Learning foreign languages by Valerie Bonham Moon

Valerie Bonham Moon offers some great hands on advice for learning another language at Home Education Magazine’s News and Commentary this week.

She writes:

On military homeschooling discussion lists, there is often the question of how to go about learning a foreign language, often German since that’s where many servicemembers are stationed. When we lived in Germany, one technique I used, after we had acquired a reasonable stock of words* in our minds, was to listen to audio recordings of familiar English-language stories that have been translated into German.

[* The beginner materials that I found most friendly for collecting that “reasonable stock of words” were The Learnables immersion lessons. The audio lessons are all in the foreign language being taught, with the lesson ‘explanations’ being cartoon drawings of whatever each story is about. In this way, there is no need to translate words. The acquisition process is similar to how we each learned our mother tongue: demonstration, listening and repetition.]

Valerie continues to explain the process and how to duplicate it even if you are residing within the USA.

Thanks Valerie! I would love to hear more about your learning adventures in Germany!

~Mary Nix

This entry was posted on July 13, 2006 at 8:23 am and is filed under Arts - Crafts, Curriculum, Foreign Languages, Free Resources, General, Language Arts, Supplemental. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.