also “learn” using huge amounts of input through books, articles, websites. From this, they learn to predict words, form sentences, answer questions, even translate.

But there’s a key difference: ChatGPT doesn’t understand. It has no body, no memories, no lived experience. It doesn’t know what it feels like to be thirsty or to ask for help.

To ChatGPT, the word “water” just statistically relates to “drink”, “glass”, “cold”, “sea”. There is no meaning, only patterns.

📊 Similarities and differences

	Children	ChatGPT / AI
Input type	Auditory, visual, emotional, physical	Written text
Learning context	Real and experiential	Abstract and probabilistic
Purpose	Communication and connection	Text generation
Error correction	Through human feedback	Through training adjustments
Time to learn	Years	Weeks (with vast datasets)

🧩 What can we learn from this?

If you're learning Portuguese (or any language), you're somewhere in between:

• Like a child, you benefit from listening, context, repetition and real interaction.

• Like a model, you can absorb huge amounts of input to find patterns.

But you have something unique: intention. You know what you want, and you can act on it. You can speak, fail, laugh and try again.

✅ Conclusion

Learning a language is more than memorising vocabulary. It’s building meaning.

Children do it by living.

AI does it with data.

You can do it your own way: with curiosity, intention and time.