Do you speak any foreign language as natives do?

Before we talk about the benefits that Children can get from learning a foreign language, let’s us look into the advantages that a Children has in terms of language learning over adults.

Firstly, Children have fewer hang-ups about foreign languages. Children’s self-respect of language hasn’t come into being. They don’t care if the words they are using are correct or not. They cannot even separate foreign languages from their native language. Or they don’t care to do that at all. Nonetheless, adults would rather just shut their mouth in order to save their face than speak out wrong sentences.

Secondly, children’s oral muscles haven’t been fixed yet. Before adolescence, the muscles in their mouth as well as the pronunciation of their native languages are very flexible. They can adapt themselves to the languages that Children live with. That means that it would be easier for children to master the pronunciation. It doesn’t mean that adults cannot master good foreign language pronunciation, though. It’s just probably going to take adults more time and effort to break the limitation imposed by the pronunciation muscles that are accustomed to their native languages.

Thirdly, children have better mneme and better ability of imitation. They can memorize faster by exploring everything around them and retain them longer. By imitating adults’ pronunciation, they can acquire their pronouncing ability very fast.

You can see that children do have advantages over adults when it comes to learn foreign languages. However, not everyone has the opportunity to live in an environment of foreign languages. Should adults give up then? No. No. No.

The reason is that adults also have their own advantages over children in terms of second language learning.

Tags: Education, ForeignLanguage, Language, Language acquisition

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 9:14 am and is filed under Steps to Native. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.