You would be amazed of how many children and youngsters speak one or two foreign languages fluently, especially those leaving in a non-English country. English is obviously extremely easy to learn, since children have contact with it all the time, through media, video games, the Internet, toys and so forth. However, a child can easily learn a secondary foreign language, or if his mother tongue is English, a main foreign language. It has been proven that we have the best assimilative skills during our young years and it’s then that we should try to build up on learning a foreign language.
Obviously, if you’re reading this you’ve probably passed that “perfect language learning age”, but if you have children of your own, it might be a good idea to give them the chance to start up on a foreign language while they are still at their learning best. It’s important to know that with each passing year, his ability to assimilate information naturally gradually decreases, because he starts gathering up on day-by-day information which fills up the free spots so to speak. It has been argued that the best period to introduce a foreign language to a child is in his first year of life. Bilingual families (where parents have different nationalities, or when both parents are of the same nationality but live abroad their home country) use this technique reflexively, since the child “picks up” on both languages at the same time.
At around age 2, your child enters the “vocabulary explosion” period. During this period that lasts around 1 year, he gathers new words like a vacuum cleaner. Obviously, the main vocabulary will be of his first language, but if you allow him to play with some toys that use a foreign language, especially toys that use images correlated to words (flashcards for example) will also give him a heads up on this new language, even though he might not distinctively know which is which at first. It’s important that he uses these words, he memorizes them and he’s familiar with them. This will be extremely useful later on when he’ll start the actual study of the foreign language you’re trying to teach.
At kindergarten age, your kid will already be fluently speaking his mother tongue (maybe the languages of both parents in a bilingual home) so some parents choose to find him a specific kindergarten that focuses on a foreign language. You’ll undoubtedly find kindergartens that teach in Spanish, French, German or English (for non-English parents of course) for natives of these languages or simply for parents that want to teach these languages to their children from a young age. If possible, try making sure that the teacher/s of these kindergartens are native speakers or are well-versed in that particular language, or your kid might end up learning it with the teacher’s grammatical flaws, pronunciation mistakes, chaotic accents and so forth.
Posts Tagged ‘Mother Tongue’
Teaching Your Child A Foreign Language
December 17th, 2009Japanese Language Accelerated Learning Techniques
December 8th, 2009Japanese is anything but an easy language to learn, regardless of one’s mother tongue. Still, it is one of the most popular foreign language choices in America and Europe, for two main reasons: the economical importance of Japan and the numerous businesses contracted between Japan and these areas and the fascination for Japanese culture that mainly formed up through modern Western media. Regardless of which reason you want to learn it for, the Japanese language cannot be learnt easily unless you know how it works.
Japanese is spoken by over 130 million people all over the world, obviously most of them being in Japan’s mainland. The Japanese language’s grammar is usually very complex to foreigners because it uses a specific speaker-listener status vocabulary that is unlike anything English or other western languages can offer. Another showstopper when learning Japanese is its writing style, which uses a combination of three alphabets: Chinese characters (also known as Kanji) and two syllabic scripts known as Katakana and Hiragana. In addition, modern Japan uses the Latin alphabet for more and more purposes, which makes it slightly easier for English speakers to grasp this new language than say, a hundred years ago.
Many Japanese learning courses and books start off slowly, in a gradually increasing order of steps. Although this is the correct way to go with any language learning process, it takes a lot of time and you might simply not have that available time to invest in it. For this reason, there are a series of accelerated learning techniques that skip through some of the basics and try to accumulate these fundamentals over more advanced chapters, naturally. Take note that although this is definitely a faster way to learn Japanese, there’s a good chance that someone that takes the “stepwise”, slower technique will almost always speak and write better and more correctly.
One of the most common Japanese language accelerated learning techniques is to plunge you head first into some easier texts, as soon as you know the basic alphabet, then provide a translation in English (or your mother tongue) of the same text. This obviously skips a lot of steps such as basic grammatical structure, pronunciation of words, punctuation and so forth. However, this accelerated learning technique has the advantage of building up your vocabulary quickly. Doing several of these translated reading exercises per day, you will soon get some of the grammar and spelling foundations that you’ve skipped in the first place, up and running.
The next step in most Japanese language accelerated learning techniques is to play a tape followed by a translated text. After you’ve built on your Japanese reading and understanding skills, the audio technique is the logical step forward. This will correct any pronunciation problems and will also have a positive effect on your vocabulary gain. There are several sources offering Japanese language accelerated learning techniques, including books and courses. You can find some very useful sources online, on sites dealing with Japanese language learning, Japanese language translations and tests.
