Learn Language Like a Child?
Posted on | August 10, 2007 | 3 Comments
My daughter has turned 2-years old last month. This is the period when suddenly you hear streams of words coming out from her month rather unexpectedly.
A lot have been said about learning language like a child, especially from the natural language learning advocates. After all, who is a better learner than a child, who would eventually become a native speaker. I am not against the natural language learning approach, but I would not go so far and adopt the entire children approach and “learn language like a child”. I can think of at least 3 areas that are very different:
1) Pace
Children take many years to become fluent native speakers. We as adult probably won’t want to spend as much time. Adults learn things very differently than children. We relate what we know with what is new to us. Children usually learn the concepts and the language at the same time. So there is no reason why we cannot learn faster than them.
We as adult tend to work much harder and stay more focus to acquire a language. We perform drills and memorize vocabulary. Children usually take the ‘natural’ pace to absorb the new materials, which of course is expected to take a longer time.
2) Vocabulary
I have heard people recommending learners to read children’s books. While I believe this is good to get used to the sentence structure, but at the same time you would pick up a lot of vocabulary that are not very useful in your daily-life. You would learn all the names of the animals and insects, from a bee to a donkey, as well as items such as a balloon, kite, and teddy bear.
I recall some years ago, my wife and a few friends hired a Mandarin teacher to teach them Mandarin. This was way before I started. She found a teacher from Beijing working in a kindergarten. One day, I took a look at her materials, only to find out that the teacher was reusing the same materials from her work. My wife was learning sentences like “Papa goes to work, Mama goes to cook” (爸爸工作,妈妈煮饭)!
3) Methodology
We are much smarter than children, and we should leverage this advantage and take shortcuts. This is where linguistic tools such as grammar come into place. I am not against extensive grammatical explanations, only that we should not spend too much time of explaining ‘why’ things are. Grammar should help us to identify patterns and nothing more.
Other useful tools include phonetics and memorizing techniques such as mnemonics.
I believe we still have a lot to learn from children as far as language learning is concerned. In particular, children are usually better listeners, they are eager to imitate, and they have the correct attitude of being fearless and humble.
Comments
3 Responses to “Learn Language Like a Child?”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe
Top Posts
Search This Blog
Categories
Archives
I am a LingQ member
Recent Comments
- Cool language tool. Should become the next hit. Now they need more people joining. http://t.co/8YWZ9Wx
- Visiting Rio de Janeiro today and tomorrow.
- Just had an English/Spanish mixed conversation with a Skype friend for over an hour. We had not talked for more than 4 years.
- My last week in Sao Paulo.
- I find myself comfortably living in São Paulo within the 1st week, thx to the ability to understand the surroundings. http://t.co/UDkZA79
August 15th, 2007 @ 2:37 am
Fearlessness is a great advantage kids have… when learning their first language! I have seen many extremely shy children in Japan who have been thrown into “English lessons”, only to be so shy as to never make a peep. Poor things!
Of course, I’m sure it would be different if they were in a school abroad totally surrounded by foreigners though.
September 10th, 2007 @ 12:24 pm
I agree, and as you point out adults can learn languages much faster than Children (despite it being so often presented the other way around).
As you say part of the reason we can learn faster is that we have already done a lot of work by learning a language (any language). I think the ability to concentrate for longer helps too, and adult can be attentive to new language for long periods of time.
Ultimately the child may go further in his/her mother tongue but that is after 20 years or so. Maybe the reason that many second language learners don’t get perfect is simply because the payoff isn’t worth it (if you can get pretty damn good in half the time why bother).
December 22nd, 2007 @ 8:16 am
[...] Secondly, what is wrong with thinking in my native language? I have a knowledge of an adult. I learn faster than a child because I don’t need to learn the words and the concepts at the same time. I don’t want [...]