When did you first become aware that there were other languages in this world besides your native language? Or did you even have this experience (as opposed to always knowing as far back as you can remember)?

I don't necessarily mean the first time you were exposed to other languages, I mean the first time you gained a conscious awareness of the ( Read more... )

I'm currently teaching English as an Additional language to kids and it bothers me how uniform the examples/pictures are. The most diversity that every shows up in books is people of different countries/ethnicities. That's to say, everybody is straight, able bodied, etc ( Read more... )

There's been a great deal written on how a person's first language (abbreviated in the literature to "L1") influences languages acquired later ("L2", even when this is not strictly-speaking the second language learned) through a process called "L1 Interence" or "language transfer". There is some discussion of language transfer that flows the other ( Read more... )

Were you 'immersed' in a language (or more than one) in early childhood, allowing you to grow up bilingual, trilingual or whatever? Did you immerse your own kids? What's it been like, during and after the immersion ( Read more... )

What's your favorite way/method/program to teach yourself a language? I'm excluding formal courses and immersion programs on basis of $$$$$$

Hi, guys! First time poster here :D My name is Hope, and I have a question ( Read more... )

I'm re-learning Spanish during this Winter Break, and I'm a little stumped on just how to do it, so I'm looking for some new ideas ( Read more... )

I made a short questionnaire for the end-of-term essay on the topic - any hard-of-hearing member wishes to fill it out, I could whip an English version and send it via PM or as a comment below this ( Read more... )

I'm thinking of learning Spanish, but I'm not sure how well that would go given the level of proficiency I have in other languages. I'm an Italian major who has been studying German, too, for years. Roughly how difficult would it be to add an intensive beginning Spanish course? Would it be easy to get it mixed up with Italian? I know I managed to ( Read more... )

From both my (admittedly introductory) study of linguistics and my own experience with my 14 month old, it seems that the early words of children are guided chiefly by #1 what the children themselves find most urgent and interesting to communicate, #2 what their unskilled and immature muscles find possible to form, and #3 starting with nouns and ( Read more... )