Finders keepers, losers weepers.Childhood is really a rich time. It's when we build an important part of our cultural background, which is going to be quite useful in understanding many subtleties of the life in the community we belong to. I have been drawn into thinking about how much those cultural frameworks are important to the actual communication the other day. This led me to consider how deep it is interesting to dip into children's world when learning a new language.
As individuals, it is during the childhood that we are taught the language which is going to accompany us all our lives (usually). It seems reasonable therefore to consider peeking into how we teach children a language if one wants to learn about how we learn a (new) language. I was amazed, even though not really surprised, therefore to recognize some familiar ways of introducing vocabulary when I read a short story for children. *philosophical mode off*
I'll take the opportunity to do some anti-marketing here. Surprisingly enough, I'm not the only person blogging about english-learning on the web! Here's a nice blog I've just found, which has many interesting posts, and seems to be frequently updated: www.inglespraque.com (mainly writen in portuguese). I learned quite some new tricks in there, i.e.: that sure thing! may be used when one wants to express informally ready agreement: 'Could you give me a ride today?' 'Sure thing!' Frankly, that blog inspired me. I hope we can do here something nice like that!
There are some things left to say: smart alec(k), or smart ass is that person which always comes which an intelligent answer, usually intended to annoy people (a know-it-all). As for the 'saying', well it's something fit into grating category... referring to the 'belief' some people have that whoever finds something becomes it's owner, even if the actual owner happens to appear!
I'll stop here, this post is already too long. More later on!
3 comments:
I read somewhere that the younger you are, the easier it is to learn other languages. There are some schools that teach more than one language at the same time to children, so that they have two (or more) mother languages.
Anyways, now I'm 20-years-old and I want to learn new languages. I want to be like Jason Bourne and speak 7 languages. Then I'll buy a Mini-Morris (Mr. Bean's car) and travel through Europe!
And it seems now I'm a contributor of this blog. Oh my! Let me think about something to post here. I suppose dirty vocab is out of question... *sigh*
A teacher of mine once told me that there actually is something which is believed to be the age when things end setting up about languages in our brains.
The languages we learn until six years old are 'stored' in a different part of the brain than the ones we learn after are. There is a whole heap of theories on the subject, by the way.
One of them is based on the idea we would be born with a very flexible set of tools for communication. When we're young, as we are exposed to a language, we configure it so that it's best optimized. By optimization I mean, for example, setting some global variables in our brain to automatically conjugate verbs (or don't), to accept male and female flexions of words, qualifiers, etc.
But anyway that is only going to be useful to our descendants, so ...
Hey this information is useful to us too! Now we know how to raise our kids in a way they grow familiar with different languages!
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