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Anyone made learning a new language a family affair?


sammie_bee

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I am trying to get my husband and kids on board with learning French. One of my daughter's takes French at school so she is more interested in trying it out at home. I would love to get the rest of the family involved because I think conversation is one of the best ways to learn a language.  Has anyone ever tried to learn a new language as family effort? Any success with this?

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My mom used to work at a hospital that held weekly Spanish lessons since the hospital had many Spanish-speaking patients. The nurses were given these detailed flashcards with basic sentences. My mom did not want me or my sister to be ignorant of other languages, so she taught us from those flashcards and eventually let me go to one of the lessons. I only have a rudimentary grasp of the language, but I can make my way around the hospital as a volunteer with little problems.

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My parents never implemented this, but that would've been interesting. I took Spanish all throughout high school and had many Hispanic friends, so if anything I was the one always trying to teach my parents Spanish words  or have them listen to Latin music with me lol. My mom wasn't terribly interested, but my father appreciated it, as he has many Hispanic patients he needs to communicate with.

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In my experience, the motivation of learning a new language depends a lot on the aim for acquiring it. If you know that you will be going to live in a French speaking country in the near future, it will obviously be not only very useful but also more exciting to learn the new language. On the other hand, if you simply want to learn another language for its own sake, it might be challenging to convince others to do the same.

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No, I haven't tried getting my family to learn a foreign language. My husband seem to be interested in other languages because he encourages my daughter who is already studying Spanish and he likes to ask us to say different things. However, he is not one to ever settle down and show interset personally so I don't push him to learn.

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My brother tried this with me once when he was trying to learn Spanish but it never really took off because I just wasn't as into it as he was. I think it takes a lot of dedication to learn a new language and if you are not completely sold on it then the chances are strong that you eventually will lose interest.

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I am teaching my two year old and four year old cousins. Just the basic words and it was nice until they got confused that they didn't know which language to use and their sentences were intermixtures of languages I thought them and the language we speak at home. So I only focus now on one language at a time.  :angel:

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