How Children Learn (part 3)

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• My daughter loves to talk. She doesn't mind not understanding (she's too busy trying to talk), but not being able to express herself was horribly frustrating. This was very important. To learn to speak, you must talk.
  • It's best to talk to someone with a common interest. For my daughter, her first American friends were classmates amazed by her jump-rope skills (Americans play a little, but do not consider it a sport; her Japanese school Takezono Higashi Shogakko is proud of it). She learned English equivalents for names of techniques quickly.
  • Also in tag games (oni-gokko), she needed to say when she was "safe".
  • You can talk to yourself. Lip-synching to a video is a good way to learn!
  • The language need not be perfect. Several of my chess-playing friends in high school took Spanish, as I did. So we talked about chess in Spanish (just because Americans are crazy). The teacher didn't approve, but we were the best in the Spanish class.
  • I think this works better than chasing random foreigners. The root of "communication" is "common". If your partner is not interested in what you are saying, the nonverbal cues will be discouraging.

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