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A New
Year’s Resolution To Learn a New Language
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by:
Emma Rath
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Danny Glover, the famous American actor, once
said that his new year’s resolution was to learn French, because
everyone he wants to speak with in West Africa speaks French. If you
would like your fun new year’s resolution to be to learn a new
language, then there are quite a few different ways you can go about it.
Perhaps you’ve been wanting to learn the language of your Grandmother.
Perhaps you would benefit from learning an official language or
unofficial second language of your country, such as French in Canada or
Spanish in USA. Or Greek in Melbourne Australia! Apparently the second
largest Greek-speaking city in the world after Athens, in terms of
number of people who speak Greek, is Melbourne Australia! Or perhaps
you feel like learning something that feels exotic like Japanese or
Swahili. One Saturday in November 2004, the national Canadian newspaper
the “The Globe and Mail” put its entire front page in Chinese,
explaining that with the globalization of jobs, Chinese will probably
be a necessary business language of the future.
A fun way to start learning a new language, especially if you’re not a
disciplined type of student, is to enrol in a language course. You meet
other people in your class who have the same language interest as you
which is fun in itself, you’re being taught by a real teacher, and the
once a week schedule of the classes means that you are practising your
new language regularly and steadily. Local community centers offer
these courses. Colleges, private language institutes and continuing
education programs at university offer them. You may be lucky enough to
have cultural organizations nearby that offer language courses. For
instance, a local immigrant organization in my town offers courses in
Swahili, a language spoken in many east African countries. Downtown, a
cultural organization funded by France called Alliance Française,
offers French courses. A nearby Saturday Chinese school offers courses
in Mandarin Chinese for both adults and children, and it’s quite
encouraging to see Cantonese-speaking adults there having as much
trouble pronouncing Mandarin as the non-Chinese adults!
If you can’t get away to a class, then there are lots of language
courses you can study at home: books, audio cassettes, video cassettes,
DVDs, music, interactive computer software, and online courses on the
Internet. Your local library probably has language learning resources
that you can borrow, if you don’t want to start off the year with the
expense of buying these materials. When studying on your own in this
way, try to devote 10 minutes every day to a bit of study or revision,
instead of doing 1 hour one day but then not finding the time to look
at it again for a couple of months. With 10 minutes of study each day,
you probably won’t feel like you are making progress because the
progress is so gradual. However, the progress will also be steady, and
in 3 months time when you look back on how much you have learned,
you’ll probably impress yourself.
To get you started learning your new language in the next 5 minutes,
here are some links to free online courses
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages - On the BBC website, you will find free
online courses for French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, Portuguese
and Mandarin Chinese. And also for Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Irish and
English, and links to British Sign Language.
http://www.word2word.com/course.html - The Word2Word website contains
links to free language courses all over the Internet. As of January
2005, it has links for 114 languages, from Abenaki, Albanian and
Arabic, to Urdu, Vietnamese and Xhosa. In all, there are 288 links to
online courses. So whether you want to learn Cree, Croatian or Korean,
hopefully you’ll find a free course for the language you want here.
A great way to learn and practise another language is “language
immersion” – being surrounded by people who speak that language and you
having to get things done in that language environment. A holiday in a
foreign country is a very interesting and fun “language immersion”
opportunity. People amaze themselves, speaking words in a foreign
tongue that they didn’t realize they knew, when they have to function
in a foreign language environment. Closer to home, local immigrant
community events may be able to provide you with a language immersion
environment without the expense of travel.
My Japanese teacher told us that if you understand more than 5% of what
is being said in a foreign language, then you are not at the optimum
level for learning the maximum amount possible of that foreign
language. If you understand more than 5% of what is going on in your
class, go up a level he said! If 95% seems gooblety-gook to you, then
that’s perfect he said! Take heart. It means you are soaking up as much
of that foreign language as is humanly possible!
According to Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta in the book “In Other
Words”, adults are more capable of learning a second language than most
people assume. In the book “What’s Going On In There”, Lise Eliot
explains how Noam Chomsky discovered in the late 1950s that all of the
world’s languages share the same fundamental structure. He called it
“Universal Grammar”. The language you already speak and the language
you want to learn both have sentences, grammar, nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions. You may not be able
to label those parts of your speech, but your brain is applying those
concepts to your speech every day, and has been doing so ever since you
were a baby. Experts believe that our brains have specific language
circuits, like a computer has specific circuitry to do certain tasks.
If you can communicate in one language (and if you are reading this,
then obviously you can!), then you have the necessary brain circuitry
to communicate in any language.
Which brings us to the subject of babies, kids and language. My father
observed that French children must be very clever. While
English-speaking teenagers are struggling with French in high school,
apparently French children are fluently speaking French right from
toddlerhood! (!!!)
Language courses for children exist in our communities, particularly in
communities that have vibrant ethnic members. Fun but academically
serious Saturday language classes for children are very popular among
immigrant families. They are created so that children can learn the
language and culture of the old country that their ancestors came from,
and they usually embrace the participation of other children from
outside their culture. So if you want your child to get a head start in
a foreign language, to reap the IQ benefits of being multilingual, and
to share and practise with you while you also learn a foreign language,
enrol them in Saturday school for Chinese, Italian, Greek, Croatian or
whatever language school you find available for kids.
As with adults, lots of multimedia resources are available for teaching
foreign languages to children. The latest craze is language videos for
babies! Small children find these videos very entertaining and love to
watch them. Some well-known titles include Bilingual Baby and Lyric
Language. On the Internet, http://www.kiddiesgames.com offers fun free
games for babies and preschoolers to learn Spanish and French.
Have you ever thought of learning Sign Language? American Sign Language
(or ASL) is the first language of half a million people in the United
States and Canada, and is probably the third most used language in USA.
Dr Bill Vicars at the ASL University at http://lifeprint.com/asl101
tells us that many deaf people cherish and enjoy their language and
deaf culture so much that given the chance to hear, they’d rather
remain deaf so as to remain part of their culture. On that website you
can find a free online ASL course and visual dictionary.
The benefits of hearing babies and toddlers learning sign language are
very exciting. The research of the past decade has shown that hearing
infants that learn sign language learn to speak verbally earlier, have
higher IQs, have less tantrums during the terrible twos because they
can communicate their needs, and are generally happier! There is now
quite a choice of entertaining videos for small children that are very
effective at teaching kids signs, such as the Signing Time videos at
http://www.signingtime.com and the We Sign videos that you can preview
at http://www.production-associates.com/wesign.html. In some areas,
it’s possible for children to take signing classes such as those of
http://www.kindersigns.com or to join reverse integration kindergarten
at deaf organizations or signing playgroups.
Have fun carrying out your new year’s resolution of learning a new
language. Find some music in your target language that is in a music
style that you enjoy and has the words to the songs. Robert Fisher in
the book “Head Start” explains that there is a link between music and
remembering language. He reports that the Ancient Greeks would listen
to the whole of the Iliad chanted to soft lyre music, and this allowed
many people to be able to remember long passages from the Iliad.
Have fun! ¡Diviértase! Amusez-vous bien!
About the author:
The author of this article, Emma Rath, produces free online and
purchasable download baby and preschooler computer games, including
games for learning English, French and Spanish, http://www.kiddiesgames.com
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