One of the skills that everyone as children were bound naturally to learn like motor skills is languages.
Communicating is a daily occurrence and need in our daily lives. We communicate to tell people our needs, to pursue our desires, and to convey and share information and ideas.
We also communicate to socialize and form relationships with other people. There is so much usage of communication and advantages compared to disadvantages. Knowing this, it might look questionable why there is a lack of opportunity to learn a foreign language to fluency in public schools.
As of the last statistics, only 20% of K-12 students are in the process of learning a foreign language other than English. This statistic is estimated to be equal to 10.6 million students either learning ASL or American sign language or another foreign language. That would be a mere 1 out of 5 learners. At least two states in the US have fewer than 10% learning a foreign language.
These are some statistics that put Americans at a disadvantage. In the US, students from K-12 public schools students have cited Arabic as their second most-spoken home language. This is only second to the Spanish language. This is according to federal data taken between 2013 and 2014.
If we put that in a numbers perspective, that equates to approximately 110,000 students who cite Arabic as their home language. However, Latin, a dead language where no country or unit of society speaks anymore, has eight times more students enrolled. That is in comparison to Arabic which is an in-demand language skill in the current century.
Some experts cite that the nation’s motivation for learning a language can be a fickle trend. The United States as a country has endeavored to learn the language where economic competitiveness is seen, not out of cultural immersion nor need to improve. The level of difficulty in a language in learning as a personage has been a large misinterpretation of research if we look at the entire study and the data set it was based from.
Language learning isn’t primarily a matter dependent on brain plasticity, which would render it an impossible task to do as an adult.
But a simple matter of exposure to the target language and the number of hours that can be spent by a child compared to an adult in a classroom to learn.
With this in mind, all the benefits of learning another language are available for any adult learner.
With the world becoming more interconnected than ever through the internet and more interdependent because of trade, fluency in other languages is becoming a handy if not essential skill to have. Learning a language is a rewarding endeavor that opens up a whole new worldview. Being fluent in a language makes you a local wherever that language is used. You will gain acceptance in communities and be able to consume art, music, and media, and have insight into the culture it has come from. You would be able to build lifelong friendships and even relationships because of the gift of language.
Since worldwide trade is going to be a staple and would be on the uptrend in the foreseeable future, language learner can advance their career by having fluency as a competitive advantage. Languages are the top eight skills for many occupations available in the job market in any industry and skill level.
According to a survey between 2010 and 2015, the US job postings geared for bilinguals have more than doubled. This says much about the exponential growth of the job market available for bilinguals. Apart from that, there are positions that incentivize being bilingual which equates to additional salary and bonuses.
Because of the internet, it has been relatively easier to work on acquiring new skills and adding them to one’s resume.
Meta-learning skills making language proficiency easier can be broken down into 5 elements: memory which is best learned through repetition and usage and reading which you can have by reading comics, e-books, internet content like blogs, and social media posts.
The third one would be writing which can be done by having a personal journal or scrapbook in the target language or creating internet content with the target language. Listening, on the other hand, can be easily done with audiobooks, YouTube videos, watching films, and listening to native speakers.
The last one is also one of the ways to how you can get speaking ability in your target language. You can also find friends or go on dates with a native language speaker of your target language.
Choosing your own materials to work with is also advisable: a book, a dictionary, and a teacher should suffice. There are also some memory techniques that can be used and applied in learning languages. One of these is mnemonics in the form of jingles, songs, rhymes, or sentences you can relate to the things you need to memorize.
Immersion and exposure to the culture, media, and speakers of your target language are extremely helpful in gaining proficiency in a language. Experience is still the best teacher especially for skills like languages.
Be optimistic about your journey even if it feels challenging sometimes, keep in mind that in most languages only a year is needed to have the proficiency to communicate every day in a target language. If you are more ambitious about language and would like to be a polyglot, my advice is to take it one day at a time and one language at a time. You need to be able to focus and finish one task so you will gain the mastery that you desire. After that, laddering might help. This is using a coursebook in the language learned to learn a new one.
The road to gaining a new skill is an exciting, eye-opening, and financially rewarding task.
Knowing this, it would not hurt to invest in your workspace just as you are investing in yourself through these improvements.
There is no other place for you to go but up, just like the Standing Desk Frame E5 from Flexispot. It is a premium choice you deserve and has all the features you would need on a desk. It is sturdy, spacious, scratchproof, and would conform to your height and size to make your health and posture good as you keep working as well as you.
