Be Like a Baby

Like any language English is the result of its people, its culture, and the world that surrounds it.  The first thing you must do as a learner of another language is dedicate your leisure time to learning and making it fun.  Make it fun? You might ask. How can learning a language be fun?  Most likely, too many of us have been exposed to days of learning grammar on a chalkboard with endless grammatical structures and boring fill in the blank exercises,  while grammar is an essential part to understanding a language, the majority of us do not learn languages this way.  

In fact, many of us learn by listening, speaking and reading to real things that are of interest to us.  To learn a language you must be exposed to the language.  Take the example of a baby. A baby is immersed in a language or sometimes several languages and they are able to sort out all this information in their heads and begin to speak, with just over two years or sometimes even less. I’ve heard so many times as a language teacher that babies and young children have an enormous advantages over adults for learning languages. While this is true in some aspects, like the motor skill and development of new sounds, it should be no reason for you as a learner to believe that you are not capable of overcoming learning a new language.  

First I want you to consider the environment a baby is in, they are constantly being bombarded by new words experiences and sounds, be it from their parents, siblings, family members, music, television, etc.  Twenty four hours a day seven days a week they are exposed to their target language.  Now compare yourself to the baby.  How much are you being exposed to your target language?

What’s my advice to you?  Be like a baby! If you are not exposing yourself to the language outside of the classroom you are not being like a baby.  Expose yourself to the language every opportunity you get and absorb the information like a sponge. And perhaps most importantly keep an open mind, if you're not receptive to new things its near impossible to learn.  Take a look at my following article on The World of English on the Internet, which includes resources for reading and listening on the Internet.

Holliwood comes to Valencia

Photo by: Stepan Pavka

This out-of-place building located in the thriving student area known as Benimaclet, is a great contrast between the building boom of the 2000's and the deserted lot that bares its all too suiting name.  If it wasn't for the “I” in the spelling I might have believed the artist's proclamation and mistakenly believed, albeit for just a moment, that I was state side once again.  Sometimes the far reaches of American culture often surprise me and at the same time disgusts me, but there is no escaping it nowadays.  I often question myself whether I'm part of the problem of our continually universal culture, or one of the defenders as every one of us who learns a language holds part of that culture within us.