Foreign language, that magical beast very few Americans know how to tame. Is it worth the attempt? Is it possible?
Before we moved to Germany, a well-educated relative of mine said he would have wished to raise his children there. Being on the fence about the experience, I asked why. He looked at me as if I were simple. “Because then they could learn German without an accent.”
Not having a great need for that particular facility in my own life, I couldn’t quite agree that revolving one’s entire life around that skill was worth the effort. If it had been French, I would have understood, but German? Please don’t judge me. These were my feelings at the time. I have since gained an immense appreciation for German.
When we found out we were going to live in Germany, we kept this opportunity in mind. Our children could have the opportunity to learn a foreign language without an accent. We could enroll our children in the local German school system. In that immersive experience, they could gain full or near-full fluency. We very seriously considered it.
This would have been a huge adjustment for our family. We homeschool and, as you have hopefully picked up from this website, it’s an entire lifestyle choice for us. We took the decision seriously. We interviewed three families whose children were or had been enrolled in German school. After nearly an hour of conversation with one of these mothers, she asked me what our family goals for learning German were. She pointed out that if I didn’t intend to stay in Germany or at least invest great efforts to provide a significant immersive experience afterwards, my children would lose that fluency in a relatively short amount of time. She also pointed out that there was no guarantee that children in that situation would not have an accent. I was grateful for that insight.
While German language mastery would have been a worthy skill, we did and still do value what we have in our family homeschool lifestyle. To us, it wasn’t worth giving that up. So we compromised.
I decided that while we lived in Germany, we really needed to delve into the educational science of the thing and develop it into a system that would work for our family. I researched. I delved into the experience of others, including my husband, who speaks five languages and is conversant in several more. I realized that much of what I have learned about teaching students music can also be applied to foreign language. I’d been trying to learn languages my whole life and for a long time, I hadn’t felt entirely successful with the systems I’d tried.
This system worked. We never became fluent in German, but we became better. We became comfortable. That was our goal: to become comfortable speaking German and learning German. We only spent a few minutes each day as a family, a few simple words, phrases our family used every day. This developed into a manageable system that we now feel we can apply to any language. It’s effective, it doesn’t take a lot of time, and it can easily be expanded for a more intensive tempo.
This is the first post in an occasional series in which we will be sharing our approach to language study in the family environment. It’s simple and cost-free. The point of our approach to language learning is not fluency, the point is to be conversant. Some language learning programs focus on being able to speak when traveling. A friend of mine recently pointed out that travel didn’t seem like a very reasonable goal for her family, perhaps not for most American families. She didn’t feel that it needed to be. My friend told me that she has always wanted to learn French. I shared that I felt the same way. We decided to go for it: learn French with our children. It’s really that easy. I can’t wait to share how!
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