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If you speak English as a native speaker or as a second language you already know dozens of foreign words. French cul-de-sac (end of sack), Spanish Los Angeles (the angels), German kindergarten (child garden).
You are probably already ahead of the English people in the old days. 'The English know two languages, English and louder English!' That used to be a popular saying. Why was this the case? If you look at people on remote islands, they often know only their own language. Until the advent of the railways, which preceded air travel and tarmacked roads, most people did not travel beyond the next village. Countries in the middle of Europe, where the locals spoke a language which nobody else spoke, often had residents or travelling sales people who spoke two or three or four or five languages.
It doesn't have to be that way for those of us who are not surrounded by foreign language speakers. firstly, why bother? Shouldn't they be learning our language?
It is much easier to teach and correct others if you know their language. When I started learning other languages, I understood the speakers' problems.
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For example, my friend in Singapore is called Shan Shan. That means mountains in Chinese (Mandarin). Shan Shan is literally mountain mountain. That is how you make plurals in Chinese. So your pupil who is learning English and keeps forgetting to add s for a plural, is probably translating each word literally from their language.
Some people struggle. Others learn languages easily. Instead of looking at the problems, let's look at the solutions. We live in the golden age for learning languages. There are millions of people learning foreign languages, for example, on Duolingo. The website organisers can measure exactly how many people have signed up for the basic courses and how many people progress onto advanced courses. In every language which is rolled out.
You don't need internet access. You can learn by speaking and by flashcards. That was how child prodigy Bella learned to be bilingual in Russian and French.
Look online and you can see children who are begging from tourists or selling postcards to help the family earn a living and these little children can speak numerous languages. As we say, needs must. If you must, you must. If you must, you do.
The Russian Multi-Lingual Child Prodigy, Bella
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Online a wonderful little Russian girl entranced live audiences and went viral with her demonstrations of speaking fluently in numerous languages. I love the video where she asks for fruit from sellers arranged around the stage with flags of various languages.
Bella, the four-year-old who speaks 7 languages
My dream is to have my grandchildren multi-lingual, polyglots.
I can imagine that some of the people reading this will be thinking, yes, that's fine if you start young, but I am too old for that. Most children learn to read, and mostly to write, in their own language, even the harder ones (for us English speakers) such as Chinese.
You can go on immersion courses to learn a language in a year, six months, a month, a week, a weekend, or learn the Korean alphabet in a few hours. Compare one hour lesson once a week in school for three ten week terms, 3 hours. If you do it all day for the weekend for 12 hours a day, starting at 7 and finishing at 7, or 8 to 8, or 9 to 9, in a long weekend, you could cover the same ground.
That would be a crash course. To go for a job interview. To relocate to another country. To be a spy in wartime. To be a nurse, doctor or volunteer in an emergency to help another country in a natural crisis. to translate for refugees arriving in your country.
Alternatively, do the opposite. Just one hour a day every day of the year for 365 days would be 365 hours. Just one minute a day would be 365 minutes.
Other effortless ideas include having the 20 words you need to know , or the letters of the alphabet, on the back of the bathroom or toilet door. Or propped up beside your bedside light so you see them first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
Or on the dining table. One flashcard a day. One word a day. 365 words a year.
If you were to learn a language a year, in five years you would know five languages.
How much time can you spare each day? Five minutes?
Sign up on Duolingo or Memrise. On Duo you are likely to get daily reminders if you tick the boxes saying that you opt into the reminder system. I find the reminders very good.
A five year old can hold a basic conversation. For the first year of its life it doesn't say a word, just listens to the sounds of language all around. Then come the first simple one or two syllable words for mother, then father.
Let's look at these words.
You can probably do one or two from memory. Or from your travels. I learned French and Latin at secondary school. So these are my instant, effortless words.
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English - French
Mother, mummy, Mum - mere
father - daddy, Dad - père
French - English
mere - mother
père - father
Flag of Germany
German - English
mutter - mother
vater - father
English - German
father - vater (v pronounced as f)
mutter - mother
Useful Websites
https://osxdaily.com/2017/03/22/type-accents-mac-easy/
https://context.reverso.net/translation/windows-mac-app
(Avast sent me a warning about this. My husband told me to ignore that warnings. 'Avast is just trying to sell an upgrade.')
Useful Language learning Websites
duolingo.com
Interlingua
An artificial language using commonly used words from mainly romance languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
Not to be confused with interlingo
MEMRISE
A system which allows you to save your memory aids for each word, and see memory aids from other people.
memrise.com
earworms.com
Bella, 7 languages at the age of 4, shopping on stage on TV in Australian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd9u9N7Z4TU
About the Author
Angela Lansbury is a teacher of English and other languages and gives talks and workshops on language and learning languages. For workshops contact annalondon8@gmail.com
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