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According to Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta in
book “In Other Words”, adults are more capable of learning a second language than most people assume. In book “What’s Going On In There”, Lise Eliot explains how Noam Chomsky discovered in late 1950s that all of world’s languages share same fundamental structure. He called it “Universal Grammar”. The language you already speak and 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 necessary brain circuitry to communicate in any language.
Which brings us to 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 language and culture of old country that their ancestors came from, and they usually embrace 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 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 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 first language of half a million people in United States and Canada, and is probably third most used language in USA. Dr Bill Vicars at 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 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 past decade has shown that hearing infants that learn sign language learn to speak verbally earlier, have higher IQs, have less tantrums during 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 Signing Time videos at http://www.signingtime.com and 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 words to songs. Robert Fisher in book “Head Start” explains that there is a link between music and remembering language. He reports that Ancient Greeks would listen to whole of Iliad chanted to soft lyre music, and this allowed many people to be able to remember long passages from Iliad.
Have fun! ¡Diviértase! Amusez-vous bien!
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.
