How my son learnt a new language in 3 months?
COVID brought changes- a lot of them, we shifted our city and moved to my hometown. One of the greatest fears that I had, was my son not being able to communicate in Hindi which is spoken in my hometown along with other mixed languages. He has been speaking English since the last seven years and didn’t get an opportunity to write, read or speak Hindi before.
The first few days as expected he chose to speak less, getting irritated as he could not follow conversations. I had to constantly translate for him to understand what others were saying and then translate to others what he was saying. In no time, he was repeating some of the words in Hindi, he was trying to reply to others in mixed Hindi and English language.
What possibly was a trigger for him to learn the language so fast?
- Need- Everyone here in my hometown speaks in Hindi, It was becoming extremely difficult for him to communicate. He started listening, following and made desperate attempts to talk. He has a cousin of same age and he had to learn her language to talk to her, play with her.
- Not scared of mispronunciation- He was not afraid to mispronounce any word, sometimes people would laugh and he would be shy but that didn’t stop him from learning.
- Not learning with strict Grammar- He was trying to communicate so I didn’t sit him down with books to teach him the right way, instead I let him explore his way.
- Having a conversation partner- This was one of the greatest advantage I felt. Having someone of same age made it easy for him to communicate on the common topics. Spending a lot of time together they had to communicate and this helped him catch up faster.
Recognizing letters- Once he knew the words, when he started reading it was fun for him to read the letters he already speaks and then came writing. So now he could read and relate to writing as well. According to Srijaya N, who has been teaching English since the last 30 years “Since children naturally learn to speak before they read, oral speaking should precede literacy.
Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/content/296577/listen-speak-you-read-write.html
6. Watching Movies- Watching Hindi movies and listening to Hindi songs helped him enjoy the language with visuals and music.
7. Practise : The practise needs to be consistent, reading news paper headlines, listening to Hindi stories and practising to write is helping my son learn new words everyday.
8. Quit being a perfectionist- My son learnt in different ways, hearing, reading, sometimes being messy also helped. Step by step method and getting obsessive with grammar may take the fun from learning. According to Katie Nielson, chief education officer at language-learning app Voxy, “The underlying problem, again, is treating language as an object, something you learn about, rather than as a skill, something you do.
“You need to make a lot of mistakes,” Nielson says. “You need to be real bad at it, and then it ends up working better — but it’s messier. And that’s different from how you usually learn in a classroom.”
Have you learnt a new language recently, do share below. What was your experience? what helped you get fluent?
