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Home > Ciao Café > Member Advice > Member Advice on Education & Careers > Member Advice on Learning a Language
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Rating Summary based on 19 reviews

  • 5 Stars
    		18
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  • 46 of 46 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of cladach29

    cladach29

    5 Stars A bheil sibh airson ionnsachadh Gàidhlig? 04/11/2006
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages Makes great literature accessible, logical phonology, can now pronounce Scottish place names

    Disadvantages Disadvantages Hard language to learn, limited usefulness as everyday language

    When was the last time you described something as "smashing?" or took a slug from a bottle of drink, or bought a pair of brogues, or twigged to the meaning of something new? Well without realising it, you've been using words from the Scot's Gaelic (Gàidhlig) language which have been incorporated into English. For example, the word "smashing" comes from the Gaelic " is math sin", meaning "that's good". Gàidhlig is now spoken by fewer than 60,000 native speakers who mostly live in the north west of Scotland or Glasgow. Yet, it doesn't have to be this way: Gàidhlig is not impossible to learn and ... more
  • 51 of 51 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of lora44

    Level 6 lora44

    Member since 25/03/2005

    Reviews written: 96

    5 Stars ♥ Calling all potential linguists!! ♥ 30/03/2005
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages Read on my friend!

    Disadvantages Disadvantages There aren't any!!

    You can't deny the importance of languages - they impact our lives on a daily basis. And despite many preconceptions they're an incredibly useful and worthwhile thing to learn. So how does one best go about learning a language? Well as somewhat of a language enthusiast I hope to be able to help with this casse-tête - of course there's no set answer - it's going to be different for everyone, but I can at least share my experiences of learning languages with you. First off, a bit of background. I'm 18 years old and consider myself to be fluent in one language - English, my mother tongue. I've ... more
  • 116 of 116 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of djohan

    Level 7 djohan

    Member since 01/08/2001

    Reviews written: 137

    5 Stars A Long Story 07/10/2001
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages -

    Disadvantages Disadvantages -

    The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower. [Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941), U.S. author, columnist. The Worst Years of Our Lives,“Language Barrier” (1991; first published 1989).] A LONG DILLEMA Do parents need to teach or ask their children to learn a foreign language? It has been a dilemma in parents’ forums formally and ... more
  • 92 of 92 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of julietta

    julietta

    5 Stars Rules for 'minding your language' ability 25/09/2001
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages Good for the soul, community, CV etc. etc. etc.

    Disadvantages Disadvantages Can be difficult (just like anything can)

    Sorry folks but I’m going to do my standard ‘language teacher op’ thing here within this article (as per!) and try to implicitly convince you/encourage you to learn a language! You have been warned (ok?) but it’s a tough job and somebody’s gotta do it and I suppose I’ll do! My mental framework for trying to persuade you to do all this comes from another typical day in the secondary school ‘language’ classroom where half of the kids I teach turn around (almost continually) and say “but Miss, why do we have to learn French/German?”, and ... more
  • 57 of 57 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of davidbuttery

    Level 7 davidbuttery

    Member since 23/01/2001

    Reviews written: 445

    5 Stars Cymru am byth 06/08/2001
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages Welsh is enormous fun to learn...

    Disadvantages Disadvantages ...but some of the grammar is not at all nice

    I'm absolutely surrounded by linguists in my family. My dad is a French teacher who also speaks Spanish, a little German and Italian and occasionally dabbles in Sanskrit (useful for philology - the study of language - as it's a very early Indo-European tongue). My mum has a degree in zoology, so has to keep up her Latin. My late grandpa picked up a fair smattering of Urdu when in India during the war, and it was from him that I obtained an (unintentionally) hilarious Swahili phrasebook by BJ Ratcliffe and Sir Howard Elphinstone, Bt., extracts from which await at the very end of the op - it's ... more
  • 54 of 54 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of denella

    Level 8 denella

    Member since 28/08/2006

    Reviews written: 362

    5 Stars Broaden your horizon 08/10/2006
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages You can communicate with many more people.

    Disadvantages Disadvantages It often takes longer than you expect to reach fluency.

    English may be considered as the international language, but we travel abroad so frequently and so many Brits are moving to sunnier parts of Europe that language learning would seem to be increasingly important. It doesn't help that it is no longer compulsory for secondary school pupils to study a foreign language for GCSE; many of them don't find languages easy and are glad to drop them at the first opportunity. Paradoxically, language learning in primary schools is now much more common and will soon become compulsory. This could make quite a difference, as the younger a child starts to learn ... more
  • 31 of 31 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of Schmutzie

    Schmutzie

    5 Stars How to learn a language 18/09/2002
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages Communication, Added enjoyment, A new skill

    Disadvantages Disadvantages None.

    Scorpio2 is quite right in all he says about learning another language. The problem is how best to go about it. My hobby is learning languages. I speak five with a good degree of fluency, and three more adequately. I have tried just about every system going. I have also taught French and Spanish at evening classes. It may sound strange, but evening classes I do not really recommend. The class tends to travel at a speed which only suits the average student, so the slow ones will be left behind, and the quick ones will be bored. There are certain ways of compensating for this, but none is very ... more
  • 26 of 26 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of SusanLesley

    SusanLesley

    5 Stars Learn a silent language 01/07/2001
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages The sense of achievement and the chance to help people

    Disadvantages Disadvantages It's hard work

    I was never much good at languages at school. I got my French ‘O’ Level but failed German and gave up Latin after one year! I was always more interested in the sciences particularly maths. I could probably just about ‘get by’ in French if I had to and, if I went to France, I would certainly have a go, as I think it is extremely rude of us Brits to just expect the Europeans to all speak English for our benefit. I appreciate that the average European CAN speak both his own native language and English, which I think, puts us to shame! The other gripe I have about language ... more
  • 17 of 17 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of Scorpio2

    Scorpio2

    5 Stars Learn another Language. 29/06/2001
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages Widen your view on life, live with and understand your fellow man.

    Disadvantages Disadvantages None that I can think of.

    Language is everything - by this I mean that you are nowhere at all without it. If you want to be understood in your own country and even in your own area of that country then you must understand the language, the dialect, the local idiom. In English Schools we do not start learning another language, other than English until about the age of eleven. Far too late: By now the majority of children have learned their own local idioms and their learning curve is inextricably set to their own local dialect. They find that learning any language, even another English dialect is too difficult. We all ... more
  • 28 of 28 Ciao users found the following review helpful
    Picture of zoe_page

    Level 8 zoe_page

    Member since 08/07/2001

    Reviews written: 871

    5 Stars Use them or Lose them 14/08/2001
    User recommends the product

    Advantages Advantages too many to list

    Disadvantages Disadvantages the older you are, the harder it is

    If you are like me and, well, never shut up, learning a foreign language (or 2 or 3) is the best thing you can do. Just think of all the new people in the world you'll be able to bore (sorry 'entertain') with your opinions! My first encounter with foreign languages was early on. My mother was a lecturer at the local university when I was growing up, and German was her main subject. When I was 6 years old I could say the odd thing - and more than enough to embarass my mother in the process....... Here's the story : We went over to Werne, our german twin town. My mother was running the local ... more
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