Here's the key I think... Yup don't bite off more than you can chew. This is about trying smartly. You still have to try. But I don't know about this part, which suspiciously does not have a reference... Do you know how many times I have to tell little kids that "eated" is not a word??? No, ate! no, ate! grrr, no it's not eated, it's ate! They don't pick up on irregularities, it's drilled into them.
Not exactly true. The natural order of first language acquisition is quite complicated. First, kids pick up the most common verbs, which are, in most languages, irregular. Then they start to pick up regular conjugations and start applying them to every verb... including the irregular ones they had previously got right. In English this often means adding -ed to irregular past forms (sawed instead of saw) or simply a pure regular conjugation (eated instead of ate). The kid later reacquires the correct form. All the literature in first language acquisition says that adult correction doesn't matter a damn, and infants don't appear to understand how corrections work. A study showed that this may not be 100% true, but it was a study of a single child, so it's dangerous to draw too many conclusions. A researcher rigged his whole house up with hidden cameras and mics to study his first child's development, and after analysing thousands of hours of footage, he spotted that there were very short periods when he and his wife were naturally correcting the child where it seemed to just be a "final push" for a particular language feature. There was a TED video on this - I'll try to dig it out later. But anyway, my point is that children certainly do just pick things up, and correction is only a small thing if anything at all. The real problem, and the real conclusion, is as you highlight: Children mess up their irregular verbs because they're trying to get their heads round too much complexity in one go. Adults struggle because they're trying to deal with too much complexity in one go. We cannot reduce the complexity for children, because there's no input channel for the rules other than acquisition by absorption. With adults, however, we cancontrol the complexity and introduce rules one variable at a time. For an example of this, just look at any of the courses Michel Thomas produced during his lifetime. He was able to teach the most part of the grammar of the Romance languages in a few days of lessons, and many of the language points that would normally only be introduced after 2 or 3 years of study were included in that course. He achieved this by introducing only one concept at a time, wherever possible. There was never any ambiguity for the student to have to try to resolve (well actually, there was; but it was when Thomas made a mistake - a failure in the teacher, not in the method).
