All the characteristics modulations of languages are best acquired at a young age, preferably under the age of 7 years. It becomes clear to most adults who are learning a foreign language that they are carrying the imperfections characteristics of his native language or mother tongue. So how are you able to help yourself succeed in learning something new when all theories and argument of languages seem to point a fact, it is better to start learning when we are young?

We can revisit our inner voice, the inner child and use the same natural powers endowed upon us since our birth for our continued growth.

We have taught ourselves to walk, talk, sit, crawl, turn, jump and skip for more than 6 years without proper training. If you revisit those moments, you would probably not even remember the steps of how it had happened. What happened was that the child’s growth was intuitive. If there is some sort handicap, the child knew how to ignore it and use only the limbs, organs or senses that were usable.

Just as we had corrected ourselves when we tried to take our first few steps as a toddler or grip a pencil at 2 years old, we have power to authorize this highly intuitive child to help us learn again. We are capable of correcting our imperfections which we carry into our adulthood by using this intuitive learning process.

All kinds of movement we have ever learnt was performed first by the child, before the adult comes along and decides to speed up the learning process by all sorts of theories and new practices: accelerated learning, mindchamp or quantum learning. Call it what you like, but there is always such a thing called “Go back to basics”, especially when the spiraling effect of speed learning or leap learning is beyond reach or becomes confusing.

You may be interested to know that many religious converts who embrace a new religion as an adult has got to learn the scriptures in whatever language they are given. How is it that a Westerner like Cat Steven could suddenly say a few prayers in Arabic when all his life, he only sings and speaks in English? How is it possible that millions of people who do not speak Hindi love to watch Hindi movie and then sing in the same Hindi language? Or a Malay person speaking Japanese and singing in Tagalog?

School cannot teach you how talent come into being, because the power to perform such as speaking and singing in a foreign language, do not come from books, but from the inner teacher inside us. This inner teacher is the child who was once the master of your body. He has learned to walk, jump, sit, talk and swim. Be free, usher out the child, your inner teacher, and let yourself dance to the rhythm of your childhood. It is not a crazy idea. It is the best yet.

Kids are not empty vessels for us to fill with knowledge, information and lots of images. They will not learn; they will absorb, the images, movement and sounds. Interestingly, they are actually very much interested to work. They work for the love of it and the work they choose to perform have direct need for them to grow from within.

The child does not work to earn a living or satisfy an external need. He works on the same task (like washing his hands, going to school) several times over yet shows no trace of exhaustion. On the other hand, he feels even more energised and charged with greater fascination towards his work, and keeps going back to experience work at different angles and greater levels. And never once, does he turn to his parents or adults around him to ask for favours, rewards or compensation for his effort. His motivation is intrinsic. And he is not even being passionate about it, he conducts his exercises in such a way that empowers in him the will to perform it himself.

On board Moonshadow Cruise, Port Stephens, N.S.W. Australia

The child in us, continues to demonstrate the same pattern of behaviour. In learning to play tennis, twittering, swimming etc. Many coaches will tell you that the road to excellence is not experiment but experience and lots of practice, on a single task. In order to love work, we have to enjoy the thought of having to repeat the task or work. This even include, cleaning up after dinner, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds or having shower. So many of these works we do have been repeated many times to the point that we seek easier and more efficient way of completing them. The dishwasher machines, sewing machines, washing machines, and many other electrical and household appliances are invented as a result of learning repetitive manual work done by people. Repetition wil lead to discovery of new and better ways to do those tasks.

The love for work will also lead to exercise of concentration and a condition called self-discipline. Even without any reward or punishment, a child works on the same task several times over and yet never expect anything more than the satisfaction from having experienced the joy of working. He keeps going back to experience work at different angles and greater levels. The term we often used to describe a task performed that does not require any reward or external compensation such as money or wages, is ‘hobby’ or ‘passion’.

At this point, I would like to take a minute to give tribute to all stay at home parents who have served their families at home without any pay or pension. If it were not for their love of work, the house is not a home. Clothes will not be cleaned and ironed, shoes will not polished and shined, showers will be mouldy and dirty, the fridge will be empty and filled with leftover from takeaway and 3-minute noodles.

Employers also look for people who have great experiences with work in their respective profession. When you enter your particulars on the resume or application form for job, there will be a column where you have to declare the number of years of experience in the line of work you do. When an expert in health and medicine is introduced to the public at a talk show, his years of experience in his field of expertise reflects his knowledge on the subject matter.

If we take the child in us from the cycle of life, then we would fail as humans. It was the child in us, who taught us to walk, talk, run, climb, read, listen, sing, crawl, clap, blink, whistle, blow, lick, eat, suck, smell, touch, scratch, skip, hop, leap, jump, pounce, sit, stand, bend, cuddle, love and hug. Learning to become kids again might seem impossible because we have become adults and our movements are more fluid. Yet we have used such phrases as ‘Stop Kidding’, ‘No Kidding?!’, “Stop being childish?”, “Spoilt brat.”. That is just being ignorant on our part. As people who love to work, we can still learn like a child if we give ourselves the chance. Our workload will be so much lighter and simpler, as we take little steps.

Learning a language is said to be connected to two centers in the brain cortex: Sensorial center and Motor center.

The sensorial center uses the ears as the instrument of hearing for the brain.

The motor center is related to the production of speech by the using the muscle movement of the mouth, throat, nose, tongue and vocal cords.

Children: source of knowledge

Montessori argued that children provide a great source of knowledge on how language is developed.

“Language development is natural in children and follows fixed laws which are the same in all children.”

Development here means the progressive achievement upon knowledge and skills which are useful and good; and one of the attributes of development is that it exposes the mental processes that take place in the human body. Like when a baby speaks a new word, the sounds he produces from physically moving his jaws to let out air from his vocal chords, are the result of culmination of his sense of hearing and the movements required for vocalizing words.

A human baby is endowed with the natural powers to absorb sounds and images surrounding him, through the sensorial center. Also by the natural powers endowed upon him to create his own intelligence, his impulses will his muscles to move. However, until he is able to try to crawl or sit, he incarnates in him knowledge to move like others by sight (eyes) and hearing (ears). These two senses, hearing and sight are the ones most concerned in the child’s ‘psychophysical development’. At first, language comes to his subconscious mind, an entity in the brain, consisting of psychic and instinctive intelligence.

Sight:

He makes visual images in his absorbent mind by listening and seeing “the world in which he is about to move” to incarnate his personal knowledge of movement. The child begins his journey as a human being by forming himself inwardly, soaking in the images from his environment and make impressions of these images in his subconscious mind.

Hearing:

This mind, intending only to process human voices, makes connection between his muscles and the organs to which these muscles are connected to use. This is the human ears. For example, within 3 months, he knows how to cry for milk, he can clearly smile at his parents when his is picked up, even giggle when he is tickled. These and many more sounds he is able to produce awaken his consciousness after a process of incarnation within his subconscious, supported only by his psychic and instinctive intelligence.

Why doesn’t a child raised in a farm, neigh like a horse or moo like a cow? Why doesn’t the ‘wolf-child’ roar like a lion or snort like wild boar? This is a wonder of nature and for the religious, the beauty of God’s creation. Humans are born with the natural mechanics that can be used for the purpose of creating their own communication instrument called language. The human ears hear everything and in a special isolation of sensitivity, are directed to receive and capture only human voices.

“I reason that these centers are specially designed for the capture of language of words; so it may be that his powerful hearing mechanism only responds and acts in relation to sounds of a particular kind – those of speech.”

The intricate and intimate relationship between ears and sounds awakens our appreciation for the child’s readiness to absorb language. His natural laws of development guide him carefully isolating human voices from non-human ones. A child does not attend school can speak his mother tongue just as well as another who does;

‘language develops naturally, like a spontaneous creation and the mother does not teach her child language.’ (Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind.)

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