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.

Butterfly Garden In Terminal 3, Singapore Changi Airport

At any given venue and time: swimming pools, beaches or barbeques, children proved to be the most social human beings. It didn’t take long for them to choose what they wanted to do; they draw attention toward social solidarity naturally. No sooner had a child hit the sand with his spade, another child seized the moment to participate to build a sandcastle together. There is no exchange of social greetings needed. (‘How are you? My name is so and so. Are you here on a holiday?’) They get organised without form like water filling up into different container shapes, falling into its space and taking given shape.

Yet there is evident flow in their togetherness and unity is conceived under the blankets of spiritual telepathy. My daughter played for hours with a little girl chasing waves; her activities attracted at least 5 other children to ‘help’ her collect snails at the rock pool; another boy’s screams of joy draw in more children to play with him at a water fountain – in all cases, they had met for the first time. Have you ever said to yourself, “What a great day! I played water polo with a bunch of people and it was wild!’ I bet it is only on your big vacations! In children, they seek to cheer for the good life any time any day!

GO FOR YOUR GOALS – Goal Setting and Visualization for Kids

The chance experience which children find in real life is literally why vertical classification in schools are preferred to age grouping. The constitution of society of children comes together by housing children between the ages of 3-6 under one roof at pre-school and each is able to go through an intellectual walk through partitions which are but waist high. The truth is he is clever enough to work out which areas and materials most suited his capability. A 6 year old child does not stay very long in a station with materials for younger kids; his freedom to explore the material teaches him that. A teacher is able to run the classroom more effectively as would a mother of six children. Social qualities like companionship, love and admiration, respect, reciprocal help and moral support emerge from having mixed ages under one roof.

Companionship

Parents of single child winch over how restless and demanding their child is until he is in school or finds a friend to play with. generally, the problem lies in lack of companionship: read a book, eat a meal, watch a television programme, stroll in teh garden or simply lay down in bed.

Love and admiration

For one, envy is not a trait of childhood character. A child understands he is only limited by age and maturation of his skills and potentials, and is willing to wait for his time to use a pair of scissors, use mum’s lipsticks, swim without a float or work with beads in arithmetic. The idea sinks in him without envy or emulation but admiration for what his older companions can do.

Respect

He earns his respect from helping the younger kids in his work, from tying shoelaces and carrying his water bottle. The latter duly shows his respect by allowing his older companion the right to support him. It is not a lazy attitude but a sense of security derived from such support. Yet still a child may not readily help his friend out of respect for his friend’s courage and need to want to do things himself: his intuitive feeling to support and help is more acute than we adults can fathom.

Goal Setting and the Law of Attraction in Terms Your Children Will Understand!

This ends Part 1 of 2 to an investigation on society of cohesion, a term coined by Maria Montessori, in her book, The Absorbent Mind.

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.)

Get your personal copy. The Absorbent Mind.

When we live in a non-native environment, there are so many things we have to adapt to – the new environment and way of life. Our attitude has to change also.

If you are coming from a developed nation, and found yourself posted to work in a less developed country, you will find people do things far less complicated and sometimes wonder why the hack you need modern conveniences anyway. Things like coffee maker, microwave oven, vaccuum cleaner, kitchen blender or electric kettle are useless in some developing countries because these appliances threaten to increase domestic spending on utilities. Stove cooking is the way to go.

When the system of living is simpler or less automated, people are less hurried to get things done. Why? Because for one simple task such as boiling water, they have to listen to the whistle of the kettle when water is boiled, and then turn the stove off. If you have an electric kettle, you may never turn the power supply off even after the water is boiled.

Our domestic staff came from the rural villages Java, Indonesia. They have never used most of the modern conveniences we are so used to. One of them is the vaccuum cleaner. They use brooms for sweeping the floor. Carpets are cleaned with a broom that is made out of a bunch dried stems of coconut leaves. It is called ‘sapu lidi’, sapu is broom and lidi is a stick. It has no wooden stick for your hand to handle. You have to wrap your palm around the end and just sweep.

Sapu Lidi, for domestic use. The industrial ones have a pole stuck through the middle of the bunch.

Ok, you have an idea of what I am saying I hope. There are simpler way to get things done which means thoughts are minced into bite pieces. What happens is actions slower, gentler and unhurried. When your actions are gentler, the senses become quickly responsive to the impressions of your muscular movements. On the contrary, when your actions are loud, the force of your energy returns more than twice its force back to your senses.

This sublimity of actions and responses to muscular movement of senses is very vital if we want to be communicate with people who we do not share a common language or lifestyle. Fast action fast response communication skills will never get things done, unless you have a translator for both sides.

Here I describe how learn to communicate with the cook. When I gave instructions for grocery shopping, I would come to her with grocery list and money. When she sees the concrete objects, money and grocery list, she knew what I needed her to do. I did have to clarify the name of the items which were written in English language, not popular brand names like McDonald’s, Coca Cola and Milo.

There are many overseas expatriates who easily learn to speak a foreign language in this manner. So I am no exception. The difference is I created a system of learning to become more proficient. No textbooks and dictionary, just work with the environment straight away.

Spanish and ‘Batu Lesung’? Over the weekend, I reflected on my childhood learning experience. I took a picture of this pounder (‘batu lesung’) which most traditional Malay families use to prepare spices.

It is made of granite stone, carved into a bowl which we use as a tool to pound spices. The dish will taste better when spices are prepared this way. Mum used to pound every kind of spice that went into her ingredients. I remember smelling the spices as they break apart, hearing the sound of stone hitting stone and watching mum as she scooped the ingredients into the frying pan to cook delicious meals.

I still prepare my meals this way these days. I left the blender in the cold. This batu lesung causes me to wake up to my senses about language learning. I want to share my thoughts here with you.

“The first of the child’s organs to begin functioning, are his senses.” Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, Page 84

That means, the power of our mental is far more superior than the organs. Our senses of hearing, sight and smell actually make it possible for us to use their respective sense organs, ears, eyes and nose.

My cousin's first child, masayu-nuruliman-zulaikha

Wow! That means the ears are not complete until they are used; the eyes are not complete until they are able to see and the nose is not complete until it is able to smell. Information enters into our mental through our senses first via these organs.

It explains why when food is being prepared in the kitchen, we smell the odour, hear the bubbling of stew in the pot, hear the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen. Even before we speak, our senses and organs are already at work. “That smells delicious!” “What’s cooking?” Then when we check it out and say “That looks lovely!” There is a time lapse before we speak. Speaking has never come first. It arrives later.

Infants first start to cry and giggle, her first words arrive at about 1 and then it improves exponentially. Even without complete use of the organs, children can learn to speak well.

Think: Stevie Wonder or Helen Keller (or even Elliot Yami – American Idol, he says he is deaf in one ear). Their other senses are fully developed and complete, that is why they can speak a language. That also explains why some children take longer to speak while others just rattle on by time they are 2 yrs old.

I have been working on the 6 Free Lessons for Spanish but discovered that without the learning environment, I will be progressing too slowly. [You can download for free Spanish