Flower. Flower! ORCHID! So clever...

Flower. Flower! ORCHID! So clever...

How did we learn our languages?

I believe that we learn our languages by observing, associating, mimicking and integrating…

A baby is very curious and very impressionable. When his parent uses a word repeatedly, the child will try to use that word, or rather mimic that sound. And when that child makes these sounds, the parents will have various reactions. Though a child cannot understand these sounds, but he is able to feel the emotion that his parents are showing. And depending on these reactions, the child will come to know what sound to avoid and what to use.

The child will grow to understand that certain sounds are linked to certain objects with certain distinct features as time goes by. And by using these sounds, these objects will be brought to them. Like making the sound that resembles the word “Daddy” and pretty soon your father will come running to you. Depending on what the child wants and the limit of his vocabulary, the child will understand what sounds to make when he wants certain items.

Though at a young age, the maximum a child could say was a simple phrase, but as time goes by the child would have consciously or unconsciously picked up grammatical rules used in conversations, sentences used by radio deejays and even television commercials around them. The child begins by mimicking the sentence when he grasps the essence of the rule, he then experiments with the rule with his own words. Though a bit crude sounding in the beginning, through guidance, the child will then learn the proper way of speaking the language.

If the child can understand different languages and is confident with the grammatical rules of each language, chances are he may assimilate the different languages and make his own unique style of speaking. The rise of Singlish may be caused by the assimilation of the different languages used by the different groups of people living in Singapore.

For the youths and adults, the way of learning languages is fairly different, as they have already gotten comfortable with their languages, but it gives them an advantage to understand a foreign language with ease, as it can be translated into something they can understand for them.
When thrown into a community that only speaks a different kind of language, that person will have to learn the new language quickly. And usually, by directly translating the message from one language to another, constant practice, trial-and-error while using the language and listening to the language, that person gets the hang of the language very quickly.