Language Learning Tips

Guten morgen, meine Freunde! Sprechen sie Deutsch?

My daughter has always enjoyed learning languages. This year, she is working on German. Previously she’s worked on learning Spanish and Japanese, and I’m super happy about adding German to the list because it is part of our heritage and makes it much easier to help her.

These are some tips I’ve learned about supporting our children while learning a new language along our journey:

1. Apps arent always enough. They are a great place to start, but I find their scope and sequence to be lacking sometimes. My daughter has used Mango Languages, and is currently using DuoLingo.

2. Children’s books that have text in both English and your new language are amazing! Try and find some at your library.

3. Learn like you are in kindergarten! Songs, rhymes and verses have such rich language, repetition, and often use high freqeuncy words.

4. Get a few simple and thorough grammer books and slowly work your way through.

5. Learn along side your children so you can all practice speaking and reading together! This helps you narrow down learning to common words and phrases used in every day life

Learning a foreign language is about so much more than conversation. This quote by Christoph Jaffke, from his article Curriculum for English as a Foreign Language in Steiner Waldorf Schools, sums it up beautifully:

The aims of learning foreign languages are composite. On the one hand, the
practical, utilitarian goal of being able to understand another language through listening
and reading and being able to express oneself with a good degree of fluency in speaking and
writing. On the other hand, to introduce the students to the character, customs and traditions, literature, culture, geography, history typical of the peoples who speak the given language. The third, pedagogical aim of foreign language teaching is to assist the overall development of the child through the subject specific qualities, as well as giving the individual insight into different ways of viewing the world, thus broadening the pupil’s own perspective.”

When we look language through this threefold lens we see the importance of language learning is so much more than just the words and phrases that can be memorized.

I really recommend reading the full article by Jaffke if you will be teaching a foreign language in your homeschool. It can easily be found online by searching the title. It is a very informative article and breaks down the goals of each grade. I started bringing in languages later than grade one, but we still followed the general outline and started at the beginning. Fairy tales and songs are a wonderful place to start no matter the age! The language is rich, full of every day living and they typically provide lots of repetition.

Until next time,
Marina