Thursday, December 16, 2010

Multilingualism and bird calls

While in Boston, we were members of LEX/Hippo Family Club, which encourages multilingualism and taught us that it is actually easier to learn languages when one is learning more than one at a time. According to the research they sited, a different part of your brain turns on and your ears are better able to listen to foreign sounds when being bombarded by a large variety of them. Maybe hearing a bunch of crazy sounds at once tells you that you can't map each of them to a sound set you already know. I don't quite know. I experienced a similar thing with bird songs. After spending half an hour in the car listening to a bird sounds CD, I thought somehow I was still listening to it when I got out of the car. My ear was attuned to bird sounds and suddenly the neighborhood was full of them. When you listen a lot to multiple languages, the sounds you couldn't rightly hear at the beginning become clearer.

Learning more than one language at a time seems to be discouraged nowadays, often in chat rooms or in general conversation, but it has many precedents. Charlotte Mason's teachers taught children French and German from before age six, of course beginning with rhymes and songs, and Rudolf Steiner did the same, although I'm not sure what the two languages were! In the USA, Waldorf schools usually teach German and Spanish simultaneously. They also teach through song and rhymes.

Not to be outdone, but mainly because I think it makes a lot of sense scientifically, we'll be adding Spanish through songs and rhymes to our homeschool curriculum in spring of the coming year. I'm working on the curriculum now, but mom needs to do some work on her own (barely there) Spanish, first. I love languages! This is fun!

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