Homeschool Spanish Lessons - Online Learning

One thing I’ve been thinking about as I watch my son learn more vocabulary and language patterns each day, is how SLOW  language development is compared to what we expect when we set out to learn a foreign language such as Spanish.

I often get asked “how long will it take me to learn Spanish?” And people expect an answer that is reasonable; that gives them an idea just how fast they can learn it if they try hard enough.

And what strikes me as funny is that so many teaching programs – my own included (!) – tout the fact that you can “learn in a natural way, like a baby does.” Well if you were to learn Spanish like a baby – you’d need to spend at least 2 years living someplace before you could so much as put together a full sentence!

Now of course the difference is that adults can accelerate their learning by studying, which does speed this process up immensely. But I think we can learn a few important lessons from our language loving toddlers:

1. Don’t get discouraged
2. Use new words as often as you can
3. Apply patterns you’ve learned to new situation
4. Begin by talking about the things most dear to you
5. Language learning does take time!

Adults tend to get discouraged quickly, or decide that they are no good at something if they can’t do it well after a relatively short time studying it. So perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from toddlers is to just relax a little and realize that the longer you stay at it, the better you will get.