Two types of language acquisition – One kind of language making capacity?

Learn a foreign language in your sleep! Language learning made easy by hypnosis! Lean back, relax and learn! Diverse methods of relaxation promise fast and (almost) unfailing success in adult foreign language learning, relying, for example, on exposure to Baroque music or on special breathing techniques, designed to activate underused cognitive resources of the brain, especially in the right hemisphere, to synchronize both brain hemispheres, to put conscious and subconscious into communication, and so forth. These as well as other advertised methods of language learning attract large numbers of people wishing to acquire a second language, people who may be frustrated by previous language learning experiences in school. They seem to believe or are easily convinced that they do have the capacity to acquire other languages, but that, somehow, access to this language making capacity is blocked and can be made accessible by removing some mental or psychological obstacles.

After all, toddlers quite obviously have this capacity. Infants and very young children develop almost miraculously the ability of speech, without apparent effort, without even being taught – as opposed to the teenager or the adult struggling in foreign language classrooms without, it seems, ever being able to reach the same level of proficiency as five-year-olds in their first language.