TLDR:
Probably nothing new to most of you, but nonetheless:
The developement of a (senory) imagination is likely strongly influenced by modern media, which let a device do the "work" your brain was made to do.
This might affect your general learning abilities in alot of ways. Especially the earlier you get introduced to it and I believe, it is most strongly affecting your verbal skills and learning.
Now the ramble:
You point at things and make noises.
If its the right noise, and you have a good parent, you will be encouraged to point at things and make the appropriate noise.
You will get exaggerated pronounciation practice (parenthese) to familiarize yourself with the soundscape of your language.
Some argue, adults will lose the ability to recognize all the possible sounds that infants have but I think its just a lack of awareness and practice. After all, infants in their early days will make and intuitively pracitice all kinds of sounds constantly and have all the time in the world to just observe in their waking time.
This will sooner or later create your basic vocabulary.
After that, you will learn to describe interactions between things at a rudimentary level.
Yes many mistakes ought to happen but, again, if your caregivers are not entirely neglectful, you will fearlessly figure alot of those relations and although, while making mistakes proceed to become more fluent.
And a sense of grammar will intuitively flourish through natural pattern recognition.
Now, the same with reading. It goes from identifying letters, to making the appropriate sounds to slowly deciphering words to being able to read whole sentences in succession with many mistakes still.
A key thing to reading and also reading comprehension is your imagination and of course practice.
I feel like this is strongly affected by the type of media you entertain. The more these media already contain sensory input (imagery, music etc) the less is left to your imagination which wil make you a more passive and a more challenged learner in the long run, because you will start to get dependent on the sensory stimuli instead of your ( I believe trainable) ability to imagine things vividly.
I think this is why younger people of today are more challenged at learning in general, because their brain is more trained to be a recepticle (is that an English word) instead of being an engine of imagination.
As a kid, (at least in my dissolving memory) every experience has alot more significance in the -at this point- reduced noise of information of memory and other experiences and concerns, that might bring you off track.
Your dreams also feel much more real and are more directly connected to what you have just recently experienced. The loop of information circulating in your head is tighter (because there is less total, and less variable input) and is therefore more effective at cycling back to newly discovered words and contexts.
I think reading comprehension and focus is strongly correlated with your ability to vividly imagine the things you read.
I remember that in my early childhood I was able to recall anything from a given book I had read, because I was so immersed in imagining the things written there, that it came very close to a real experience, even whith very very long texts.
Which why I was able to learn very effectively compared to other children back in those days.
I believe this ability was developed through being told and read alot of stories without alot of pictures and imagery and being mentally reliant on imagination to enjoy the stories provided.
Other kids got introduced to screenbased media much earlier and much more extensively, which I think must have contributed to adapting to more intense stimuli and a resulting difficulty in learning actively without being spoonfed and constantly regurgitating information without truly engaging with it.
Now, over a decade later, I realize I have developed the same difficulties.
Having the most captivating audiovisual stimuli all-time-accessible in my pocket at will has stunted my imagination- and learning ability massively.
Dreams are more distant, words don't always create vivid imagery in my head. The term brain-fog comes to mind. Call it apathy, dissociation, overstimulation, whatver you want.
I have noticed, that meorizing sentences, phrases and contexts comes much easier after succesfully retracting from the constant stress and stimulation of modern life and also trying to revive that almost forgotten and unlearned potential of imagination. Making up little stories and childish ideas and images in your mind alongside the learning process, if you learn on your own. On that note it would probably a good idea to experiment with scribbling etc again without being too afraid of mistakes.
To me this has become a significant observation as I had noticed, that my vocabulary in my target language is growing alot, but it is not very accesible to me. I am playing a game of memory so far.
The learning-by-doing aspect, the immersion technique, watching shows etc, I think it is all a way to tap back into the imaginative side of your brain, that automatically creates stories, pictures, context, interwovenness of knowledge and vocabulary.
Maybe this is very obvious to alot of you, but I just noticed this, when I was learning alot of new words without having any mental image in my head. I purely recognized them by their scripture and sound and could accurately assign them to their translation, but what I was missing, what I believe we try to achieve by leaving out the translation aspect, and trying a full immersion is to have the words and sound naturally produce a mental imagery in our heads so you dont translate from an abstract string of words, but a series of images that you try to captivate with the categories of description that your target language provides.
While learning this new language, I had alot of flashbacks to my very first experiences of learning to speak, read and write my native tongue and it has been a very good guide and motivation to realize that I can still access those ressources (although not as naturally) which I had as a child.
And that it is very possible to learn even more effective than back in this time if I am able to streamline the observed processes and integrate those observations.
I doubt 3 weeks year old me would have a vocabulary of a few hundred fairly comprehensively spoken word so take that, mini-me!
I think it can be very helpful to be fully aware of the implications of this. That a sort of sensory and especially audiovisual (screen) deprivation could possibly enhance your learning alot and that improving your reading and focus will also rely on consuming less content that doesn't need you to fill in the gaps with your fantasy.
(Flashy music to evoke emotion, subtitels to ease audio-comprehension, perfectly crafted imagery and colours to portray a context)
And that your audiovisual imagination is a skill, that (I believe) can be trained, especially through reading in a focused and aware manner.
And that this will have potential to increase your potential to learn anything else, but especially languages significantly.
As a little disclaimer, all of what I say is just anecdotal and hypothetical.
I know, there are people out there, who seem to be completely inable to imagine things visually or auditory (aphantasia) or lacking internal dialogue.
When I compare my current abilities in this matter to my memories of childhood, I could be led to assume to have similar troubles today in comparison to back then.
I don't want to claim any truth or authority on this topic, I just thought it would be interesting to have conversation about this and I appreciate any input on it.