Schools in English-speaking countries are infamously bad at teaching foreign languages. Or perhaps not bad, just completely indifferent. Although anyone who wants to get on in the world has to speak English, things are a-changing and we are waking up to the fact that we are missing out on a great deal by not studying foreign languages.
As everybody knows, it is simpler to learn foreign languages when you are younger, so perhaps it would be a wise plan for parents to begin teaching their kids a foreign language at home, if they cannot rely on the public educational system to do it for them.
All well and good for parents of mixed marriages, I hear you saying, but what if both parents are native English speakers. Well, why not learn the language too at your child’s pace? If you start early enough, the child will still be learning English, so will learn the foreign language slowly anyway and you will easily be able to keep up.
Especially as, being the teacher, you can control the pace of the learning and you could slow it down to suit yourself. The first thing to do is pick a language that you can hear spoken reasonably often. Spanish, French and German are probably the best options. Believe me, Russian and Chinese are not!
Spanish, French and German have lots of words that come from the same ancestry as English words, so that makes it a little easier as well. So, let’s say, you pick French. Now you ought to look about for ways to teach (and learn) French.
One way to start is to get some bilingual cards with pictures of everyday things like pets, household items, relatives, colours, foods, numbers and clothing. You could use three to five cards a day in a 15-20 minute lesson and once you have used a card, you could pin it on the wall and reread it every now and then.This will increase your vocabulary.
You will also need to buy some blank card, a grammar book, a dictionary and a easy reader in French. It is all very well having a substantial vocabulary of words, but you need to know some verbs to be able to put them together into sentences.
So, say you have both studied the words for ‘mother’ and ‘cat’, you could look up the word for ‘look’, write it onto a piece of card and pin it between the pictures of mother and the cat. Then you have: “La mere regarde le chat” (mother is looking at the cat). You could repeat this with all the words that make sense until it sinks in.
‘Teach Yourself …’ books are usually fairly decent at offering a structure for your schooling and the best ones have CD’s of indigenous speakers to help you get the accent correct. Often the course work is mirrored on the CD chapter by chapter to make it even easier.
You can look on Amazon and buy some CD’s of simple French nursery rhymes and get some good cartoon stories like Asterix the Gaul. The text is meant for children, so you will easily be able to understand it. They are fairly good too and ought to hold both your kid’s and your own attention for hours, but just do a chapter at a stretch.
In order to apply your new language, try prohibitting English at meal times or for one meal a day. This can be amusing and the whole family could get involved. You will be surprised how quickly you will learn enough to say what you want to
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with the Gyro Helicopter S107. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Smart Toys for Kids.