"acquiring a language" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It can be used in a sentence when describing the process of learning or gaining proficiency in a new language. Example: "One of the greatest challenges of acquiring a language is understanding the cultural nuances and idiomatic expressions."
Moving to Belgium has rammed home to me the increased difficulty of acquiring a language with age.
Acquiring a language for a baby, as I am learning, is a task of mind-boggling proportions: the infant must learn to distinguish meaningful sounds from superfluous noise, identify syllables and then words, crack the code of meaning, and gradually acquire the skill to combine words into sentences and longer texts.
But if knowing a language is a matter of knowing all these obscure rules, then acquiring a language emerges as the monumental task of learning them all.
"When you're a kid all you're working at is acquiring a language, and you don't have anything to get in the way of that," she says.
The CPSD is a principled four-pronged approach to EAP reading course design employing elements of Type A syllabi (focusing on the discrete elements of language) and Type B syllabi (emphasizing the purposes for and process of acquiring a language).
Gold's explicit equation of acquiring a language with identifying a generative grammar that exactly generates it naturally makes his work seem relevant to generative Essentialists (though even for them, his results do not provide anything like a sufficient reason for adopting the linguistic nativist position).
"I figure if they have to acquire a language, I wanted them to have Mandarin because it makes it easier when they go into the workplace," said Jennifer Ng, whose 5-year-old daughter studies Mandarin at the language school of the Church of the Transfiguration, a Roman Catholic parish on Mott Street where nearly half the classes are devoted to Mandarin.
There does not really seem to be anyone who is a complete non-nativist: nobody really thinks that a creature with no unlearned capacities at all could acquire a language.
They'll also acquire a language or two, or maybe learn to play an instrument if so coaxed.
The contest reflects our conviction that the effort taken to acquire a language wholly different to one's own is an investment not only in yourself, but also in global understanding.
Children are thought to develop a neural commitment to their native language (L1) such that when acquiring a second language later in life, their L1 phonetic categories interfere with their production and perception of non-native target sounds (see, e.g., Iverson et al., 2003).
