Cactus Language Blog

How Do I Make Language Learning Fun For My Children?

Posted by Sarah under Cactus Languages Abroad, Learning a language

How to encourage the kids to pick up a language when young

If your children are learning a language at school and you’d like to help them and encourage them at home, there are various ways you can do so.

Games in the language they’re learning, especially word games like crosswords, Scrabble, and such like, are a good way for them to learn and practise using vocabulary. Other games that involve questions and answers, such as Trival Pursuit, are also fun ways to practise using the language.

Watching films, reading books and learning songs in the target language are all enjoyable ways for your children to make practical use of the language they’re learning.

Your children will also benefit from attending classes taught through the medium of the language they’re learning. This might be in a country where the language is spoken, and could be arranged via a school exchange or something similar. There might be classes in your area for the children of immigrants who want to retain their language - classes in the language itself, or in other aspects of the culture, such as singing, cooking, etc.

If you have any relatives or friends who speak the language your children are learning, see if you can arrange for the children to spend some time with them. If you know or can find people in your area with children who speak the language in question, even better. Your children could play with the other children and pick up their language in the process.

It might be helpful for your children if you join in with their language learning. This could encourage them to study, especially as they will probably overtake you in their knowledge of the language fairly quickly. In fact they might end up helping you, rather than the other way round!

If you know any families who speak the relevant language and who are learning your own, you could arrange to meet with them regularly to exchange languages. You could have different themes for each meeting and spend half the time speaking the foreign language and half speaking your own.

When given plenty of opportunities to listen to and speak a foreign language with other people, children will usually soak it up and become fluent in a relatively short time. However just sitting them in front of films or TV programmes in the language probably won’t be very effective – they need interaction with others, and need to see that speaking the language is useful and relevant to them.

There are links to many online language learning resources at:
http://www.omniglot/links/

About the author

Simon Ager has studied numerous languages, and currently runs a company that provides information and advice about languages mainly via the website www.omniglot.com.

Tags:children