Apa Apa Apa

I'm sitting in a room with eight other adults making sounds I might expect to hear from a 1 year old. It's all part of opening up our eyes to hear and equipping our mouths to say sounds that are not part of the English language. The English language has about 44 basic sounds that make up all the words we use. When we are infants we are capable of hearing all the sounds that are possible to make and could learn any language. That's why small children have an easier time learning a second language.

As we grow older our brain locks into just those sounds in our native language. It's not just that we have difficulty saying them, our brains may not recognize them well enough to even attempt to reproduce them. Try to reproduce a word from a language in which tone of voice is part of the meaning of the word. The teacher demonstrated pairs of words that all sounded the same, but were each different, if you listened to subtle shifts in tone or elongation of vowel or consonant. On the flip side, individuals from Japan who have learned English well are still not able to pronounce certain common sounds. Those sounds don't exist in their language and their brains may not even recognize when the "hear" them spoken.

So, each day, twice a day, we drill phonetic sounds. One example is to drill making unaspirated "P", "B", and some other letters. When English speakers use those letters at the beginning of a word they make a puff of air after it. You probably don't even notice that you do. Many languages use those sounds in the unaspirated form. No puff. So we drill through making those unaspirated sounds. This is just the beginning as the staff take us through numerous non-English language sounds. The end goal is to be able recognize language sounds that are not part of English and to make them correctly when we are learning another language. We also get to laugh at ourselves a lot.

Later yesterday, the demonstrated some langauge learning techniques that we can do while we are attending language school. They make a point that acquiring the language is our task. Language school is there to help, but even outside of it we should be using creative ways to learn the language. Right now, I can't even imagine that I will become fluent in another language. It seems impossible. Marge and I are thankful that God does the impossible, that so many wise individuals have been there before us, and can help us find the way.