Here you will gain excellent insight as to how you can get started TODAY in learning ways to learn a language you always wanted to master, AND you will also learn valuable strategies on how to help your child learn more than one language. Whether you only know one language like me, or already know multiple languages and want to pass this skill on to your children, this article is for you!
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Meet Natalija, the language guru! Natalija was born in Russia and started learning her second language at 10 years old in school, despite the school’s efforts to encourage her to learn German, she pushed to learn English and got her way.
Little did she know that she would actually end up living in Germany, getting her teaching degree there, and even earned German citizenship! She is a foreign language teacher who can teach German, English, and Spanish, her mother tongue is Russian and she lives in Sweden, speaks Swedish, and out of interest she also learned French, Italian, and Latin. So it was no question that she would be the perfect person to talk to about learning a new language and how to inspire and encourage your kids to be multilingual as well.
Learn a New language fast
The best possible thing you could do is travel to a country that speaks the language that you want to learn so you are immersed in it and are (hopefully) forced to use it, however, there is an approach that would accelerate the language acquisition so that you can make the most of your time in that country. Here we will cover ways to learn a new language by building a base, how to create opportunities to practice the language you are trying to learn, what we mean by "keeping the language alive", and how to help your child acquire more than one language and have fun doing it!
Build a base
Ensure that you take time before your trip, ideally 3-4 months in advance, to study and practice the language. You can use Duolingo, but other resources have a clear focused curriculum and soundtracks you can listen to and practice with if you do a little searching on the web. Rosetta Stone isn't free but it is very through and organized. Coursera is an online course platform with many free courses to learn the language of your choice.
Learn the basics: Master pronunciation and learn to read some characters if they differ from what you’re used to. Start to learn words that would be helpful immediately when you arrive (it is tempting to learn all the animals and colors, but try to learn words like food, directions, places, etc.) Verbally practice some simple sentences and learn the responses to questions you will likely be asking. Roll playing is great, and Meetup groups allow you to find others to practice with.
Building this base beforehand will allow you to acquire the language much, MUCH faster than if you arrived with little to no background knowledge. I experienced this with Swedish, despite being in Sweden for 3 years, I never built a base, I worked in a place where everyone spoke English, and I rarely practiced what little Swedish I knew because everyone could easily speak English. It was about 3 years later I built that base you’re supposed to have before even arriving. If I have done that, I think I would have been more motivated to learn and master the language.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. People will know that it is not your mother tongue and they may actually really appreciate you trying to speak their language. The more comfortable you are with making mistakes, the more opportunities you give yourself to practice, the more you will remember previous mistakes to correct them, but you need to give yourself that freedom to try without the fear of failure.
Create Opportunities to Practice
Sometimes, the country you are visiting or moved to has a general population that can speak your native language (English for example), very well. Sweden is a great example of that, so It can be difficult to commit to speaking Swedish when you know the person on the other end can and knows the dialogue would go much smoother if you just switched to English.
So another tip Natalija shared on the podcast is to find the population who can’t speak English, or they very much prefer not to. Very young children are a great target group to practice. They likely haven’t been to school or had formal bilingual training yet. They enjoy conversation, don’t mind your mistakes or accents, and for the most part, can’t switch to a different language.
If you’re traveling with your kids, they can be an excellent bridge to help you connect with kids playing on the playground, or maybe you moved and your child is going to a local or international school. Use your kids as an ice breaker o create these opportunities to practice!
Another population that generally does not want to or can’t speak another language is the elderly. If you’re in a new country for a longer period of time, you can search for volunteer opportunities where you can strike up conversations with the older folk who can easily get lonely these days. You help make an impact on someone’s day, and you also get a great opportunity to practice your language speaking and listening skills.
As you build your base, and even afterward when you are continuing to increase your fluency in your new language, search for easy reads in that language. You can even start with kid’s picture books and go up from there in complexity. Books are a great way to help you retain vocabulary and build sentence fluency and improve overall comprehension of the language!
Keeping the language alive
After putting forth all the effort in learning a language, whether it is your second, third, or eighth, the key to keeping these languages in your mind is to keep them alive. You can do this in many different ways but you need to have some kind of strategy or plan, otherwise, life will get in the way and you will easily forget to activate those languages in your brain. What is great is that there are so many resources (mostly free) that you can use, and there are other ways to create situations where you keep those languages alive as well.
Solo efforts (things you can do on your own to keep languages alive).
Read books
Listen to podcasts
Change the language of the show you are watching on TV
Duolingo
Take an online course
Social efforts (needing a partner or a group of people to help)
Find a pen pal
Volunteer with very young kids or elderly who speak the language you want to learn
Find a language Meetup or search for a language cafe in your area
Create a learning pod where you video chat with others who want to practice
Join the app Clubhouse and search for language practice rooms
Find a job where you are immersed in that language
Move to the country where that language is spoken by many
How to Help Your Child Learn a New Language
So how do you help your children acquire and retain multiple languages? The following tips are useful whether you, as the parent, already know multiple languages and want to teach your child, or the strategies can be adjusted to where you are both learning at the same time.
Natalija lists-off some helpful strategies in this podcast episode, the first one being OPOL; or one parent one language. It is an approach you can take if you have one parent who can speak one language, and the other parent can speak a different language. The parents can speak however they want to each other, but when it comes to communicating with the child, the child receives a different language from each parent and that stays consistent for as long as necessary or until you feel comfortable to stop.
In Natalija’s case, she spoke only Russian to her girls, and her husband spoke only Swedish. Natalija and her husband would speak English to each other, though over time they also learned each other’s language.
This leads to the second strategy, never worry about the language that your family is surrounded in, kids will always pick it up. In Natalia’s case, they lived in Germany and even though they didn't’ speak German in the home on purpose, the kids acquired it by playing on the playground, school, friends, and other life events. “This is the majority language, it is the language you should never worry about, kids will always learn it."
So don’t stress about your kids mastering the local language, be patient and it will come! Even with the OPOL approach, Natalija mentioned that her daughter would speak whichever was the easiest way to say a word in her early talking years, but eventually, she learned to differentiate between the two languages.
One other tip is to speak the language that you were brought up in because this is the one you are most emotional in. Obviously, if your mother tongue is English and you want your child to speak Spanish, then you would need to speak Spanish, but if your mother tongue is Spanish and you were not sure whether that is the language you should speak with your child, the answer is yes!
How to have fun learning a language
Just like you would need to keep the language alive, the same strategies apply to your children if you want them to remember the language you taught them. One of the best things you can do to help with language learning is to visit or live in the country that speaks that language, but not everyone has the means or opportunities to do that, however, there are many ways in which you can bring a variety of language into your home.
Have a family library of books in that language, spend family time listening to podcasts and discuss it, let them watch a cartoon only if it is in the language they need to practice, put them with people who only speak that language. For example, if you’re a native Spanish speaker, have them spend some time with the grandparents where they know they cannot switch to another language, that they should speak Spanish to their grandparents. Or have them play with kids who speak Spanish, for example. Creating situations naturally inside and outside the home will help keep the language alive in your child’s mind.
Don’t try to force the learning of another language or demand they speak a certain language, as that might lead to defiance or resentment towards the language. It is best to get creative and find ways to make learning fun and engaging!
To listen to this awesome interview with Natalija, follow the Wander Mom Diaries podcast and search for Episode 2. It is a great conversation and you will hear fun stories about language learning within Natalija’s very interesting life!
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