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Have you ever wondered why it is that children can pick up a foreign language much easier than us, adults? They often arrive in a new country with no previous knowledge of the language at all, and, after a while, they just “get it”, most frustratingly to their parents who might put enormous effort into learning it - typically pore over grammar textbooks without much success. Their children might not even be able to read, yet after a while they will just know how to put words together and, compared with adult learners, they will sound more natural, too… so what are we doing wrong?
According to Dr. J. Marvin Brown, who studied children`s language acquisition, “if you want to become like a native speaker you don`t need to learn when you are a child. You need to use the same methods like a child.”
What children do is they listen first – just listen to natural talk for anything up to a year, and only start speaking when they are ready, when words come effortlessly. Now clearly, for us, adults, this is no good – we need results fast so we need to combine listening with speaking right from the start, however, we must keep in mind the importance of listening. Constant listening. We must listen to natural talk/eavesdrop in shops, on the bus, on the tube/listen to music/watch TV/have the radio on whilst driving. Even as a beginner. We won`t understand much to start with but listening is most important for picking up word stress/sentence stress/intonation – the prosody, the music of the language.
Another feature of children`s language acquisition is that they learn phrases. And this is something we can do, too, as adult learners – we must always learn phrases, never words in isolation. If we learn words together, we get the grammar free. And there are more advantages to this so-called “chunking”. By learning words together we can train our brain to think in natural units of the language, which means that we will instinctively know which syllable to stress in each unit of speech(“tonic syllable”), where to pause etc. When following the methods of children we are guaranteed to enjoy the benefits.
