Language

Who here has tried to learn a new language at some point? I certainly have and still am attempting to learn German. Over the years I have made progress with it, and am far better than I was freshman year of high school, but mind you this is after about 6 years of study, and I still can hardly say that I am fluent. Why is it that it takes so long to learn? I am sure that fact that I haven’t made it my number one priority, nor my number two for that matter, and that I simply have other things to study hasn’t helped my studies but I think there is something else at the core of it.

I apologize for any blanket statements but children in other countries learn two languages side by side throughout their lives and by the time they graduate normal schooling can speak two or three languages fairly fluently. They have the advantage over the majority of Americans coming late to the game. Learning early is the ticket. I started learning when I was about 15. By that time I have been set in my ways of speaking my own language and learning another is quite a task.

What I realize is that when they teach you another language via high school and the American way they teach you it in relation to English. They relate German participles to American participles, German proper verb conjugation and placement to English verb conjugation and placement and all sorts of sentence structural equivalencies. It stumps me and I learn slowly because honestly I DON’T KNOW WHAT THESE THINGS ARE IN ENGLISH. If I couldn’t’ tell you what the direct object is, or what a dependent clause is in English, how am I going to do so in German? Without a good understanding of how the English system works when broken down it is almost impossible to learn another language on top of that, especially when learning it upon a foundation barely exists.

I don’t believe the public school system proficiently teaches the English language. I also believe that were they to teach English proficiently, students would still not know it as well as they should. I mean what incentive do they have? They can speak English fine, right? It’s not like there’s we’re surrounded by foreign speaking nations( You’ve only got one side Mexico).

Here is what I propose, what I hope to, one day, do with my children, and what many foreign countries have been doing for ages. I propose from the stages of early language development we teach two languages side by side. In this way language would not be learned as English, or German, but as a general language structure. The language structures of the two language would be different, but learning with two structures and how they are different from one another, while containing mostly the same elements, would make the understanding of each deeper.

I love me my metaphors and I equivocate this with learning about each individual lego before putting them together, rather than seeing a complete lego structure, taking it apart and putting it back together again. The first is far easier, and I am sure if I understood the blocks I could build many structures from them.

I would love to see a push for this in education reform, and think that each of us, whether we have children or one day have children, should take the time to teach two languages simultaneously, possibly even speak two in the home. We need to catch up America. No longer are the days we can hide in our happy rich home and ignore the rest of world. We have to start being part of it again. Let’s jump in language first.