Misunderstandings

As deaf as a post?

I’ve always heard that the sooner we start to learn a second language, the better it is. Also, recent theories say that the best way to learn, and I fully agree, is by imitating the natural way of acquiring a second language. That’s to say, learning a language as children learn their own mother tongue.

On the one hand, here in Spain things are supposed to change (from Government’s perspective), which means that teachers have been told that they have to teach the four basic communication skills full time in English and following the natural way of language acquisition. In other words, children first understand, then speak, then read and finally write. So the correct order is: listening- speaking- reading- writing.

On the other hand, the problem is that things in Spain were done the other way round for a lot of years, and we still have a big bunch of teachers who are not fluent enough to put the theory into practice.

Last but not least, I’ve heard that we (Spanish) are as ‘deaf as a post’ when it comes to learning English, but I think we didn’t receive the amount of input required to develop language skills.

From a practical point of view, as our input was poor, we couldn’t develop a good ‘intuition skill’ for understanding a second language.

As usual, children are better than adults. They amazingly surprise us by saying things we have never wondered about.

I’m quite concerned about pronunciation. Specially if mispronouncing implies a change in meaning.

I do the same at home, my kids are young and as they are still learning how to say some words correctly in Spanish, I don’t particularly correct them when they mispronounce words in English, but the other day something happened at home: my 4 year-old misunderstood me. It was hilarious! The dialogue was more or less like:

HIM: “Mamá, ¿cómo se dice abrochar en English?

MUM: Button up

HIM: ¿eh? ¿Culo arriba?

MUM: Why are you saying ‘culo arriba’?

HIM: Dijiste “Bottom up”. Bottom, culo, up, arriba.

MUM: Ah! No, no, no, Bu-button, not bo-botton.

The thing is, he was probably right because I maybe said ‘bottom’ (or kind of). I learned English in Dublin, and then lived in Cork, and in many regions of Ireland the sound /ʌ/ is pronounced /ɒ/.

It was fantastic. This dialogue really pushed me to keep on speaking English to my children. It demonstrated me that the new language is truly getting into their wonderful, little brains.