Learning Languages in the 21st Century

After that last post, a friend emailed me and said, "Ok, where on earth do you find good foreign language resources? Can you blog about that next?" So here I go...I'm going to blog about that for a bit before I go grocery shopping. Woo hoo.

No matter what language you are learning, you need a multifaceted approach. If you have a child who is confident in their own mother tongue (speaking, reading, writing, able to look up words in a dictionary, etc.), then you can use an approach similar to what an adult could use, but for a younger child, the best thing I think is to just do immersion, and learning the language in the natural context. Children have an ability to pick up language when it is all around them when they are young--after all, that is how they learned their mother tongue. There are lots of video games for preschoolers in different languages (teaching names of clothing, colors, numbers, and so forth), and some CDs to listen to in other languages.

For older kids and adults, using a multifaceted approach is great. Something that will teach communication in that language, something to teach basic vocabulary, and if it is a different alphabet (or in this case, Chinese Characters), something to help learn the written language too.

I LOVE I-Tunes! This is free. Go to www.apple.com/itunes and down load your free copy. Then go to the Music Store in Itunes....and search for the language you are interested in, under the category of Podcasts. Podcasts are basically on-demand radio shows. There are video podcasts or just audio podcasts. I found at least 20 podcasts just for Learning Chinese, and I listened to them with Anastasia until she decided on one that we both thought would be most helpful (for the record, that is Chinese Learn Online, though we also like ChinesePod). You then subscribe and download the "episodes". In the case of a language podcast, you want to go back to the beginning lessons too. Each time you log into Itunes, it will check for updates to your podcasts, and download them automatically.

Then you drag your lessons into a new folder within Itunes (I made a folder called "Learn Chinese" by clicking on the plus sign in the lower left corner), and start burning CDs. You can listen to it on the computer too....but we take them everywhere. You can also load them onto an Ipod or MP3 player if you are so blessed. :-))

We also found some books by googling Learn Chinese. There was a lot of free websites that helped out initially, and they are a blessing. We also found some inexpensive workbooks designed for bilingual chinese children whose parents want them to learn Chinese characters while living here in the USA. We've made index card flash cards to help learn the words, and we have had some help from a native speaker we met who made sure the pronunciation was spot on, though we have found another book that also shows how to pronounce the words.

Now that she is progressing more and more, she is looking for othre things to learn in Chinese and to read in Chinese. We have found a free downloadable Chinese Audio Bible. We found free downloadable hymns in Chinese. We found free Children's poetry in Chinese on another site, where you could read along and listen.

Hope that is helpful to someone. :-)