In recent years, learning foreign language or languages has become a must at various fields of human life. After perceiving the necessity of a foreign language, people decide to learn an important one such as English, Deutsch regardless of their age.
It is open to question whether it will be sufficient or efficient for an adult to start learning it, or not. In our country, children start learning English in school at fourth-grade. This means that they meet a foreign language when they’re ten years old. This age is also late for a human being to learn a foreign language efficiently.At this point, the task is assigned to government or parents. Foreign language learning age should be reduced to the age during infancy. ) (The best age to learn foreign language is during infancy. ) For a child, his/her infancy is of vital importance in terms of learning foreign language.
However, many people beleive that infancy is too early for a human being to learn more than one language. They think that children should not be forced to learn foreign languages with his/her native language. But they are wrong.From birth to the age of five, neurophysiologic mechanism in child’s brain is totally active, and with the help of this mechanism language is recorded to child’s brain automatically. Like a sound recorder, child records what he/she hears. After that period, this mechanism loses its function. Child can learn a foreign language after his/her age of six, but this will not be supplied by this mechanism but by ability. A baby’s brain is so fresh that the number of languages does not pose a problem for it.
At birth, its brain is not wired to learn a particular language.A baby can just as easily learn English as Deutsch, French as easily as Chinese. Scientists are also convinced that children do not have any problems when they learn several languages at the same time. It is the baby’s early experiences that modify the brain, influencing it to be able to learn one language as easily as another. This means that the best time to learn a foreign language is during the first few weeks and months of the infancy.
It is beleived that learning more than one foreign language is not proper for baby’s neural system and it may cause to similar health problems.On the contrary, scientists proved that it has no harm to baby’s health, even it is a healthy process for it. According to some researches of famous Russian Academician Neurophysiologist Shapoval’nikov, most of babies have troubles about not overload information, but inadequacy of information. Until the age of three, a child’s brain reaches to the eighty percent (%80) of an adult’s brain weight. During this process, it has lots of place for information.
This learning process also prevents psychological problems with which a child can face during his/her school age.This child will have no difficulty in learning foreign language and will not face with psychological problems such as failure, unconfidence, shyness, lack of ability to establish a dialogue. So, learning foreign language during infancy will be useful for the school-age of a child. A baby’s learning more than one foreign language may cause economical problems in a family. This would not be affordable for everyone. But this is also not a matter for baby. It does not need tutors for learning foreign languages.
One can easily find song, poem, story and tale cassettes everywhere and can buy them for a small fee. It is said that holding a child responsible for learning foreign languages hinders him or her to live his/her childhood fully. However, childhood includes games, songs, tales, poems, doesn’t it? So, while learning, a child can enjoy his/her life and live his/her childhood fully and economicaly. To sum up, infancy is the best age for learning various foreign languages.
An effort made while child is substantially under the controll of us will not produce the same result when he/she is out of our control.