Mango Languages

Now Everyone Can Learn a Foreign Language

A few weeks ago I attended a birthday party for a friend of the family. The house was full of kids and grandkids who all came to celebrate a special event. In between the main course and dessert I got to interact with the kids, playing charades, singing karaoke, playing hide and seek, etc. Seeing how the kids selectively communicated with each individual, fascinated me. Their parents were born in Russia and they were leaning Hebrew in school, yet they were born in the United States. It was “Zdrastvuyte” (hello in Russian) to all the guests, “Shalom” (hello in Hebrew) at school and “Hey, what’s up?” among friends.

This is exactly what I thought of when I found this article from USA Today, More children Learn More Than One Language. This article is all about children learning to speak multiple languages at a very young age in our globalized world.

“More and more people are aware of the importance of teaching another language to their child because we are in a global world,” says François Thibaut, who runs The Language Workshop for Children, which has nine schools around the East Coast.

Language study for children is based on immersion, he says. Kids sing songs and play games to help develop language comprehension skills. “This is a natural way of learning language.”

The articles goes on to state, that when children start learning languages at birth, they have the capacity to learn many languages at once without getting confused — because, as the brain develops, so too does the ability to separate one language from another.

Early language learning has been shown to enhance verbal development, as well as reading, writing, and social skills.  Now that Mango Languages offers Little Pim, a child doesn’t have to have an ethnic background to learn a foreign language.  Since we’ve launched Little Pim as part of Mango Languages earlier in the summer, kids ages 0-6 can learn foreign languages in a fun, easy, and effective way. Kids who know more than one language not only have the opportunity to think creatively in a different language but also more opportunities to express themselves through communication.  This is so exciting!

How Do Children Learn a Language?

In the previous post I talked about the example, John likes Mary more than his wife, and I said that it can be understood as having two meanings (John likes Mary more than he likes his wife and John likes Mary more than his wife does). I also said that these two meanings are easily discernible by a child. I can see you smiling full of doubt because a little child won’t be able to understand the connotations, so let us delve a bit more into this idea.

What do we mean when we say that a child can speak a language?

The answer is that a child can clearly and easily express his thoughts, his needs and his feelings. He can understand those around him and be perfectly understood. What’s more, through the language he can be transported to imaginary worlds where sticks of wood can speak and bad magicians turn people into frogs, and he has no problem whatsoever with doing that although none of these things happen in the real world. 

Let us think for a moment how a child achieves all that: he has no formal and systematic education; everything comes naturally, he doesn’t have to try hard and he always succeeds. Just compare a child to an adult trying to learn a foreign language and you will see my point. The speech the child hears is sometimes half-said, elliptic as we call it, and some children hears this truncated form of speech called motherese. In four years he is a perfect native speaker. But is what a child achieves truly a great accomplishment? 

Stay tuned!