learning languages

Humans as a species are so incredibly intelligent and adaptable. The most fascinating part of "The Shallows" to me was concerned with the history of reading and how it relates to the human brain. I find it so interesting that at first, the spaces we put between words when translating auditory language into text came as an unnatural thing for our ancestors to do. "When we talk, we don't insert pauses between each word--long stretches of syllables flow unbroken from our lips." This is incredible to think about. It demonstrates just how much our brains were  forced for adapt and reconfigure themselves to the introduction of written language. Now, 2000 plus years since, it seems unnatural to not separate our words--of course, this is due to the factor of years of language being spoken, written, structured, and studied. However I find it interesting that Carr notes that "today, when young children begin to write, they also run their words together. Like the early scribes, they write what they hear." So essentially, writing and reading is something that does not come natural to us at all.  Carr notes how when initially learning how to write and read language, "readers' eyes had to move slowly and haltingly across the lines of text, pausing frequently and often backing up to the start of a sentence, as their minds struggled to figure out where one word ended and a new one began and what role each word was playing in the meaning of the sentence. Reading was like working out a puzzle." Suddenly, instead of thinking and communicating through auditory means, visual means of text became the new way of communicating. This must have been incredibly foreign for those people to do, just as it is to us when we are children learning to read and write.
Speaking from my own life, this is exactly how I felt (still feel occasionally) when taking my Spanish classes, or back in my senior year of high school when learning Latin. I even feel this way about reading, though that's probably due to my own lack of interest in "practicing" of the skill of reading. Language is so confusing and strange when you think about it. Recently, I read this article which discusses the problem with learning languages through means of reading text and studying lists of words. Instead, this article suggests that it is more useful and natural to our brains to learn language through visual means rather than through studying words and text because those are not what come naturally to us. Think about it--most children learn to speak simple sentences before they have any clue how to spell their own name. This is no doubt a result of what they hear from their guardians/people around them as well as what they see in the world and the cognitive associations they make with visualizing things. Its like the chicken or the egg debate--which comes first? Speaking a language or writing it? Speaking, no doubt. It's quite interesting then that when you study a foreign language in school, you immediately dive in to grammar and structure.