You’re absolutely right. If my kids were living in Finland or Japan then practicing the language they experience every day would help to form the connections that make a language “stick.” I’m reminded of the only good scene from The Thirteenth Warrior where Antonio Banderas explains how he learned the Viking language with two words: “I listen.”
That being said, it’s far better than my education in French. I took four years in high school and three semesters in college and can barely understand it. Plus I didn’t have nearly as much fun as them.
I think that’s also how you get to being able to think in another language too. When you’re immersed in it, it seeps into your thought process.
In lots of Canada we have French immersion schools, where English-speaking kids who never encounter French outside of the classroom can become quite fluent in French by giving over half their instruction in French. With age and a few hours of exposure per day, it etches itself into the brain pretty well.
You’re absolutely right. If my kids were living in Finland or Japan then practicing the language they experience every day would help to form the connections that make a language “stick.” I’m reminded of the only good scene from The Thirteenth Warrior where Antonio Banderas explains how he learned the Viking language with two words: “I listen.”
That being said, it’s far better than my education in French. I took four years in high school and three semesters in college and can barely understand it. Plus I didn’t have nearly as much fun as them.
I think that’s also how you get to being able to think in another language too. When you’re immersed in it, it seeps into your thought process.
In lots of Canada we have French immersion schools, where English-speaking kids who never encounter French outside of the classroom can become quite fluent in French by giving over half their instruction in French. With age and a few hours of exposure per day, it etches itself into the brain pretty well.