An American who speaks 28 languages. What did I learn from this video?
1 Anybody with an ordinary job can learn another language or several.
2 If your parents speak different languages, that's a great start. It gears you up to the idea that speaking a language is a way to communicate with people, a practical purpose, not words on a page, but conversation.
3 He meets all sorts of people, of whom a great many speak other languages. Whether at school, or work, or travelling. He immediately sets out to learn a greeting and a few words of conversation to make them feel welcome and happy.
4 He takes every opportunity to practise the language.
I remember doing this in Singapore when I was trying to learn Chinese, and the Mandarin for numbers one to ten. I could not keep asking any one person to repeat the numbers endlessly. However, I could ask the taxi driver, every time I got in a taxi, to tell me the numbers one to ten.
Everybody was delighted to do so. It put them in the position of expert, teacher, helper. It showed I was interested in their culture. It created goodwill.
He takes every opportunity to learn new vocabulary. I do this. Every time I look at food, I read all the instructions for storage and cooking and ingredients in the languages I can read, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German. The English is already there, with the translations.
The same applies to multilingual directions on appliances. A new microwave or cooker. Those annoying thick booklets are no longer annoying. They are free translation books. I spent a lot of money on multilingual dictionaries in small print, and children's bilingual and multilingual books. I have free multilingual translations all around me.
When I travel in another country, many products have multilingual instructions.Tourist leaflets are often in two or three languages.
They might contain errors, mistranslations. But I am nearer communicating than when not knowing anything. I have learned ten words, one wrong, but nine right. With a little research, or practice, I can correct the one which is wrong.
His attitude is positive. No language is too difficult for him. No language is useless. If he meets somebody who speaks another language, that is reason enough for him to start learning it. He has a teacher and a new friend.
I have several blog posts on easy and confusing words in foreign languages, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and more. Dip into a few posts on languages you want to learn, and those which you find challenging.
Please share with friends, family and colleagues the links to your favourite posts about languages.
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