Teaching Language

TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN
A LANGUAGE YOU DON'T KNOW
by Rich Murphy

Foreign languages are usually an uncomfortable area for homeschoolers to tackle. For most of us whatever language we might have taken in school is long ago, and long since forgotten.
Unlike many other subjects, our lack of knowledge in foreign languages isn't easily covered by teacher's guides. Nor can we breeze through the book before our kids do, to refresh our memories. To add to the frustration, this is one of those subjects that most curriculums require a knowledgeable teacher. Or at least a fluent speaker in the language.
However, even with these frustrations, most home schoolers can recognize the advantage of having their children learn a second language. In this day and age, with the world becoming a smaller and smaller place, a second language is almost a necessity. Even if your child never uses it for business, the ministry opportunities, both home and abroad, are tremendous. Many colleges are recognizing this as a need by requiring two years of high school language before admission.
There is good news however. Without any formal training, you've already taught one foreign language to your children. None of our children were born speaking English, we had to teach it to them. That was their first foreign language. You know what? English is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn! After that, it's all down hill.
How did they learn English? It wasn't by studying English grammar. Actually, they didn't learn any grammar until they already knew how to speak pretty well.
The concept of teaching languages by teaching grammar was developed by linguists. Linguists are kind of like English teachers, they love grammar. My wife is a language teacher, and her idea of relaxing reading before going to bed is a grammar book for some language she doesn't even know! Unfortunately, as we just discussed, most of us don't learn that way.
So, how do our kids learn their first language? Think back a minute, to when your children were first learning. They didn't start with sentences, but just sounds. Imitation is the key. What's happening is that they are trying to repeat the sounds that they hear. At this point, it's not much different than a parrot, but, they are learning patterns that will later become words.
Oh, those first words! How exciting it is when they first say "da-da," or "ma-ma." I never heard of a child who's first word was "encyclopedia," or "presidential," or "university."
Soon they progress to those bigger words though. "Cookie" always seems to be a favorite. This too is soon replaced with "me want cookie." Wow, real communication! Expressing ideas! Real sentences, or, at least real phrases.
You know something? Children in other countries learn the same way. Instead of saying "da-da," they might learn "ta-ta" in Polish, but they start with sounds, then go to words, then phrases.
We can apply this same system to learning a second language. For any of us that have taught our children to read, we know that Phonics is a great way to learn sounds. Not only that, but English really isn't a very Phonetic language. We break the rules more than we follow them. Many other languages are totally Phonetic. That makes them ideal for learning the sounds in.
For every language I have ever looked at, there are numerous cognates. This includes Swahili (from east Africa), Korean, Gujrati (from western India), and Russian. What are cognates? These are words that are pronounced similarly in both languages. Chocolate is one of my favorite cognates. In every language that I have looked at, it is always Chocolate. Granted they might pronounce and spell it slightly differently, but it is always recognizable.
So, if we want to start with the easiest words in a language, we can start with the cognates. Not only are they easy to remember, but we can actually make sentences using only cognates and learn how the language works! Any kid will think learning languages is easy when they see this!
Although there are a lot of cognates in most languages, there aren't enough to make up all our conversation. So, it is necessary to learn more vocabulary words. However, learning just lists of words isn't good enough. Without putting those words into actual usable context, they'll just fill up your "hard drive." Like a useless computer file, they never are opened up and used.
You can totally skip over almost all grammar rules if you learn phrases. Conversation is not made up of words, it is made up of phrases. Learning a language by learning phrases is called a "conversational approach" to learning the language. Proper grammar comes from hearing it done correctly, the same way our children learn proper grammar in their first language.
By using this four step program, Phonics, Cognates, Words, and Phrases, you eliminate half of the reason to have a "professional" foreign language teacher. After all, it takes a true expert to make things hard enough to confuse the rest of us.
The other roadblock to teaching foreign languages that we don't know is pronunciation of the language. We partially dealt with this by using the Phonics to learn sounds. But, it takes a native speaker to really show us how it is pronounced.
This however, is one of the easiest problems to solve. Cassette tapes can give us that native sounding teacher right in our own dining room. One thing to watch out for though, native speakers tend to speak fast, sometimes too fast to understand. Make sure your tapes have the pronunciation nice and slow. You can work on speed after you learn to pronounce it right.
Of course, if you don't want to try it yourself, you could send them off to some foreign country for a year or two. That'll teach them the language too. Granted that might be a little expensive though.
So, now that we've eliminated the problems, why not give it a try? Who knows, you might learn it with your children. Then you can practice together. I'll warn you though, they'll probably learn it faster than you.