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Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Advantage of an "Hola" and "Bonjour"

Many people who learn a second language mistakenly believe that they can't learn anymore languages beyond this. In fact the opposite is true - learning languages becomes easier.
The first language you learn - your mother tongue, or native language - is the hardest. You learn by trial and error for the first years of your life, and you learn out of necessity - a pretty good motivator. Some people are born into multiple language environments, but most learn additional languages by attending school or self-study later in life.
I assume that because of the time and effort required to learn a second language, we won't really have the ability to learn more languages later. We learn languages differently later in life than we did as a child, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As we begin to study our second language, we begin to learn and sharpen a set of skills that we don't use completely in the other aspects of our life. As we get better at our second language, those learning skills improve. The phrase I like is - "we can learn to learn languages."
This brings us to learning multiple languages. There are a few tricks to learning several languages, whether you are learning them at the same time, or one at a time in succession.
There is often some vocabulary in a language you are learning that has words in common with English or another language that you know. This is because languages are related to each other or at least borrow from each other. Use that to your advantage. When you begin to study a language, look for a list or collection of cognates. This will not only get you started on expanding your vocabulary, you will begin to recognize patterns of spelling and pronunciation that are peculiar to this language. A neat bonus is the fact that your list of potential cognates grows with each language. For instance, when I learned 'ayer' in Spanish, I didn't recognize any cognate in English, but the French word for 'yesterday' is 'hier.' It's almost identical when you account for the slight difference in pronunciation.

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