A New Year’s
Resolution to Learn a New Language by Emma
Rath
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.
